Write Vivid Character Descriptions

1. Introduction: Hello everyone and welcome to this course on writing vivid character descriptions in your narratives. My name is Barbara events. I am an instructor of creative writing and communications, and it is my great joy to bring this course to you. When we're writing, we often have two components with which we think about crafting a character. We have the initial stage where we are developing who are character is we're sort of thinking about the character traits that are characters or protagonists are supporting characters are antagonists are going to have. Then we have to take all of those decisions and then actually put them into our writing. And that is what this course is all about. I do have a course dedicated to crafting and thinking about what character traits your characters should have. And specifically choosing traits that will help advance the plot so that your characters and your plot are inextricably linked. I highly recommend that you take a look at that class. That course in conjunction with this course, will help you not only therefore, brainstorm and think about who your character is, but then actually go about the business of writing that character into your stories. When we think about character descriptions, usually comes to mind first and foremost, or blocks of descriptions where it's sort of like shoe at this dress and she had this color, hair, etc. Just sort of superficial descriptions of an appearance. But a character description is so much more which we want to look at. A good character description is not a chunk of riding that you can sort of pull out of the story and it stands on its own. It is woven into the story itself so that when you're describing your character, you're also telling me about the plot. You're also telling you about the setting. You're telling me about other characters. It's not just dedicated to one thing. So we want to look at that and look at how do you write in a description. Advance is not only the reader knowing more about the character, but the reader understanding much more about the story world and indeed the story itself. To that end, we're going to be looking at character description from several vantage points. First and foremost, we are going to look at how your character description absolutely depends on the point of view that you have chosen in writing your story. Perspective, point of view, authorial voice has everything to do with the way you will describe your character and indeed how the reader interprets those character descriptions. We will also be looking at the plot and how you make those character descriptions in a way that actually does advance the storyline so that you're maximizing that description. You don't want superfluous riding in your stories, you want every single word count for as much into serve as much purpose as you can. So we want to think about character descriptions that are going to advance the plot as well. We're going to look at several kinds of character descriptions, specifically direct character descriptions and indirect character descriptions. Because you want to have a variety of ways and angles in which you are actually describing your character. Think about it this way. When you go into a fun house or a house where there are a lot of mirrors all around you. And some of them are funny and then woven into every mirror that you look in, you're getting a different vantage point on yourself. All of those mirrors are reflecting you, but each one is reflecting you in a unique way. This is very important when we're writing. We want our character descriptions to be flushed out from a variety of angles. So we want to look at how do we do that. So when we look at those angles, we want to think about the character as a truly dimensional figure. Which means that we're not only looking at how they appear, what they're wearing, but we're also looking at what's going on in their head. How are they situated in the community? What's the history? What's the future? What are their goals? All of these things are part of your character descriptions will also get just nuts and bolts with it in terms of sometimes you have long character descriptions, sometimes you have short character descriptions. And indeed, throughout your narrative, you have character descriptions just in the actions that they are doing, the woods they are saying. So character description is actually something that's happening all the time when you're writing your story, it's happening throughout the novel. So how do you, how do you balance that? How do you make sure that the reader has what he needs, what she needs to deeply connect with the character. Because remember, you want your readers to really connect with your characters. That's what's going to make us care about the plot. If we don't care about the characters, we don't care about the plot. So this character descriptions are incredibly important. I have several literary examples that we will be going through when we do this. So you are going to get a lot of great inspiration. And indeed, I'm sure you have your own writers whose work you tremendously love. If you've watched any of my other courses, then you know, I am a believer in not just teaching rules. I think it's good to look at the best practices. Great writers in our past. But my goal is to teach you how to read like a writer, how to analyze works that you love so that you can break them down, understand them, and then take the things from the authors that inspire you and work those into your icing, coming up with your own style. This is a much more independent way to be a writer and that is my aim for you in this class. I hope that all sounds of interests, if it does, stick around, and let's start to talk about the purposes and the importance of character descriptions in your writing. 2. How Readers Connect with Characters: Story is all about characters. We love a good story because we care about the people in it. Most of the time, when people talk about riding, they talk about two things. They talk about character and they talk about plot. And both of these things really are completely linked in a solid story, your character and your plot are not broken apart. They are so tightly woven together that the traits of character has absolutely push the plot forward. In watching that plot play out, we learn more and more about the character himself, the character herself. And indeed, we become more invested in who that character is. Watching someone go through difficult times, watching someone go through challenges and have to respond to those challenges and act as an agent in their world is what helps us actually get to know them and connect with them. If you just described someone, gave me a description of them, I might say to myself, Well, that sounds like a very nice person or she doesn't sound very nice. But that's not the same thing as my scene. That person go through those actions and become invested in that person. Because in a way, as a reader, I'm going through the actions with them. So this is one of the key things that we have to think about when we're thinking about actually writing out our character descriptions. We can't just have descriptions that we consider separate from the narrative itself. Because what's really going to connect the reader to the character is