I just recently finished the last rewrites on Wolf’s Cross, and it got me to thinking about Character in fiction. This is mostly because what my editor wanted, for the most part, happened to be character-related. Seems I understood everyone, and why they were doing things, but a few places it was also helpful to let the reader in. . .
I’ve written before about the canard that character is somehow in opposition to plot. Suffice to say, that idea is BS. That said, what is characterization? The word is bandied about, much like the word “plot,” with the tacit assumption that everyone knows what we’re talking about. A lot of newbie writers, and a few pros, seem to think that we just mean the description of the person in the story, height, hair-color, profession, where they went to school, that he likes cats, or she dislikes shellfish. Sometimes it’s as if we’re reading a resume or a police report. . .
And unfortunately that kind of “characterization” tends to be just as riveting. A laundry list of traits isn’t characterization, any more than a laundry list of incidents comprise a plot. Worse in fact, the more traits a writer piles on a character, the character becomes paradoxically more diffuse.
The key here is relevance. Characterization in fiction is not the aggregation of traits, but the systematic removal of all but the most relevant traits. What’s relevant? It is those traits that inform the character’s action in the story, or otherwise affect the story’s action. So physical description is only needed insofar as it tells us how the world the character inhabits will react to the character; a first-person man vs. nature story without anyone but the protagonist present could get away without any physical description at all, a Regency Romance, not so much. The character’s backstory is only needed insofar as it clues us in to the place the character is in society, and the character’s motivations.
The trick is, every time you tell the reader something about the character, ask yourself why you’re revealing this particular detail. If you don’t have an answer beyond, “I’m adding characterization here,” you may want to skip it.
