"Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon."
Susan Ertz
Lesson 3: character (showing not telling)
- Don't patronise the reader - make him work, be active
- Give the reader control; don't do all the work on his behalf. Readers may go down different paths
- Consider a character entering a bookshop. He might have one reaction if he speaks the language that the books are written in and another if he doesn't
- Images can be interpreted in many ways. Put two objects next to each other and the meaning of each is affected by the other
- Imaginitive idea -> writing -> book = doomed to failure. Shepherd readers down a broad path, providing some guidance but not complete control
- Offer fertile ideas and allow reader to interpret them. Provide subliminal information
- How do you convey information about a character without telling?
- body language eg gestures or barriers such as hand in front of mouth, fiddling with cufflinks, crossing legs, turning your back on people, standing up or sitting down, eye contact
- dialogue, eg accent, dialect, education, speech volume, gent or spiv
- clothing eg shoes, jewellery, casual, genuinely fashionable or posing, scruffy but confident, tattoos, utility of clothes, tidy or not, colour coordination. Context is important: you wouldn't wear a suit down a mine shaft
- Physical eg wrinkles. skin colour, reaction to physical attributes
- First impressions linger. Do not introduce your character in non-typical mode
- Everything reveals something about character. Whatever you put down will be interpreted
- Don't give the reader an impression that you subsequently overturn eg suggesting a skin colour which subsequently turns out to be wrong!
- Work out what the centre is and reveal parts of that
- Be subtle
Back to writing course
