Direct and Indirect Characterization

ldlago

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After receiving feedback on something I had written for a contest, I began searching websites for ways I could better develop my fictional characters. I came across the terms direct and indirect characterization. One website I found this morning and downloaded was www.nownovel.com. There was a piece written by someone simply named Jordan. He writes, and I quote, direct characterization means the character details authors explicitly describe. For example, telling the reader a character's desires, life philosophy or current emotional state explicitly.

Indirect characterization, he goes on to write, shows readers your characters' traits without explicitly describing them. He mentions types of indirect characterization as any writing that helps us infer or deduce things about a person's personality.

Dialogue - where a character's bossy, kind, mean, or other qualities come through.

Actions - what a character does (for example jumping on a beetle to squash it) reveals, incidentally, their character (in this case that a character is needlessly unkind or violent).

Description - how a character looks often gives indirect characterization. We might assume, for example, a pale-skinned character is antisocial and hides away from the sun.

Jordan goes on with examples from Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf and Dickens.

Would you be open to posting examples of direct or indirect characterization from your own writing?
 

Bufty

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Idlago,

You apparently have examples given.

Your best bet here is to read widely and see how other authors approach characterisation.

What you've given above is a fairly clear explanation of the difference between showing the reader (indirect) and telling the reader (direct).

Either approach is valid and the choice is the writer's because only he knows the relative importance of whether to show or tell when covering any particular issue. If it's insignificant, tell, otherwise show, and draw the reader into your story by means of letting him put two and two together instead of being spoon-fed everything.
 
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Woollybear

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Yes, best bet is to read and see how trade authors do it. I'd say that the open to Shanghai Girls (which I just pasted as an example to use with Vonsey) is a good example of indirect characterization. Or, upon reflection, possibly an example of a nice melding of direct and indirect.

"Our daughter looks like a South China peasant with those red cheeks," my father complains, pointedly ignoring the soup before him. "Can't you do something about them?"

Mama stares at Baba, but what can she say? My face is pretty enough - some might even say lovely - but not as luminescent as the pearl I'm named for. I tend to blush easily. Beyond that, my cheeks capture the sun. When I turned five, my mother began rubbing my face and arms with pearl creams, and mixing ground pearls into my morning jook - rice porridge - hoping the white essence would permeate my skin. It hasn't worked. Now my cheeks burn red - exactly what my father hates. I shrink down into my chair. I always slump when I'm near him, but I slump even more on those occasions when Baba takes his eyes off my sister to look at me. I'm taller than my father, which he loathes. We live in Shanghai, where the tallest car, the tallest wall, or the tallest building sends a clear and unwavering message that the owner is a person of great importance. I am not a person of importance.

That's from Lisa See. Notice the last sentence sounds like a direct statement, telling us Pearl is unimportant, but because of the context of the paragraph it is also showing us that her self-esteem is low.
 
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Lakey

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Sol Stein’s Stein on Writing leans heavily on the concept that Stein calls “details that particularize.” This is the idea that when you describe just about anything—a person, a room, an event, a memory, a piece of backstory—you amplify details that distinguish the thing described in some meaningful way. He gives a terrific example that shows how to use particularizing details in characterization: A story that opens with a woman in a designer tracksuit being approached in a parking lot by an unshaven man in a stained trench coat. These descriptions don’t just tell us what the characters look like; they give us the first layer of characterization, by setting some of the parameters of what kind of people these are. And they create instant tension, because the kind of woman who wears designer tracksuits is likely to feel threatened or at least repelled by a grubby-looking guy.

In my writing I rarely do what you’ve called direct characterization. I don’t say things like “Eddie was the sort of person who always felt uncomfortable in fancy clothes, and often accidentally ruined them.” Rather, I try to work details that particularize into my scenes in an organic way. So I might construct scenes in which, among other things, Eddie fidgets with the generous skirt of her satin dress, which she only put on after her mother got on her case about wearing the tweed skirt she would have preferred. Later in the scene she might clumsily drop a cigarette and burn a hole in the skirt. These events might be presented as action beats and moments of interiority adding color to a conversation that is largely about something else—or (preferably) about something metaphorically or thematically related to how Eddie feels in her clothes. That technique allows the layering of characterization in with other story elements.

