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Showing
Character
by: Karen Propp
It’s not enough to simply create, or understand, your characters. More
challenging is how to reveal them on the page so they come across as
lifelike and vivid as they are in your memory.
There are two basic ways to reveal characters: Showing and Telling.
When you “tell” about a character you simply state some facts or perceptions
about a person.
In the following passage from Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichl tells
us about her father:
“My father found all of this slightly amusing. An intellectual who had
escaped his wealthy German-Jewish family by coming to America in the
twenties, he had absolutely no interest in things. He was a book designer
who lived in a black-and-white world of paper and type; books were his
only passion. He was kindly and detached and if he had known that people
described him as elegant, he would have been shocked; clothes bored
him enormously, when he noticed them at all.”
In the following passage from My Dark Places, James Ellroy tells us
about a childhood friend:
“Lloyd was a fat boy from a broken home. His mother was a Christian
wacko. He was as foulmouthed as I was and loved books and music just
as much. Fritz lived in Hancock Park. He dug movie soundtracks and Ayn
Rand novels. Daryl was an ass-kicker, athlete and borderline Nazi of
half-Jewish parentage.”
In both these passages, we get a wonderful bundle of information about
a character – background, looks, habits, personality. Telling is a quick
and easy way to reveal a character to the reader, and often it’s a very
effective way to introduce a character to the reader for the first time.
Telling is fine. You are, after all, telling a story. Perhaps telling
is even more dominant in memoir than fiction because so much of the
story hinges on how the writer perceives the various characters.
However, showing is usually stronger and more dynamic than telling.
For example, you could tell us:
Naomi was painfully shy, especially at social gatherings.
But it’s even more effective when the reader gets too see Naomi’s shyness,
as in:
Even while the party reached a climax, with drinking and singing in
full swing, Naomi stayed in her corner chair, twirling her empty wine
glass.
The second passage adds depth and specificity and it puts us right in
the moment. You could precede this “showing” line with the previous
“telling” line, or you could simply omit the “telling” line and just
let us infer Naomi’s shyness. Either way, the showing passage helps.
All tell and no show does not make for the strongest possible characterization.
There is a famous writer’s maxim: SHOW DON’T TELL. “Showing” means to
let the reader “see” something, experience it for himself as opposed
to simply having the information laid out neatly for him by the narrator.
Showing something – a character, setting, anything – lets the reader
experience it in a more dimensional way than mere telling. Showing also
more closely mimics how we experience things in real life, where we
see things and draw our own conclusions rather than having everything
pointed out to us. In a sense, showing allows the reader to have a more
interactive reading experience.
Another advantage of letting us “see” characters is that we can come
to know them gradually, our perceptions altering and growing over time.
Just as it happens in reality.
METHODS OF SHOWING
There are four basic methods for showing characters:
• Action
• Speech
• Appearance
• Thought
Let’s take a quick look at these methods.
ACTION
Action doesn’t refer to fistfights and blowing up buildings. Action
refers to everything that characters do. Jean-Paul Sartre said, "We
are our deeds." It’s true. There is no more effective way to reveal
a human being than to show what this person does.
This may include “little” actions, like how a character treats the cashier
at a check-out counter or how a character applies her make-up in the
morning. Everyone handles the minutiae of life in a slightly different
way.
Take a look at this passage from Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged
Bird Sings:
“His obesity, while disgusting, was not enough to incur the intense
hate that we felt for him. The fact that he never bothered to remember
our names was insulting, but neither was that slight, alone, enough
to make us despise him. But the crime that tipped the scale and made
our hate not only just imperative was his actions at the dinner table.
He ate the biggest, brownest and best parts of the chicken at every
Sunday meal.”
We learn a few things about this man here but the most revelatory thing
is the fact that he always takes the best part of the chicken for himself.
It’s such a minor thing but it says so much.
We also learn about characters by their “big” actions, actions that
have major significance. Since most good stories contain some element
of conflict and drama, it’s likely that your characters will be placed
in situations where their mettle is tested, where they are forced to
take some “big” actions.
