As one of the big three of writing (whichever big three you subscribe to, mine or the conventional grade school model or something else¹), the character-aspect of your story obviously deserves a lot of thought and care. The number of articles about writing characters, many of them remarkably basic, boggles the mind. Flat characters, round characters, female characters, villains, heroes, aliens, AIs, intelligent gerbils²– look hard enough and an article’s out there. We’re obviously really concerned with characters; it behooves us, therefore, to spend some time figuring out how we’re going to actually communicate those characters to the reader.

How do readers get to know characters? Characters are essentially facsimiles of people. From the author’s perspective, characters are made by piecing together the parts of other people, real and fictional (including the author). For the biographer or historian, meanwhile, the character on the page is still a facsimile, albeit one with a singular original rather than a Frankenstein composite. This nature has implications. Because fictional characters are facsimiles of people, we learn about them in a facsimile of how we learn about real people.

How, then, do we learn about real people? We have three methods. The first is the way in which we know about other people: observation and interaction with something always exterior to ourselves. The second is the way we know ourselves. We know ourselves from the inside and imperfectly. We remember our own thoughts, and that remembrance is itself a thought. We cannot learn ourselves perfectly, but we have a much more intimate knowledge, mechanically easier if more compromised by its closer proximity to our biases (not that our biases don’t affect our understanding of others our own biases). The third way is the most limited and specialized: to listen to the dictates of the Author of our lives, God. This method is available consistently only in His Word; except for the persons in the Bible, we can therefore only derive generalities (the pervasive depravity of man) or knowledge of the character of God from this. Each of these three has its own vectors and its own maximum level of knowledge, its own flavor which is expressed in our narratives and characters.

First, the reader can learn about the character like he would learn about another person in real life. This function is always going to be extant in a character, regardless of the other two methods, because the character will remain separate from the reader regardless of what you do. Like in real life, the reader will take into account the actions, words, and reputation of the character. He’ll ask questions. Do his actions and his words line up? What does his choice here tell me about his morals and personality? How much do I believe that character’s assessment of this one? This method of teaching the reader about the character is made out of implication. You, as the author, set up the breadcrumbs: the actions, the words, the circumstances in which they exist. The reader follows the trail to his own conclusion.

The difficulty of the situation lies in making sure the reader reaches a conclusion that you intended. A failure here can rise from a lot of different circumstances. Let’s say that we have John and Samantha and Bartholomew. John is holding Samantha hostage; her fiancé Bartholomew is perched on the edge of a cliff, watching. When Bartholomew turns and jumps off the cliff into the water, abandoning Samantha, you could be forgiven for thinking him an utter cad and caitiff³. What I didn’t tell you is that Bartholomew, being John’s twin brother, knows him remarkably well, believes that his brother is about as likely to go through with his threats as a pufferfish is to colonize Mars. That knowledge, if you knew it beforehand or if you learned it afterwards, would change your assessment. If the character possesses information the audience does not know he has and acts upon it, the audience may interpret his actions entirely wrongly, simply because the author failed to communicate all the factors required to rightly judge the situation. In some cases, this can be exploited; the author can set the story up to make you reevaluate a character by giving you new context. In others, it’s incompetence and not art; that’s when problems arise.

Other, worse faults arise when the author has a worldview significantly differing from the reader’s (and an incomprehension of the reader’s worldview); the average ‘strong female character’ in movies there days should bear witness to that; in such cases, the writers generally intend to make an admirable, likable character and end up with something repulsive and repugnant⁴.The maximum level of knowledge the reader can obtain by this method is the lowest of the three. At its core, this method always carries the possibility, if you think about it enough, that the character you see is merely a facet of the full person. Perhaps, this method implies, there are entire swathes of life and character and personality you just haven’t had the opportunity or focus to see. The writer, after all, has chosen to show some parts of his life and not others. Some dimension of these characters will remain obscured, even if it is only their innermost thoughts, and thus a certain realistic uncertainty afflicts these portrayals.

The second method of learning about a character is doing it from the inside, to do it by inhabiting them. Consider the protagonist of T.M. Doran’s excellent novel Towards the Gleam. We don’t get John’s thoughts actually written on the page. We don’t even get his last name. His character, though, is spelled out from his perspective, to an extent. Other stories take this farther; my own writing style (as seen in Why Ought I to Die?) tends towards this for the protagonist. This method has the potential to go incredibly in-depth. For reasons of efficiency, of course, authors tend to a more exterior portrayal of more minor characters, but an internal perspective, even a limited one, can be applied even to quite minor personages.

