Everything you know about characterization is wrong.
Fiction is a learning tool where you get to have difficult experiences by proxy.
By living with a character over thousands of words, you gain all of the wisdom and none of the loss of their journey. Powerful stuff. The ultimate mind-to-mind transaction. But that doesn’t mean your characters should be people that sit alone in a room and think. Why?
Because, just as you must exercise the body to ensure the survival of the brain, every character must act—or sometimes just talk—to ensure their survival in the arc of the story.
Characterization, as it’s been traditionally taught, focuses on physical attributes; clothing choices, food/drink/entertainment/relationship preferences. These are all very important, because we must as writers be able to employ these vivid and compelling details in our writing, but they are not characterization.
Characterization are the choices your characters make under pressure that reveal their true natures.
Before you go and get it twisted, let me say this: your character doesn’t have to become Bruce Willis in any of the Die Hards to face pressure. We’ve all had the days when getting out of bed is hard enough. But there’s a choice in getting out and that choice uncovers who we are in that given moment. If silence truly is violence, we act in every little thing we do or don’t do. Your characters are the same. Maybe even more so.
Characters Act To Answer Your Questions
To write fiction is to ask questions. Unfortunately, there are no rules in writing, nor are there formulas. This isn’t math. We don’t have definite answers for our questions; hell, we don’t even have all the information we need to solve our questions. Moreover, we don’t even know the proper methods for working toward answers other than to get our ass in the seat and write.
But, while we may not have formulas, we do have form. Form suggests that in any scene a character should always want something and always take action to gain that something. And we have our characters. They’re unruly, temperamental, sometimes annoying, but they act and act within the time and space of the story. Maybe, if we get lucky, they’ll do something surprising that chips away at a path to our questions.
Hell, it might even be entertaining.
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