Make them as human as possible. Character's Name: -- Describe relationship with this character and changes to relationship over the course of the novel. Her mouth bowed forward and her brow sloped back, and her skull shone pink and speckled within a mere haze of hair, which hovered about her head like the remembered shape of an altered thing. To create this article, 40 people, some anonymous, worked to edit and improve it over time. Draw your character to the best of your abilities, labeling their physical attributes. But name here could have no more pride than he did. Then compare it to your own.
A small head with a jockey cap, a skimpy little checked jacket that was made out of air … The man was seven feet tall, but very narrow in the shoulders, incredibly thin, and his face, please note, had a jeering look about it. He was such a miserable specimen, the children said, all humps and hollows. There was no audio except for a static hiss. Make sure that everything they do advances both the plot, and their own backstory. It was a face to be dominated by, or to fight: never a face to patronize or pity.
When I write about my grandmother, I usually focus on her strong, jutting chin—not only because it was her most dominant feature but also because it suggests her stubbornness and determination. Lonnie was blade-faced, six and one half feet tall, and had a body like whipcord from the marathons he ran in New Orleans, Dallas, and Boston. One reason a books ends up on the top of the list would be the characters. One character has packed enough pills to stock a drugstore; another has packed a calculator; still another, several packages of condoms. For Kundera, a novel is more a meditation on ideas and the private world of the mind than a realistic depiction of characters. His eyes bulged with terror as he saw what was in front of him.
If people know the name, they'll still accuse you of copying and you can still get in trouble, not only with the readers, but maybe the law as well. Once he had a drug problem. It adds depth and complexity to characters and their relationships. Health: Hobbies: Favorite Sayings: Speech patterns: Disabilities: Style Elegant, shabby etc. Decide where he's from and how he got to the present moment in the story. Character profiles are useful when writing in any genre.
Also, think of how a soldier would move: back straight, gaze straight ahead, heading for his target like he always has somewhere to be. Their hand cold and clammy?. Ralph is a main character in William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Read authors who are particularly noted for their characters. His eyes were set deep in his face, his stern brow set over them like a guard to discourage anyone from searching within.
Note how much we find out about Lonnie's appearance, educational level, intelligence, ambition and personal habits in just two paragraphs: After lunch, she and I met with our district attorney, Lonnie Marceaux. The boy frantically crawled across the floor. It is your responsibility to make your characters, your settings and the action of your stories come to life clearly and vividly. It hung on his lanky frame like a coat hangs on a rack. It smelled of fried pork and the mouse-gnawed Army blanket on the cot in the corner It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dimness and find the old man. When I write about Uncle Leland, I describe the wandering eye that gave him a perpetually distracted look, as if only his body was present. He looked up at me from where he was seated on his bunk, and his eyes were hot and bright and moisture was beaded across his upper lip.
Your generosity means a lot. Phrases that merely label like tall, middle-aged, and average bring no clear image to our minds. Usually, you can tweak this to cast more light on the plot or characters. If the reader does not care about or connect with a main character, then students many times will stop reading. His cloak — or perhaps that was his hair too — shifted as if in an unfelt wind.
Describe the visible essence of the character. If you want to make it more evocative for a certain character, you can use terms like honey, caramel, chocolate, rose, snow, golden, etc. Which items is she practically giving away? You don't want to overload your reader with description. When planning appearance, imagine your character's ethnicity, cultural background and any medical information that may affect your plot. The coughing is a reminder of her life-threatening condition.
These are just a few ways that students can improve their understanding of character traits. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me. To enlarge the description, imagine that same father in a particular setting—not just in the house but also sitting in the brown recliner. Its gray, slippery skin was stretched taut upon its face. Use comparison to highlight key differences between characters Many aspiring authors struggle to make each character distinct. Even if you try to be subtle and show what a character is like by having her compare her looks to someone else in the family, it often just doesn't sound convincing.
The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. He smelled faintly of dried sweat, Red Man, and talcum powder. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, drew a famous distinction between 'flat' and 'round' characters--between those fictional personages seen from the outside who acted with the predictable consistency of caricatures, and those whose complexities or teeming inner lives we come to know. This article has also been viewed 394,606 times. Think Luke Skywalker versus Darth Vader, Harry Potter versus Voldemort, or Tom Hanks in Castaway versus his environment.