going through the narrative with the reader. Which means that as you're describing the action that's happening, you have to think at every moment, What am I teaching my readership about this character? This might seem obvious, but we have to think about what is it that's going to make my readership connect with my character? We connect over a common humanity. We have to think about the core traits, the core experiences of being a human. Then allow me to connect with the character who's going through experiences that I probably haven't been through or I have been through and that helps me connect with them more. If I've never been a superhero who has special powers and it's flying all over the city doing things. Obviously, I can't connect with the hero on that level. So how do you make your reader connect with a character who is so different than Fen Xi is, than he is. You have to look to the core traits, things like envy, things like desire, disappointment, love, these central human experiences and emotions. You have to drill down and find those. And when you're thinking about your story, you want to say, okay, what are the key things that I want my readership to feel about the character. You don't want to just say, well, my character looks like this and he was sad, etc. You want to always be thinking about the emotional impact that you want that scene it to have an emotional connection. You want the reader to have at that moment with that character. Because we can describe a lot of things about someone, but we want to choose the traits that are going to engender in the reader certain kinds of emotions. Remember that as a writer, you are there to manipulate your reader. There's a story and there's plot, and the story is more of a description of Eden. If you've watched my other story courses, you know that I've gone into this. But a plot is something where you have orchestrated a series of events in a way that is going to build, it's going to create tension and release regularly in the reader. And so you're, you're working to actually tweak and manipulate the character's emotions through the plot that you're making. When you're doing the exact same thing with the readership connecting with your character. When do you want your readers to not like your character? When do you want your readers to be disappointed in your character? When do you want them to be afraid for your character to love your character? You have to decide in your scenes what you want to have happening. And you have to think just as when you're writing a plot, you are thinking about the overarching plot. And then you're thinking about all the little steps that are going to get you to that climax and then down to a denim wall, right? So it's when you're thinking about plot, you're thinking about the whole big thing, but then you're thinking about all the little pieces built into that. You have to think the same way when you're thinking about describing your characters. There's the overarching plot that the character is going through, but there's an overarching impression that you want your readers to think about and relate to with your character. And how are you going to get me to see all the three-dimensional fleshed out pieces of this character in a way that makes sense, which means you have to think not only about what are the traits you want to share, but what's the order in which you want to share these traits and how do you want those traits to be manifested through the plot? So there's actually a lot to think about when we're thinking about character development. And it is important as we start to go through this that we understand that this is actually very complex thing to be thinking about. And it has a lot of different angles at which we must look at it. So what I'd like to do is start at what I think is one of the base sort of foundational things that you have to be considering when you are writing your stories. And that is perspective, point of view. So let's look at that in the next video. 3. First-Person Descriptions: Point of view, authorial voice. Why do we have to begin here? This is such a critical place to store it, because once you've chosen, and by the way, we're assuming at this point that you've thought about your character traits. As I mentioned in my intro video, if you have not watched my course on writing a good character profile, I highly recommend that because that's going to help you decide who your character is before you start writing. But once you've made those decisions and you're thinking about how to manifest your character, you have to know what the perspective of your story is because this influences everything. Always remember that your authorial voice is a character, even if you're just looking to have a third person omniscient where it's not a first-person perspective, that authorial voice is a character in and of itself. There is no such thing as a story that can be told without a filter, a story that can be told that's not told through a lens. Every story you tell will be told through some kind of lens. And so you have to know, what is the lens, what is the length that I'm holding up that we're looking through. So for example, if your story is first-person perspective and your protagonist is the same person who's narrating the story. You've got a unique challenge because you do not have the luxury of just sort of being removed from that character and saying, Joe Schmo looked like this and he felt like that. And he went and he did this and he had gray trousers on et cetera. That's that's taken away from you. When you have a first-person perspective, Most first-person perspective characters are not going to say, I walked into a room with a radiant green dress that had gold trimming on it. My hair pulled up into a beautiful been. And they're not going to go into that kind of character description that we would go into perhaps if we had a third-person perspective. So immediately you've taken away some of the visual experiences that a reader could have. Now, we're seeing everything from the main character's eyes, right? So they're not probably going to be describing themselves physically as much. They're going to be describing everything that they are seeing. Which means that as you're describing the lamp in the corner or how the schoolroom looked to her when she walked in. That description of the schoolroom when she walked in is in fact part of your character description because what you're doing in describing the schoolroom is describing to me her mental state, how she feels about school, how she feels about the school room. So in first-person perspective, there is a way in which everything you're describing is telling me something about the psychology and the emotions of the character, which means basically your, your whole story is character description in its own fashion. First-person perspective has its own unique challenges. It also has the benefit of always being able to tell us what the character is thinking. If the character so chooses to share that information with us. So you have this perspective in which depending on who your character is, there, going to be honest with you. And I would say that a couple of things here about the perspective and perspectives of course, all of its own. But when you're thinking about first-person perspective, think about a Charles