Another technique I really like to boost characterization without just telling my readers what I think my characters are like is to provide all description from a strong POV. There’s an example I’ve given before in discussions like this so I’ll go find it and reproduce it here as well. Here you go—consider these two descriptions of a tall woman wearing pressed trousers:


"Jane had always envied tall women like Anne. The crisp crease in Anne's trousers struck Jane as a personal affront, as though Anne were intentionally flaunting her elegance." (describing Anne while characterizing Jane)

and

"Anne sat on the couch and stretched her long legs in front of her, carefully arranging the crease in her trousers. It had taken fifteen minutes with the iron to get that crease just right, and she intended to keep it tidy." (both describing and characterizing Anne)

These descriptions use the POV to tell you something about these women that runs far deeper than “Anne was tall and wore pressed trousers.” How the POV character (Jane in the first instance, Anne in the second) perceives and interprets Anne’s clothes is integrated into the description, giving you both the mental picture of Anne and the layering in of a piece of characterization of whichever one is the POV character.

As an exercise, you can try describing the same setting or person from several characters’ points of view, and really think hard about how each character perceives differently. They might use different words, or have entirely disparate reactions (imagine a third woman looking at Anne who is very old-fashioned and doesn’t like seeing women in trousers at all. What would her description of Anne sound like?). They might notice different details—the details that particularize both the describer and the one described.

ETA: I see that all of my examples have to do with clothing! I did not do that on purpose, and you can apply this technique to anything at all—people, furniture, food, the weather, love—anything at all that your POV character has perceptions and thoughts about.

:e2coffee:
 
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neandermagnon

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I have never come across terms like "indirect characterisation" and "direct characterisation". I'm not really into all these academic literature terms. You don't need to know what things like these are called to be able to do the things they describe. It's a bit like the difference between learning the names of all the parts of a car engine versus actually learning to drive. Learning about literature doesn't teach you how to write - it teaches you about literature.

In my experience, the best ways to improve at writing are:

1. read lots and lots
2. write lots and lots
3. reread and edit your own writing and try to make it better
4. critique other writers' writing
5. get your writing critiqued by other writers

If you want to focus on characterisation then when you read books, think about how the writer does characterisation as you read them. When you reread and edit your own work, think about how you're doing characterisation and whether it's effective and what you can change to make it better. When you get something critiqued, ask the critiquers if they can focus on critiquing your characterisation.

Would you be open to posting examples of direct or indirect characterization from your own writing?

I don't make distinctions between direct and indirect characterisation. I do characterisation similar to how Lakey does it, so if she says that's indirect characterisation then that's what it is. But the terms aren't important. What's important is whether or not it succeeds in getting across the right idea to the reader.

I mostly write in first person point of view so in a sense, everything written is characterisation, because it's the character telling the scene or story in their own words. So every word characterises the point of view character. Other characters are characterised by a combination of their actions, interactions and the inferences the point of view character makes about them (which frequently characterises both the POV character and the one they're making inferences about). How the POV character describes the things around them - including which things they notice and bother to describe - also comes from how they are as a person, i.e. it's all characterisation. Lakey's suggested exercise of describing the same thing from various different characters' perspectives is really good for this.

It's hard to give examples from something I'm currently writing because characterisation is an ongoing process throughout the story and short snippets won't make much sense without the context of the rest of the story. Any given sentence or paragraph might be doing several things at once - worldbuilding, characterisation of one or another character, advancing the plot, etc. Character A getting into a punch up with character B is both advancing the plot and characterisation of both characters and might also be worldbuilding (e.g. the attitudes towards physical fights in their culture). People's actions and motivations characterise them. You'll get a much better sense of it by reading a whole book than by reading isolated snippets out of context.
 

ldlago

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I'm going to give you a paragraph from the piece I submitted. Critique it if you'd like.

He slipped a pair of leather loafers over his bare feet, threw a jacket on and climbed a ladder to the roof. He sat on the ledge and stared down at a city, quieted to mark the holiday. On normal business days, its bustling shops would resonate with commerce, fueling life. Through local streets, the interstate - cars, box trucks and tractor-trailers crept the endless maze of starts and stops. He thought of heading west, prairies and open space, but having spent so many holidays alone, why should it bother him to spend another here? Ironically, anonymity and solitude unrealized throughout his life, protections from a storm of vindication gaining might, he found in this unlikeliest retreat. Though his decision to meet Mencken undermined the fragile bit of peace he knew could never fully purge his memories of a free-fall into human suffering, it might at least flush out the operatives of an enemy more deadly than the villagers they slaughtered needlessly.