The means this method uses are analogous to the first method’s means. We see the character’s actions and words; we see too his thoughts, whether articulated or summarized. We get even the character’s reputation- as he sees it. That last clause is the key to this method’s difference from the rest. We get the world as the character sees it, and so we see the character in the world. We pick apart character from world, intuiting what is objective in his analysis and what is character. Some parts of the story, generally, will be artificially injected into his narrative (the author’s needs often cause such protagonists to have an impressive eye for certain telling details- though this too can be made an element of character). The character’s viewpoint, nonetheless, becomes the means by which we see him, including his self-analysis, his perspective on other’s analysis of him, his perspective on others, and every other element which we might experience ‘if he were me.’

The sum of this method is that it induces introspection on somebody else. We line up the story’s information from the character’s perspective and introspect upon it as if we were him (though with our emotional baggage more than his, except insofar as the author has communicated those biases to us), analyzing him, then perceive the pseudo-self-analysis we have done with and on him, building up his character in our minds. As a result, this method has a remarkably high level of informational capacity. You can learn to know a character impossibly well by this method, come to know him so well that you pass from inability to predict due to ignorance, through ability to predict, to inability to predict due to an apprehension of complexity, to, perhaps, an ability to predict by near-intuition, by empathy and resonance with the intricacies of his character. Of course, this assumes the character has some depths; he may not (as next week will address). Regardless, this method can allow remarkable understanding, an understanding we cannot on this earth achieve so certainly of another person, incapable of telepathy as we are (and taking into account the exponentially higher level of complexity a human possesses compared to any fictional facsimile). It also allows for the existence of a narrator inherently unreliable, biased; it obscures what the character sees by putting the character in the way.

The third method is can be incredibly crude or incredibly powerful, depending on the author’s skill. A story can describe the characters the way the Bible describes us: with the author’s creator-based authority. Timothy is a coward, Anna is pretty, and Thomas worships a ‘golden’ calf made out of petrified boogers. These statement are given out with all the assurance of the author who made the world, here devoid of the layer of obscurity provided by a character’s viewpoint, and the reader must perforce acknowledge the truth of these dictums. Of course, just because he intellectually recognizes them doesn’t mean the characterization has worked. Calling John a ‘man with a bad temper’ only does so much when he is invariably calm and equanimous when he appears on the page. Be careful, therefore, that when you choose to impose a dictate, you follow through on it.

This method, despite what may seem inevitable, is not truly confined to explicit statements of the author. If the reader can tell from the way the story is told that the author intends a certain characterization or judgement, it can result in a similar result, an implied author-dictate. Again, consistency with the other characterization is here key if you don’t want the whole thing to feel thin and hollow, a lie (and as I’ve discussed in another article, (Part One) (Part Two), authorial lies are very bad for your story).

This third method has a knowledge ceiling, of sorts. It’s only practical to convey so much information this way, if you want the reader to actually internalize it, and generally speaking, this method can’t characterize with the subtlety and depth of the other two, though some authors have managed. It’s a tricky beast. One of the fundamental differences is that we simply don’t learn much individual detail this way in real life. We can learn some of the patterns of mankind by reading the Bible, but the Bible will not give you a specialized and individualized character profile on neighbor Jimmy across the road. Thus, attempting to communicate large swathes of subtle characterization by this method runs into the problem that, unlike observation and introspection, this doesn’t happen in real life.

Some of you may have noticed that defining the Bible’s characterization as this introduces a curious confluence: God inspired the Bible, so in a sense, the Bible provides not only a method #3 path to His character but a path that could be characterized as either #1 or #2. It’s worth noting that the Bible spends time characterizing God via His actions, words, and even thoughts, as is respectively shown by Isaiah 63:3, Gen. 1:26, and Deuteronomy 9:8 (the last is, I admit, a bit of an edge case, an emotion rather than a thought). The Bible uses all three methods: external, as in Psalm 3:3, self-testimony (internal), as in Ps 2:6, and Authorial dictate (also technically self-testimony), as in Exodus 20:5 or 1 John 4:8.

All three of these methods are viable and usable. As authors we need to consider which one works for which circumstance, for which character. Will a certain perspective blur the truth too much? Lean, perhaps, upon method #1. Is that blur good, because the point of the scene is to characterize and the uncertainty of the method actually enhances the plot? Consider moving towards option #2. A story will generally favor one above the others, if only by virtue of having to choose a perspective⁵. Choose well, and the story will be all the better for it.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – Mine is Plot, Character, and Theme; the standard is Plot, Character, and Setting. Unless you’re really unconventional, Plot and Character are going to be at the top of the list for your ‘essentials of story’ summary.

2 – This was a joke, but I looked it up to be sure, and, well: Intelligent Gerbils.

3 – Or, here, for casting imprecations upon an author who just wants to flaunt his vocabulary.

4 – To be fair, some of the more woke actually want the character to be unlikable, from what I’ve heard.

5 – Check out this listing of perspective categories: article.