Dickens novel where, for example, Great Expectations. Pip is narrating the experiences heat is going through. We read Great Expectations and we trust pip. Pip as the protagonist is actively lying to us. So we have faith and BIP, we have every reason to trust him. What isn't necessarily always true is that, remember, Pip is looking at his life through his perspective. So as, as, as a reader, we will look at Pippin PIT might say, Well, I was terribly afraid of MS. Have a sham in this scene. I was frightened, etc. And that's fine. But we have to look at pips limitations because that's how Pip feels. But we then have to analyze PIP outside of his feelings. We just say, well, I understand that Pip feels like this, but that really shows me XYZ about him. The fact that Pip went to London and we're spending all this money, et cetera, says something about pip. So we have PIP describing how he feels, describing the actions he is going through. But just like any one of us. We have our own interpretations of our lives. And very often, if you were to ask a stellar or mishap, or Joe or any of the other people are surrounding Pip in his life. To describe hip, we would probably get something different than what Pip gave us. We'd start to see we'd see some similarities, but we would see lots of differences. We have to remember as a reader when we're reading a first-person perspective, that in fact, that perspective, even as honest as the character might feel, heat is being, is limited. It's through his own lens, it's its own perception of himself and often our perceptions of ourselves. It's just not what other people are. So we take that into account as a reader. When we are reading that kind of perspective. What does that mean for you as a writer? It means you have this wonderful opportunity as a writer to think not only about who is pitched to me as a writer, but who is PIP2 himself? And that will be a very essential question for you to answer so that you can write the right character descriptions for your story. In first-person perspective, you cannot just know who you as the author thinks that character is. You have to know who the character sees himself or herself as. And that means thinking about the blind spot in that character. Really unique challenge to you. You have this way that you have to say, well, I have to tell the story honestly in the sense that I have to tell what's happening. But I have to tell it through the limited and the Certainly opinionated perspective of my reader, of himself, of herself. So you want to make sure that you're thinking about that when you're writing a first-person perspective. Now, sometimes first-person perspective people lie to the reader. Don't tell the reader things or leave things out purposefully. And that is something important to think about as well. You know, you want to be very careful about lying to your readership or having your readership feel like they cannot trust the author to a degree. It's okay to have a sense of, I'm not so sure about this character. I think they might not be telling me something or I noticed that my character didn't mention that whole conversation that I would think would have been important. And I wonder why it's okay to have things like that because that can help actually enrich our experience of the story as a reader and make us able to be more objective about the character. But you have to be very careful about doing that. What's important to remember is that everything that character does not say is as important as what the character does say. And as a reader will be looking at those things, we will, an observant reader will notice. If a character doesn't say something that we think would be important. To notice if you've built me up to a scene in which a young man is going to meet the girl of his dreams that this ball, and he knows she's going to be there. We expect that when you get there, he's probably going to talk about how beautiful she is. He's probably going to notice exactly who she's talking with. He's going to notice all of these things. If he is really descriptive for a time, and then they start to have a chat and then suddenly he withdraws and he doesn't tell me as much. I'm going to notice that I'm going to say, this character is not telling me something. This character is leaving something out. What does that say about how this character feels in doing that and making those choices? As an author, you're, you're putting the reader deeply in that perspective of feeling like that character is actually talking with us. Because the characters leaving things out just like you would if you were telling a story to a friend and choosing not to say certain things, you really want to make sure that you're thinking creatively about how you use that first-person perspective when you're thinking about actually describing your characters. 4. Third Person Descriptions: Limited & Omniscient: Another common, very common perspective in writing is going to be third person limited. And a third person limited is where you have that sort of authorial perspective that says, Sandra watch to the beach, right? So we're not getting it from Sandra. Sandra's not saying, I walk to the beach. The author is saying Sandra Bullock to beat. But what makes it limited is that we are actually still in Sandra's headspace. We're not in the headspace of the author because we are strictly seeing everything through the lens of sandra. Now sometimes you'll have stories that are more or less third-person omniscient, which we will get to, but that go in and out of a third person limited. But many, many stories are really, for the most part, third person limited perspective. When you're running third person limited, it's sort of an understood rule that what we're seeing is the opinion of the character. Who's your protagonist. This can be true of things like very often the Harry Potter novels and things like that. We were following Harry. We're following Harry through the story. We don't have a bunch of scenes where we go off and Harry isn't. There were really always where Harry is seeing what heresy and being told how hairy feels not makes it a third person limited perspective. We're not jumping around being told how her mind, he feels, how his friend Ron fields or anything else. It's always hairy. But we are in the position of looking at him. In some ways. This has similarities to the first-person perspective in that you always have to think about. I have to look at my entire world and everybody in it through the lens of Harry's mind, that stays the same. But what's different is that you are also allowed that extra piece of being able to describe how hairy looks and what he's doing and what he's wearing and things like that. Now in a way, you can really say, well then that's actually not just Harris perspective. It's this author's perspective looking at Harry. But really it's the thoughts and the character we're connecting with is Harry is his thoughts. And so in that kind of Writings situation, you just really have to make sure that, you know, always that this is how hairy fields, this is what Harry's going through. So as a writer, you don't get to sit there and just say, well, this is what I think of Hogwarts. There's not a witch you think of backwards. What does Harry think of Hogwarts? How does, how do you feel about Hogwarts? How does, how