In Why The Caged Bird Sings, we see a major action when Maya, as a young
woman during World War II, decides that she wants to get a job as a
conductor on a San Francisco streetcar. The company running the streetcars
had never hired a black person for this job, but Maya will not take
no for an answer. She keeps returning to the company office, she repeatedly
solicits the help of Negro organizations, she glares at the current
conductors. She declares to herself:
“I WOULD HAVE THE JOB. I WOULD BE A CONDUCTORETTE AND SLING A FULL MONEY
CHANGER FROM MY BELT. I WOULD.”
And, eventually, she prevails, becoming the first black person to work
on a San Francisco streetcar. That’s a “big” action!
You can also give a general sense of a reader’s actions, as in this
passage from Russell Baker’s Growing Up:
“In that time when I had known her best, my mother had hurled herself
at life with chin thrust forward, eyes blazing, and an energy that made
her seem always on the run.
“She ran after squawking chickens, an ax in her hand, determined on
a beheading that would put dinner in the pot. She ran when she made
the beds, ran when she set the table. One Thanksgiving she burned herself
badly when running up from the cellar over with the ceremonial turkey,
she tripped on the stairs and tumbled back down, ending at the bottom
in the debris of giblets, hot gravy, and battered turkey. Life was combat,
and victory was not to the lazy, the timid, the slugabed, the drugstore
cowboy, the libertine, the mushmouth afraid to tell people exactly what
was on his mind whether people liked it or not. She ran.”
In this collage, we don’t just get one specific action from this character
but her whole approach to how she handles life.
SPEECH
We also learn a lot about characters when we hear them speak.
This may include how a character talks – the sound, the rhythm, the
energy behind their speech. Such is the case in this passage from Augusten
Burroughs’s Running With Scissors:
“My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound
like it went through a curling iron. Other people sound flat to my ear;
their words just land in the air. But when my mothers says something,
the ends curl.”
Here the woman’s southern accent is made incredibly vivid, and we’ll
hear it whenever she opens her mouth.
And, of course, we also get to know people by what they say. Notice
how much we learn about this obnoxious visitor to New York City in David
Sedaris’s “City of Angels” (Me Talk Pretty One Day) by what she says:
“I knew exactly what he was up to. I know the rules, I’m not stupid,
so I wrote down his name and license number and said I’d report him
to the police if he tried any funny business. I didn’t come all this
way to be robbed blind, and I told him that, didn’t I, Alisha?
She showed me the taxi receipt, and I assured her that this was indeed
the correct price. It was a standard thirty-dollar fare from Kennedy
Airport to any destination in Manhattan.
She stuffed the receipt back into her wallet. “Well, I hope he wasn’t
expecting a tip, because he didn’t get a dime out of me.”
“You didn’t tip him?”
“Hell no!” Bonnie said. “I don’t know about you, but I work hard for
my money. It’s mine and I’m not tipping anybody unless they give me
the kind of service I expect.”
We don’t have to be told that Bonnie is suspicious, narrow-minded, and
infinitely irritating. We can hear it in her words.
APPEARANCE
When you relate any aspect of a character’s appearance, you let the
reader see the person as if she is standing there before us. Appearance
can relate to any aspect of a character’s physicality – looks, dress,
gesture, any other physical distinctions.
You want to be careful about relying too much on physical appearance
as a method for characterization. You can’t always judge a book by its
cover. Still, well chosen physical details, can lend great insight into
character. And, for most major characters, the reader needs some sense
of the person’s appearance, so they can picture the person in their
mind as they read.
We get a vivid sense of this character from her looks in this passage
from Patricia Hempl’s “Memory and Imagination” (I Could Tell You Stories):
“My father gave me over to Sister Olive Marie, who did look remarkably
like an olive. Her oily face gleamed as if it had just been rolled out
of a can and laid on the white plate of her broad, spotless wimple.
She was a small plump woman; her body and the small window of her face
seemed to interpret the entire alphabet of olive; her face was a sallow
green olive placed upon the jumbo ripe olive of her habit. I trusted
her instantly and smiled, glad to have my hand placed in the hand of
woman who made sense, who provided the satisfaction of being what she
was: an Olive who looked like an olive.”
