I COULD SHATTER INTO SHARDS

Greetings! I’m continuing the discussion on character description:

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Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively by Rebecca McClanahan, Writer’s Digest Books, 1999

Chapter 6: Bringing Characters to Life Through Description (Part 2)

Describing characters through their environments: You can use home, workplace, neighborhood, and other elements to reveal your character. “Often when I have trouble developing three-dimensional characters, it’s because I haven’t provided them with a suitable background against which to shine.” Another way to discover your character’s traits is to put her in an environment where she doesn’t fit, like putting a grandmother in a tattoo parlor, and see how she’ll respond.

In the movie The Big Chill, the characters reveal themselves by what they pack for a weekend trip. One has enough medication to stock a drugstore, another brings a calculator, a third several packages of condoms. What would your character pack?

In my WIP, the villain is a bit obsessive-compulsive. He arranges his spices alphabetically on the shelves.

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Setting characters into motion: However well described a character might be, he isn’t alive until he moves. A character flicking ash onto a carpet paints a different picture of his personality than the character who vacuums it up.

One of my characters breaks a pencil when he’s angry.

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Describing a character’s inner landscape: There are three techniques for showing a character’s inner life: through revealing his thoughts and dreams, through how he describes world around him, and through rendering the character’s inner cadence, syntax, and diction.

This last one about interior rhythms is a tough one for me to grasp. I think one example from my WIP is a character that constantly thinks “my fault,” almost like a mantra.

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The Hunger Games: Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins, Scholastic Press, 2008

The glue of mutual need that bonded us so tightly together for all those years is melting away. Dark patches, not light, show in the spaces between us. How can it be that today, in the face of 12’s horrible demise, we are too angry to even speak to each other?

I like the metaphor of glue.

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My muscles are rigid with the tension of holding myself together. The pain over my heart returns, and from it I imagine tiny fissures spreading out into my body. Through my torso, down my arms and legs, over my face, leaving it crisscrossed with cracks. One good jolt of a bunker missile and I could shatter into strange, razor-sharp shards.

The character is feeling a bit brittle.

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He doesn’t speak, just runs his fingers over the bruises on my neck with a touch as light as moth wings, plants a kiss between my eyes, and disappears.

Awww.

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That will do it for this week. We’re done with The Hunger Games Trilogy so I’ll have something new starting on Tuesday.