do you feel about being an orphan? You're always thinking of everything in terms of the character. This really means you have got to know your character's emotions and opinions about things. Everything you describe is going to tell me something about Harry. If Harry goes to die again, Allie, to buy his school supplies. And he says in the description we have of dialog on Ali is that it was just dark and dirty and it just was, there's this sense of mood of despair and depression that we're going to say. Harry's down on diagonally, how he is feeling depressed. Harry might on a different day walk down diagonally and think it was bustling and wizards everywhere and there were all these kinds of exciting new sites. And then you say, Harry's excited how he's got energy. So when we watched in the first harry Potter book and how you first goes to diagonally to buy school supplies. And we are given these descriptions of the bustle and the people and the excitement. Jk Rowling as an author doesn't have to tell me how he was excited. We know it because of the way dialogue on Alley was described. So it's a wonderfully, wonderful way to indirectly tell me things about Harry Potter. So that's another perspective that you can look at. A third perspective that is often used in writing would be your third person omniscient. And what this means is that the author can jump around to anybody's head who wants to be incident in a given scene. We might be told how hairy felt and we'll tell it how Ron felt. We're told how his friend of mine he felt were popping in and out of everybody's brains. What that means, however, is that when I'm describing Hermione, if I'm saying Hermione looked beautiful in a dress, I, as the author, have to tell you who thought Hermione looked beautiful? If it was third person limited, and I described her mind is looking beautiful in a dress. I would know that it was Harry saying it if he's the protagonist. But once you go to a third person omniscient, now you have to say how he thought Hermione was beautiful in a dress because we understand as the reader, that the author is popping in and out of so many people's heads that we have to be told who is thinking? What? If we're not told who is thinking what, then the author himself or herself is the character telling it. And that's the key thing with something like a third-person omniscient. In third person omniscient, your author is going to be more of a character than in any other kind of plot. Where when it's separate, separate from any of the actual characters acting in the story. So you'll have an author who can have quite an opinion and be very opinionated about the personality traits or whatnot of the variety of characters. And in that way, the author himself or herself is an actual character. But what this means then as a reader is that we know everything is going through the lens of that author. So always remember, you are hold, you're telling me a story, but you have to tell me that story through a lens. And the lens that you choose is going to tell me a lot about the character. I cannot know who your character is unless I know the lens that I'm looking through. If I'm looking through the first-person perspective lens, then I'm going to assess everything in that story as that's a character, that's the character's perspective. If it's a third person limited, I'm going to assess things in that story as that person's perspective with a touch of the authorial voice put in. If it's a third-person omniscient, I'm going to assess things through the lens of the author himself or herself. Which means I will, I will navigate my opinions about those characters in a different way. So as you can see, there are just so many things we have to think about when we think about point of view. But it's one of those decisions that you really have to decide upfront before you start writing so that you are actively making the proper choices in how you choose to then go about just literally putting pen to paper words, writing your characters. In the next video, I wanted to talk briefly about plot and how plot and character descriptions are connected. 5. Use Descriptions to Drive Plot: It's so important as we're writing our character descriptions that we do not think of them as something that you could easily pull out or pop into the story. You really want everything that you write to be pushing the plot forward and also deepening my connection with the characters. So don't think about your character descriptions is just Okay. I was doing the plot thing. But now let's throw in some character description and then we'll get back to the plot. You want to weave the character descriptions into the plot so that there are both growing together. What this means is that you want to make sure that you are choosing character traits that highlight and push the plot forward. You should have designed your character to have traits that are actually pushed the plot forward. Again, I have a class on this, so I'm not going to get into it here. What's important is that just as when you're crafting your plot, right? And you're thinking about your scenes, you have to think about, well, seen, this scene needs to come before that scene because I'm trying to build to a certain point. Each scene builds on the one that came before it and act as a stepping stone for the one coming after it. So that they're like little training. You can't just switch the car is around, they all follow each other. Well, you want to think similarly about your character traits and how you choose to reveal your characters to your readers. How do you want your reader to feel about the character in the beginning of the story. Sometimes you want to introduce your character in a way that has some unlikeable traits and then we warm to the characters. We get to know him or her. Sometimes you want us to love the character right away. Most of the time in writing, it's pretty important that you give me some redeemable traits for your protagonist. Even if your protagonist is tremendously flawed, you want to give me some redeemable traits to latch on, to make sure that I do in fact, like your protagonist and I care about him. If I don't have some things I can connect with in a positive way, then it's going to be difficult for me to care about the challenges your protagonist is going to go through throughout the rest of the story. And what this means is that they're really awesome. That there really is a sense in which you have to think about the order in which you are revealing certain things to, to us about your character. You have to think about what are the traits that I want my readership to know about my character? I want them to know he's hard working. I want them to know he's a good father. I want them to know that he tends to be a little bit proud, that he can tend to be hard on people. Okay, great. You want me to know these things? How are you going to reveal those to me? And in what order are you going to do that? So that's where again, you've got to plot. You're trying to put plot points and an order, but then you have to do the same thing with emotions. You don't want to give me three scenes in a row that say James was a good father. James was a good father. James was a good father. I'm going to get bored. Even if those three scenes have different action points happening in them. If my takeaway