And we get a nice glimpse of this character through his way of dressing
in this passage from Rick Bragg’s All Over But The Shoutin’’
“He had always been a clean drunk, a well-dressed drunk, what people
in that time called a pretty man. He might be cross-eyed drunk but his
shoes were always shined, always the best-dressed man in jail. His children
and wife might go without, but his shirts were always pressed. Some
people had backbone to lean on. Daddy had starch.”
And in this passage from James McBride’s The Color of Water, the blending
of looks, dress and gesture give us a quick but complete portrait of
a man
“Big Richard was a tall, thin, chocolate-skinned man with a mustache,
who favored shades, short-sleeved shirts, shiny shoes, and sharkskin
pants, and always held a lit cigarette between his teeth.”
Big Richard seems so close we can almost smell his cigarette smoke.
THOUGHT
In prose writing, the readers has the ability to zoom right inside a
character’s mind, much more so than in the dramatic forms of storytelling,
such as drama and film. Obviously, what goes on inside a person’s mind
reveals much about that character. Inside the mind is where you’ll find
a character’s most important, and often private, thoughts.
In fiction, sometimes the writer will report the thoughts of numerous
characters. But in memoir, you will mostly only report the thoughts
of your own mind. After all, one never really knows for sure what’s
going on inside another person’s head.
In this passage from Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions, the writer,
who has suddenly become a mother, reveals thoughts she probably didn’t
share with anyone else:
“In a very real sense, I felt that life could pretty much just hit me
with her best shot, and if I lived, great, and if I died, well, then
I could be with Dad and Jesus and not have to endure my erratic skin
or George Bush any longer. But now I am fucked unto the Lord. Now there
is something that could happen that I could not survive: I could lose
Sam. I look down into his staggeringly lovely little face, and I can
hardly breathe sometimes. He is all I have ever wanted, and my heart
is so huge with love that I feel like it is about to go off. At the
same time I feel that he has completely ruined my life, because I just
didn’t used to care all that much.”
From these private thoughts, we glimpse a whole spectrum of colors about
this person.
In this passage, Lamott is revealing thoughts that occurred in the past
tense, thoughts that corresponded with her actions at the time. But
in memoir, many of the thoughts revealed are those where the writer
is reflecting on the past from the present-day perspective. In the following
passage from Mikal Gilmore’s Shot in the Heart, the writer reveals a
blend of both past and reflective thoughts:
“I remember the look on my father’s face as he sat and held my mother’s
hand that night I found them in the kitchen. I remember my mother hearing
the news of his death, and crying out from such an astonishing place
of loss and loneliness. Yes, those two people loved each other. It is
plainer now in retrospect than it ever was when they were alive. Or
maybe I can just see it a little better now, having learned for myself
what a bittersweet thing love can be. From my vantage, love – no matter
how deep or desperate it may be – is not reason enough to stay in a
bad relationship, especially when the badness of it all is damaging
or malforming other people. But I didn’t get to make that choice for
my parents, any more than I get to make it for you.”
As seen in this example, thought can reveal not only something about
the person doing the thinking but also the characters he is thinking
about.
MIXED METHODS
When revealing characters you usually won’t be using your methods –
action, speech, appearance, thought – one at a time. Rather you will
use two or more of these methods simultaneously. Think of these methods
as instruments in an orchestra, blending together to create a unified
effect.
In this brief passage from Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichl manages to
utilize all four methods of showing (and even a little telling) to reveal
her mother:
“My mother had lots of energy and education and not a lot to do. “If
only my parents had let me be a doctor,” she often wailed as she paced
the apartment like a caged tiger. She tried one job and then another,
but they never lasted. “Nobody has any vision!” she announced after
being politely fired as the chief editor of the Homemaker’s Encyclopedia.
“I really thought that an essay on English queens and their homemaking
skills was a brilliant idea.”
We don’t learn everything there is to know about this woman here. But
we can certainly see her and sense her and we know right away how different
or similar she is to our own mothers.
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