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avoiding cliches, avoiding cliches in fiction, characterisation, characterization, developing viewpoint, fiction writing tips, stereotyping characters, viewpoint and characterization, writing tips
As a manuscript assessor with over 200 full length assessments under my belt, I’ve seen the whole spectrum of fictional characters, from You’re so real I can almost smell you to Oh dear, he’s made of cardboard. Pity…
We all want our characters to step off the page as living breathing individuals, so I’d like to give you my three most cited reasons for characterization failure and how to correct it.
Use of cliches
The moment I read He was so angry, steam came out his ears, I want to put the book down. Seriously? Do you not realize that readers are highly visual? Unless this is a fantasy/children’s book, your character doesn’t actually have steam lifting their cap, or daggers shooting out of their eyes.
Instead of giving us a cliche (and turning your character into generic angry man) show us how your character is unique. We all experience and express anger in different ways. Some people get theatrical and throw things. Others (scary people) go really quiet and just stare at you. When you’re writing a scene, spend time thinking about your character and how they’re likely to feel anger (physical sensations and thoughts) and how they’re likely to express it (dialogue and action). Then let that flow into the scene.
Sloppy Viewpoint
For those of you who don’t understand viewpoint, it’s the perspective of the character whose eyes/sensations/feelings/thoughts you’re choosing to filter the story through. I’ve grabbed an image from Grand Theft Auto to show you what I mean: your character looking at the world of your story (or their phone as the case may be):
It’s your job as the author to pick a character in a scene and show us the scene through their viewpoint, along with all their opinions about what’s happening and why and what they think of others etc. When you leave us inside their mind for extended periods of time (not head-hopping from one character to the next), we grow comfortable there and drop deeply into the story, coming to understand that character’s natural biases, interests, memories, desires and fears. This is how you build characterization via the Show don’t tell method, and it’s also the reason that you try to give your main characters the lion’s share of the viewpoint, so their characterization will be strong.
What I don’t want to see is you stepping in as narrator to “tell” me:
Mary was fat and ugly unhappy. No man ever asked her out. She often gorged on food instead of taking time to care for her appearance.
(Note: this is a workshop participant’s example that I used to create a ‘make this into a scene’ exercise in class, not my own work!)
I’d rather you sit me inside Mary’s head and “show” me:
Mary slumped onto the stained couch and wondered if there was a spring loose before she dug a half-eaten Toblerone out from under her butt-cheek. She tossed it into the ashtray and reached for the sticky remote control. Nothing decent on the box, as usual. Only dating shows and they gave her indigestion. Stupid women spending ten hours in hair and makeup just so they could get on tv.
Bitches. Mary reached past the sleeping cat into the opened pizza box and took out the last slice of a family-sized cheesy crust. “Any loser can marry a farmer”, she told Princess Jasmine, who slept on, blissfully unaware of the mozzarella dotting her fur. “If they want to live in the middle of woop woop.”
Not exactly deathless prose, but the difference between what you “tell” the reader (narrative summary) and what you “show” them via Mary’s viewpoint (in a scene with setting, dialogue and action) is the difference between a cookie-cutter character and one that’s starting to come to life. It’s still a little generic, but as the story progresses, you’d have ample opportunity to make Mary truly unique as you show us the world through her eyes so we can really empathize with her. If you’d like to have a shot at creating a scene with Mary in the comments below, that would be fun. Try to avoid the stereotypes I’ve put in (single woman and a cat, unhappy and over-eating, single and hates dating shows, etc). And that leads neatly to step three!
Stereotyping:
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve read a character who’s so stereotypical they feel like they stepped out of a board game. You know the type: the sexy secretary, the big bad biker, the gruff boss, the dotty aunt, the feisty grandma, the cherub child, etc, ad nauseam.
I’m not saying kids can’t be cute, but no child is cute 24/7. Neither is every child ‘bouncing off the walls’ (see Cliches above) 24/7. Some secretaries are just good at their job and aren’t there to be lusted over or objectified. Ditto shirtless construction-workers.
Real people are never just one thing. Neither are good characters. For seat-of-the-pants writers, this can be a real problem because as they start the book they might not know their character very well. But by the end of writing a book in draft they should know their character inside-out, and that’s the time to go back and change anything that feels generic or stereotyped. If the secretary in your story is sexy, what if she’s also a math whiz or a kick-boxer or has a house full of adopted pets?
I’m not telling you to go mental with quirks, but try to think past the characterization shorthand we all use when we’re looking at characters from the outside, and get inside them, under their skin, inside their heads. Even sub-characters who never have viewpoint in the story should still come across as unique individuals.
So, there you have it my friends. Three easy tips to make your fictional characters more realistic. If you’ve got questions or further tips, please pop them into the comments section below. And if you’re looking for a good book to help with fiction writing, I can heartily recommend this one. My copy is dog-eared!
Great tips, Louise.
I’m a bit concerned by the examples you use to illustrate the difference between telling a reader something, and showing it through action, description, and dialogue.
You describe Mary as “fat and ugly”, as if those two things go together. I know that’s in the example of how not to convey character, but it still seems like fat-shaming.
Then in the example of showing, we don’t actually learn anything about Mary’s weight/size, or whether she or other people think she’s pretty or ugly. I get the feeling she might be depressed, given that she’s slumping on a stained couch. But eating pizza doesn’t equal fat, let alone ugly. Being cynical – or maybe bitter – about dating shows and women who spend lots of time on their hair and makeup doesn’t mean Mary is ugly, or fat, or unattractive to other people. So what you’re showing is different from what you were telling, which makes the example less effective.
I know you wrote this as an example of how writers can convey information as a character, not as an example of deathless prose, as you say, but you also talk about avoiding stereotypes.
There are studies that show many Westerners equate fatness with being a slob, over-eating or eating junk food, and being lazy, unhappy, and undesirable, even though fatness need not go with any of those things. Many popular films reinforce those stereotypes, particularly about single women. So it seems a pity to use a stereotype of a woman sitting alone eating comfort food and talking to her cat while snarking about dating shows.
What do you think?
I do like Princess Jasmine with the mozarella in her fur – she’ll be a happy cat shen she wakes up and finds that 😀 (unless she doesn’t like dairy).
Apologies for the delay in replying, Greenspace, I’ve been on the road! You make great points. There’s a fine line between what resonates because it’s a shared reality (I’ve been that slob on the couch with pizza, thinking I was fat when I was just over my usual weight) and what’s stereotyping (as you rightly point out). I should probably have mentioned out that the example “Mary was fat and ugly” was one I took from a workshop participant, and I used it as a starting point for other workshop attendees to develop Mary into someone they could relate to, could imagine as a friend/sister/cousin, It wasn’t clear from the original example whether Mary herself felt “fat and ugly” or whether that was the author’s opinion (which isn’t particularly relevant because readers are interested in the characters, not who created them).
I’d love to see other writers have a go at creating Mary in a scene, to ‘show’ us how they perceive her to be (maybe in the comments below). I’ve certainly created characters who had more fat than they wanted, and I’ve lived that experience myself, while friends around me thought I was an idiot and envied my weight. Perhaps Mary isn’t overweight at all. She might just think she is, exactly because of the media focus on thinness being desirable.
And how cool would Princess Jasmine be if she was lactose intolerant?
Lots of great suggestions, thanks! I’ll edit the original post to clarify that it wasn’t my “fat and ugly” comment. Def. wouldn’t want any of my besties slapping me upside the head for being mean.
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