Monday Motivation: We love story, but it’s the characters we fall in love with
We might read novels for the stories they tell – but often it’s the characters in them that linger. And so it’s worth pondering some of the most memorable of character descriptions – sometimes accomplished with no more than a quickly sketched line or two, sometimes drawing on fine metaphorical parallels, sometimes illuminated through action.
Take Cormac McCarthy’s description, in No Country for Old Men, of the doyen in charge of a motel. He managed the impossible in just fourteen words:
A fifty-year-old woman with a cast-iron hairdo sits behind the desk.
Or Henry James, in The Aspern Papers:
Her face was not young, but it was simple; it was not fresh, but it was mild. She had large eyes which were not bright, and a great deal of hair which was not ‘dressed,’ and long fine hands which were–possibly–not clean.
Screenwriters have learned to pare their descriptions to the bone. After all, which actor is chosen for a role is the job of the casting director and the director. And yet, what’s written on the page can help determine the way in which the actor plays the role. Think of the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski, and their laconic introductory description of their hero, The Dude:
INT. RALPH’S – NIGHT
It is late, the supermarket all but deserted. We are tracking in on a fortyish man in Bermuda shorts and sunglasses at the dairy case. He is THE DUDE. His rumpled look and relaxed manner suggest a man in whom casualness runs deep.
By contrast, consider Anne Bronte’s use of imagery and simile to convey the essential character of her Mr Lawrence in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:
His heart was like a sensitive plant, that opens for a moment in the sunshine, but curls up and shrinks into itself at the slightest touch of the finger, or the lightest breath of wind…. Mr. Lawrence was like a new garment, all very neat and trim to look at, but so tight in the elbows, that you would fear to split the seams by the unrestricted motion of your arms, and so smooth and fine in surface that you scruple to expose it to a single drop of rain.
We’re not given a glimpse of the character’s physical presence, but I defy anyone to give a more lucid description of a personality.
Character is often best shown in action. What someone does, and how they do it, tells you, often, all you need to know about them. Take this description on the opening page of Toni Morrison’s Jazz:
I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, “I love you.”
And then, of course, if you’re very daring, you can turn the utterly pedestrian into a distinctive and memorable presence. In Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer writes:
He did not look like anything special at all.
But whatever route you choose – metaphor, significant detail, action – make sure that your characters leap from the page into the minds of your readers.
Happy writing,
Richard