from each about genes is exactly the same thing that I'm going to get bored. So not only does the plot itself have to be varied from scene to scene, and tell me new things and make me feel like I'm going somewhere. So to the things that I learned about a character have to change from scene to scene. You have to think about that. You also have to think about where is my character at the start of the story? And where's my character at the end of the story? And how do I get my character from point a to point B? How do I get there? Because the main character has to change. If the main character doesn't change, we're not terribly invested in them in the same way. Now, as I have said, and I always say in my courses, there are always exceptions to this. Everything I'm saying, you could find a great story that has, that doesn't follow this Alice in Wonderland, great example, The Odyssey, great example. Odysseus does not really change. Alice does not really change. Both of these stories are tremendously wonderful. So it can be done. But those stories are different because they're episodic in nature. They are not your traditional buildings story that builds to a climax and therefore that affects the character. Again, character and plot totally linked. But in a traditional narrative like most people want to write, in which you are building to a climax. You then have to build to that character change. So you have to think about balancing for me. Scenes in which the character is demonstrating his or her strengths and seeds in which the character is demonstrating his or her weaknesses. And often a scene we'll do both. It doesn't necessarily do one. But when you're assessing your scenes and you're thinking about building that out, you really want to think about, am I providing a three-dimensional view of my character? Am I demonstrating a lot of different aspects over the course of the narrative? Is it important for my readership to understand that my character is a really good father. Before my readership understands that my character has some real issues with anger management, which is more important for me to know first. And that's, that's for you to decide. But you have to think about that because that's going to change my experience at your character by experience first his anger management issues. And then I see he's a good father. That's going to change how I relate to him as opposed to if you put it the other way around. Again, a really solid story. Everything in it, you can't just pull it out, put it somewhere else and be like, well, it doesn't matter where I put it as long as it's in here. No really tight plot means that that scene, that moment was designed for that point in the plot. And you can't just pick it up and move it. Nor can you just decide to mid writing change a trait about a character and then have that somehow not affect the plot. That's not going to happen in a really tight story. So you just really want to think about not only how do I build my plot points and then that kind of tension release. But what are the emotional connections that mental connections my reader is making with the character throughout the plot. So that by the time I get to that climax, I deeply care about that character and I feel like I really know him or her. Alright, now that we have talked about these two theoretical components of perspective and plot, let's talk about some of these specific ways that we then get into the actual writing of our characters. 6. Direct & Indirect Descriptions: There are two primary kinds of characterization that you will use in your stories. And these depends on the perspective that you've chosen. But the first is direct characterization. Direct characterization is when the author just straight up tells me about the character. She was proud. She was the most likable girl at school. She was beautiful. Those are direct characterizations. You're not showing me anything. You're not showing me her doing anything. You're just telling me that this is how it is. Indirect characterization is where your character reveals who she is through the things that she does. We see here be very kind to someone. So we say, Well, she's kind or we see him be short and abrasive with someone and we say, well, he's a bit difficult to work with. Indirect characterization means that the reader makes determinations about your character based on the words your character says. The thing is, your character does the way your character sees the world. Those are your indirect characterizations. A good story, for the most part is going to have far more in the way of indirect characterization. Then you do direct characterizations. And you want to have a balance, but really try to make sure that the majority of what you write is in fact an indirect characterization, because it's those characterizations that are really linked to the plot and that are going to push the plot forward and allow the story to move without feeling like I was reading the plot. And then suddenly we had to stop and get a chunk of character description. And now we're like, okay, but now we can move again. You want to avoid those stops in your stories? Let's look at some examples of this. I want to show you a few description of the character Daisy and F Scott Fitzgerald, Great, Gatsby. Now this story is narrated by her cousin. So just briefly what you need to know about the plot is that Daisy and Gatsby sort of have a love relationship. But her cousin, as we will see through these descriptions, has his own decisive opinions about Daisy. Now, in The Great Gatsby, the protagonist, narrator, he's really telling the story of Daisy and Gatsby. He's, he's, he's telling his own story. But it's really about Daisy and Gatsby. That's what he's focusing on. But for our purposes, here is the main character because we see everything through his lens and we're following him around. He is in fact the protagonist for us. So what I want you to notice in these, just based on everything that we've talked about right now, is how he uses his descriptions of Daisy and what these descriptions tell us not only about Daisy, but more importantly about him. The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise. She leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression. Then she laughed and absurd, charming little laughed. And I laughed too and came forward into the room. Let's look at that here. He's described what she's doing. He hasn't said that she is absurd. He hasn't said anything is direct. There's nothing really direct in this description. There's all indirect that's happening. So let's look at this. There is, what we're really looking at here are daisies actions and we're going to make judgments based on those. He says she leaned forward with a conscientious expression. Now, he can't say whether she's actually conscientious or not because we're not in Daisy's head. So all we know is that our expression looked conscientious to him. And she laughed and absurd, charming little laugh. Let's think about that. So here she is. She, She's looking concerned, but then she makes this Laugh, which he calls absurd and yet charming. So there's an attraction there. But he doesn't say charming laugh. He says, absurd. As a reader where to sit and say, well, well what, what makes them laugh absurd? Is it absurd because it's not appropriate to laugh