Celebrated crime author David Corbett has a wonderful post over on Joanna Penn’s blog about writing character and especially how character is revealed by action. Check it out. It’s one of the best pieces on character I’ve seen.
I’ll leave it to you to enjoy Corbett’s entire post, but I’ll at least set out for you the five principles that Corbett outlines–emphasizing that they are principles, meaning guidelines that can be applied in myriad ways, not paint-by-number instructions.
First, character is revealed by someone’s need or want. Someone has to be in motion toward some good he wants to get, or evil he wants to avoid, even if it‘s only Bertie Wooster lying in bed wishing he didn’t have to lunch with his Aunt Agatha.
Second, character is revealed when someone, usually after formulating an imperfect plan for achieving his want, runs into difficulty. Obstacles. Conflict. We wouldn’t have a story or a character if Coraline in Neil Gaiman’s eponymous fable didn’t find herself trapped with her “other” mother.
Third, character is revealed when someone exhibits a (seeming) contradiction. As when Flannery O’Connor’s protagonist Hazel Motes in Wise Blood cannot get rid of the thought of Christ no matter how hard he tries to dispel it.
Fourth, character is revealed when something unexpected happens, when the character makes a mistake that renders him vulnerable. Think about when David realizes he married the wrong woman in Dickens’ David Copperfield.
Finally, character is revealed when we realize that there’s more to the character’s predicament than meets the eye. When it’s clear that the character has a secret. As when in The Great Gatsby Nick Carraway goes to lunch with Gatsby and discovers that he associates with gangsters.
What I find marvelous about these principles is the way in which character is revealed more by action–pursuing some want, running into obstacles, trying to overcome them– than by soul-searching. This doesn’t mean that the interior monologue prevalent in so much literary fiction, not to mention in Shakespeare, is unacceptable; it means that even the interior monologue must focus on real patterns of the character’s action, and not just the articulation of emotion, if it is going to succeed.
I also liked how Corbett argues that the reasons why these principles are so important is because they go to the heart of who we are as human beings. Human beings, after all, are characters in stories.
Because I write fiction so much in the comic mode, it’s also interesting for me to think about how these principles are applicable to writing comic characters. I hinted at one such application in mentioning P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster. But each of us will have to work to find out how these principles are applicable to the characters we are trying to depict.
Please share with us whatever triumphs, or problems, you experience in this endeavor.
P.S. Corbett has a new book out on this topic: The Art of Character. I for one am looking forward to reading it.