I would say this leans more toward direct characterization. What do you think?
 

neandermagnon

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You'll need to post it in the share your work section, because we're not supposed to do critiques in this section. I'll be happy to critique it in there, if I get time (sorry lots of non-writing things impinging on my life at the moment).
 

Bufty

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Critique it for what?

You are covering more than one thing here. It jumps from one topic to another and to me it's wordy and I struggle to get any clear characterisation from it at all.

But out-of-context snippets are notoriously bad for critiquers.:flag: :Hug2:


QUOTE=ldlago;10675028]I'm going to give you a paragraph from the piece I submitted. Critique it if you'd like.

He slipped a pair of leather loafers over his bare feet, threw a jacket on and climbed a ladder to the roof. He sat on the ledge and stared down at a city, quieted to mark the holiday. That's just plain narrative description.On normal business days, its bustling shops would resonate with commerce, fueling life. So is thatThrough local streets, the interstate - cars, box trucks and tractor-trailers crept the endless maze of starts and stops. Don't know what that sentence is meant to convey.He thought of heading west, prairies and open space, but having spent so many holidays alone, why should it bother him to spend another here?I don't quite follow what this sentence means. Ironically, anonymity and solitude unrealized throughout his life, protections from a storm of vindication gaining might, he found in this unlikeliest retreat Or this one. Though his decision to meet Mencken undermined the fragile bit of peace he knew could never fully purge his memories of a free-fall into human suffering, it might at least flush out the operatives of an enemy more deadly than the villagers they slaughtered needlessly.Or this one.


I would say this leans more toward direct characterization. What do you think?[/QUOTE]
 
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ldlago

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As an exercise, you can try describing the same setting or person from several characters’ points of view,

think hard about how each character perceives differently.

This is very similar to something ConnorMuldowney suggested in our discussion of VOICE. It had to do with a character seeing things in ways no one else does.
 

katfeete

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"Indirect vs. direct" is somewhat a restating of the old "show vs. tell" dichotomy, with most of the same trade-offs. It is simpler and takes far less words to tell readers "He was tall, strong, and brave" than to subtly work in little scenelets where he gets something off the highest shelf, hefts fifty-pound sacks, and faces down an angry mob. On the other hand, readers are more likely to believe in his height, strength, and fearlessness if they've seen it. Which to use generally is a balance of how central this particular character is, and how important a part his height, strength, or bravery play in the overall story.

It's also, like most dual categories, a vast oversimplification. There are a lot of ways you can get information about a given character to the reader, of which "just tell them directly" and "show indirectly through their words and actions" aren't even two ends of the spectrum, just two points on the great big scatter graph. For example, my WIP has two POV characters who interact with a lot of the same secondary characters. How they describe those people is by this dichotomy "direct" characterization of the secondary characters ... but they describe them differently, notice different things, make different assumptions, so it's simultaneously indirect characterization of the POV characters themselves. (And may I add, great fun. :evil: ) A related trick that works even if I'm not doing multiple POV is to have a character describe to the POV character a third character: I get "direct" exposition about the third character; indirect exposition about the speaker based on how much they'll say, on what they leave in, leave out, or flat-out lie about; and even more indirect exposition as you get a hint of how the speaker views the POV character based on what they will or won't say.

Another trick I use, which I suppose goes in the indirect pot, is to show characters reacting to or dealing with similar scenarios at the beginning and toward the end of a story. Characterization isn't static. People change, and they ought to be changing over the course of my book, and this is one of the simplest but most effective ways of showing it. (And if they haven't changed -- well, that says something too.)

(I can show snippets of some of this stuff if you truly want, but my WIP is still in the "find the plot holes" step and most of the descriptions and stuff are, well... not wordsmithed, shall we say. You're probably better off, as others have said, hunting up examples from published works.)
 

CathleenT

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I'd suggest writing short stories or vignettes to try out both styles. I lean more toward showing, but occasionally, you can hammer a point home that can't be missed by slipping in a small tell. I think each writer needs to find their own balance. I found that (at least provisionally) by writing shorts, but I gather that not everyone can. Vignettes or scenes would accomplish the same thing, given enough critique to polish them.
 

ldlago

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I can show snippets of some of this stuff if you truly want

I would love to read a snippet or two. I was told by a member this is not the place to critique. Maybe we can sneak it in by simply calling it examples of direct and indirect characterization. I don't think the terms direct and indirect are necessarily synonymous with show and tell, since they apply strictly to characterization and nothing else.