at that time? Is it absurd? Because it just sounds silly me laugh itself. We don't know, but this is the sort of thing that we would then think about as a reader. This is the sorts of things that make us engage with the story. Remember that if you everything to your readers in a way that doesn't ask us to sit and interpret anything for ourselves. That doesn't allow us to invest ourselves as much. And your story, what makes us really start to invest is when you have things that aren't necessarily always quite so clear that we actually have to contemplate and decide what does the author mean by that? Let's look at another description. I looked back and my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Have faced with sad and lovely, with bright things in Bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth. But there was an excitement in her voice that men who cared for her fan difficult to forget. A singing compulsion, a whispered Listen, a promise that she had done gay exciting things just a while since that they were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour. Now this description is more of a direct one. We don't actually see Daisy engaged in anything. This is strictly her cousin describing her to us. But what do we really learned? We learned something about Daisy, but we also learn a whole lot about him. We see how deeply he or she is radiant to him, she is attractive to him. She is mesmerizing to him. We learn so much about him, but, but notice the creativity with how he describes her. He doesn't just say she had a lovely voice. He could have said, Oh, she's got a lovely voice, but he doesn't. He describes her voice like music. The voice I think you're follows up and down as if the speech has an arrangement of notes. And when you think about that and you think about following his speech up and down, you would think about somebody's voice louder and softer and all of the variances in our voice. If we're literally following her speech up and down, then we're not just invested in what she's saying. Where's totally taken in by her voice itself and how it sounds. Like we would be music that doesn't have words. There's a way in which he's telling us the level of which one gets drawn in to Daisy he'd just describing her face is sad and lovely with bright things in it. There's such a juxtaposition there. He's saying, yes, she has a beautiful face, but she has a sad face. But it's a face that says I've done gay happy things and I'm going to do more gay happy things. Well, how does a face that say I've done all these fun things that I'm going to go do all these other fun things. And yet it's sad face. And it's a sad face with bright things in it, like her eyes and her mouth. Those are bright, but there's a sadness. So he's thinking vary. The author and their descriptions are so creative. Thought out in terms of their variances and how he chooses to convey those things. Even in this paragraph that's direct description of Daisy, direct characterizations. It's creatively told, and it's told through imagery. This is so important to not let your direct descriptions, the boring. What makes a direct description truly interesting? Something that we enjoy reading the words of is that it has this kind of creativity and has this sort of descriptive imagery to it. I've done a course on imagery riding on simile and metaphor. If you've not watched it, I highly recommend that you do. Because that course gets into how to do language like this. And how do you come up with the analogies and they similes and metaphors for things you want to tell your readers, like how Daisy looks, how her voice sounds. But note here that even this direct description is so creatively told. Let's look at one more description of Daisy. Tom's getting very profound as a daisy with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. He reads deep books with long words in them. Now, here, this is more of an indirect character description. Because what we're seeing is Daisy acting and we're making decisions about her. And what we get from this. There is a flight genus two Daisy. She is, nobody reads big books, long descriptions in them. And her expression we're told is sort of a unthoughtful sadness. So in this way, this is a short one, but we're getting this sense of Daisy through seeing her act and through her words. All right, Now that we've looked at briefly just the idea of being able to describe your character both directly and indirectly. Let's take a moment and look about the variances of the ways in which we can describe our character, both in terms of what they're thinking inside their heads, as well as those things external to them. 7. Direct & Indirect Descriptions: When we think about riding our character descriptions, there are two aspects of our character that we can talk about. We can talk about their internal life and internal thoughts and we can talk about things external to them. And you want to have a variety of both of these things in your writing. So let's take a moment and look at the variety of things that you can say about your character, that you have very fleshed-out character descriptions. It is so important that when you're describing your character, you're connecting your reader with his or her internal life. What's going on in his head or her head? Again, this is what's really going to allow us to connect with your character. Yes, we have to look at all the externals, but we want to know what he's thinking or what she's thinking. We don't constantly want to be wondering. We want to have a sense of who this person is and that's how we feel like we know them. Think about real life, you know, some things about the people you work with every day. Will you see every day at your job? But if they don't sit down and ever tell you how you fit they feel. You are they going to know them to a certain degree as personally, few people in your life you really have conversations with him, really tell you what they're thinking and what they're feeling, et cetera. Those people, you feel like you really know, well, the same thing is going to be true of characters you read about. And so you want to make sure that you have that kind of balance in your character descriptions throughout your stories. What that means is that when you have an action happening or a plot point happening, you just want to say to yourself, well, is it important for my readers to know how my character really feels about this? For example, say your character gets kicked out of private school. You might be thinking to yourself, Well, I don't really have to tell my readers that this is totally devastating to my protagonist because it's just kicked out of private school. You should know that, but no, maybe your protagonist is relieved. Maybe your protagonist is dreading having to tell his parents. Maybe your protagonist is devastated because they wanted to go on to an Ivy League uni and I think she never will. There are all kinds of things your protagonist might think about getting kicked out of private school. What are the important ones that we need to know that will help us further the plot against always connected to the plot. But this is where it becomes important for you to tell me something about the external life of your characters. Because you need to direct me, you need to guide me. You need to say yes, this plot point happened, but look over here, this emotion of the protagonist or look over here, this one. You really want to think about that when you're doing and thinking about your internal characteristics, make sure that you know that the reader is on the same page that you're on and if the character is on. So what are some of these internal characteristics that you might be revealing? Internal characteristics are going to be emotions. They're going to be thought. Goals, dreams that you are. Characters have. What do they want out of life? How did they feel about things? What are their emotional and mental responses to the things in their lives? To their past? How is their past haunting them? How was their past helping them? What are their goals for the future? All of this, everything up in here is your internal characteristics of your readers. What is their mood at the given moment, right? Your, your character might, overall, I'm really happy, positive person. In this scene, your character is blue and sad and at the moment their emotions or down. So there are not only the overarching characteristics of your character in general, but then there are the immediate characteristics of your character in this situation. This is what becomes so important about developing your character over the whole novel, over the whole story, is that you might have that character who is on the whole, very upbeat, but in this scene happens to be uncharacteristically sad. Well, how do, how are you going to make it so that as a reader, I know that this character is uncharacteristically sad right now. As opposed to just, this is a sad character. You have to set me up for that. You have to write enough of a variety of traits in enough of a variety of situations, and then reinforce the important traits in various different ways. So then I understand that this character is on the whole, very upbeat and that what we're seeing right now is an immediate emotion. That's not really her character persona as a whole, but that is something very focused on this moment. And that might not really jive with the rest of who she is, which makes me go What's going on here? Think about that. Think about not only who is my character in a broad sense, but what is the immediacy of my character's internal state in this scene? And then how is this going? How are the issues and the things that might character needs to grow and change with over the course of the story. How do I start to tweak that throughout the story? So if your character is someone who has anger management issues and this is a big piece of your narrative, let's say in the beginning they're really bad and at the end there's so much better. Okay, but how internally am I seeing these changes sort of tweaked throughout the story? How internally am I seeing and change it will do to have them just suddenly go. Anger issues throughout and then okay. But now he's great. No. We want to see him changing in different ways, struggling in different ways throughout. So you want to build that internal in, in a slow way that grows to that climax. And that we see the negotiations of those emotions inside of him or her outer characteristics are going to be things, obviously appearance. So just how they look, how they sound, what is their speech like? What are the words that they use? What are the behaviors that we would see? What are their names? Names are certainly a place where you can creative. Two authors who come to mind as being authors who really do think creatively about names would be JK Rowling with names like Severus, Snape, which sounds slippery and sneaky and seems to fit his characteristics. And certainly someone like Charles Dickens who was very creative with names. Names like your riot heap, which just sounds like this strange, odd person who is in fact, you're right, eats personality. So think about the names of your characters. Also. Think about not just names, appearance, how they speak and their actions in general, and how they move or all of that. But think about their situation in the community because that would be an external thing as well. Is she popular at school? Is he wealthy and respected in his community, or is she just really gracious and everybody loves her? What what is their stance in the world around them? Always remember. You can only tell me so much about the character by focusing on that character. That character is in a specific situation. He or she isn't a specific historical moment, even if it's a fantasy novel. It's a specific moment in time in a specific community with specific people around him or her in which he or she is acting. So you have to flesh all of that out to tell me something about the character. Otherwise, the characters just kinda floating in this nebulous place and I don't, I'm not able to know much about him. What's going to really tell me about the character is seeing how that character compares with people, the place, and the situations around him or her. So you've got to make sure that you're setting and all of that is really solid and that you are making sure to connect your character with it so that I understand a lot more about him or her. In this next video, I'd like us to just go over a variety of tips and pieces of advice about character development and about actually writing your character into your stories. Things that you should be thinking about for your writing. 8. Best Practices: When the rubber hits the road and you're doing your writing, always remember that as we looked at before, you might have some long descriptions of your character and you'll have short descriptions of your character. You might very well have moments in which you just sit down and we're meeting your character or something, or it's an important scene and you want to just take some time to describe how she looks or how she looks or how she's feeling in which you might have a description that goes on for awhile. I have a description in your readings for an excerpt from Washington Square. And what you will see in that description is that it really focuses on Catherine slope. We look at this in a bit, but it focuses on her and we spent quite a bit of time on her. Now through that description plot moves forward and we learned a lot of backstory, but it is also just a very significant chunk that's describing her. But you'll also have moments like we saw with Daisy, where it's just a brief lying, it's just describing an action and maybe a brief thing about how she looks or sounds, and that's it. So think about that when you're writing that, you're going to have some long description. You're going to have short descriptions that you want, that variety of both throughout your stories. So that again, it's all about variety, variety of seed, variety of characteristic variety of how things are described. You want to keep all kinds of things moving because that keeps the reader interested. This also means that in the point of keeping the reader interested, you want to think about sensory variation. Don't just describe physical things. Don't just describe auditory things. Think about how something might taste, smell, feel. All of these things can be part of your character descriptions. Now, you might think to yourself, Well, my character isn't going up and touching Daisy, So we can't describe how she feels physically soft or hard, but you can because you could say that her voice was soft. And again, this goes back to the whole idea of, I've just rich descriptions and sensory imagery. But you could describe her voice as being soft. You could describe her skin as seeming soft. You could describe her voice as sweet or tort or bitter. You could describe it in terms of taste. So it doesn't have to be a literal thing where, well, I can only use visual to describe what I'm seeing. No, you can describe what you're seeing in terms of taste. And that's what's going to help give you these really creative character descriptions that make the reader actually have to think about the character because you're not just saying she was bitter. You were saying she was like a cup of cold coffee that's been sitting out for two days. Well, cold coffee sitting after two days isn't just bitter, it's stale. So I mean, you know, all those kinds of things that you want, that variety and you want that beautiful imagery in your character descriptions. I would also say that when you're researching your character descriptions, take time to really research their experiences, who they are, their traits, their emotions is particularly true of historical writing. But what's going to make a character come alive? Is it really true to them? So if someone's gone through a terrible situation, like the death of a husband, take time to research that. Take time to find out, go in the internet's amazing. Get online, read articles, do your homework, talk with people, find out what it was like for them the first few months of being without their spouse. If you've not lost your spouse. And you're going to write about someone who has, don't just trust your imagination to come up with something really real. Because the bits that are going to make it just truly come to life are probably going to be things you had never thought about. But going and doing some homework and finding people who've gone through it and hearing their stories will help inspire you and give you the meaty things that really count. You have to take time to really investigate and invest yourself in these experiences that your character has so that you can write them in the most genuine way possible. One final thought, something that I see often happening and that you want to be very careful about. Avoid over saintly protagonists. You want your protagonist to have floors. We cannot connect with the protagonist who does not have his or her own issues because we have our issues as well. And so it's great to have a likable character and you want us to like your protagonist. Do you want us to care about them? But we have to see that that character needs room to grow. We have to see that that character has issues of her own, of his own, because that's what's going to actually help us really connect with them. It's very hard to connect with someone who doesn't seem to have any floors. We want to connect, we go, I relate to that. When we see somebody's flaws, it's much harder for us to relate to someone who's always succeeding and doing everything perfectly, because none of us do. And so we might say, Well, they seem really great. But we're not going to connect with them in the way that we would if they did have some floors. So you want to make sure that you're thinking about that as well. 9. Introducing a Character Example: Well, I'd like to do now is just take a look at a couple of examples that sort of go over everything that we've been talking about. So we're going to just look at a couple of stretches of character description and see how all of these things that we've talked about come together in these pieces in your class documents. I have these for you. We're not going to I'm not going to put all of the texts up on the video screen for you, but I would recommend that you go and you read these so that you can then appreciate most fully these descriptions that we will go through. I'd like to start with what is without a doubt, when I've just truly fantastic character description. This is by Jane Austen and this is actually the opening paragraph of the story. We are being opened up with a character description of Emma would house, who is the protagonist of this story. So let's look at this. Emma would house handsome, clever, and Rich with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence and had lived nearly 21 years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. She was the youngest of two daughters are most infectious, indulgent father and had in consequences of her sister's marriage been Mr. stuff, his house from a very early period. A mother had died too long ago for her to have more than an indistinct remembrance of her caresses and her place have been supplied by an excellent woman as a governess who had fallen short of a mother infection. So let's just pause right there. Alright. What we've set up this total description and we're taking the author for her word at this point. This is an author who is just kind of omniscient. She's out of Emma's head. She's got opinions. M as M is pretty, she's smart, she's rich. She lives in a happy home. She's had a very blessed existence. She's 21 years old. She's never really been distressed. She has one older sister, a totally indulgent father, and she's been mistress of the house since the system moved out. So what we have here is this just, we haven't even seen them act, but we're just getting this sense of Emma as just a very privileged, pretty girl who hasn't ever been terribly stressed out. She has a governess. 16 years. Had Miss Taylor been in Mr. Ward houses family less as a governess than a friend, very fond of both daughters, but particularly of Emma. Between them. It was more of the intimacy of sisters. Even before Ms. Taylor had ceased to hold the nominal office of governance, the myelin severe temper had hardly allowed her to impose any restraint. And the shadow of authority being now long passed away. They had been living together as friend and friend, three mutually attached. And Emma doing just what she liked highly a steaming Miss Taylor's judgment, but directed chiefly by her own. Let's pause again. So we've opened it up. We've talked about Emma and then we say Emma had this governance that we placed her mother, then we switch. And now we're going to talk about the governors, because this is so important. This, this, this, this description is going to set us off into the story and the governance is important to now we've switched over, we talk about Miss Taylor and we get this backstory on this. Taylor, she'd been with the family. She was fond of both daughters, but mostly of Emma. She had long since stopped being even thought of as a governess, was now more of a friend, was good disposition and whatnot. And offering advice to Emma. Emma, back to Emma here. Likes to have the advice, likes to have a nice friend that sort of goes out and does precisely what she wants. So what we get from this is that Emma is she likes to have her own way. And we're not told that. But we are told that just simply by the fact that she kinda goes off and does her own thing. Let's turn to the third paragraph of this description. The real evils indeed of MS. Situation with a power of having rather too much of her own way and a disposition to think a little too well of herself. These are the disadvantages which threatened to alloy. Two are many enjoyments. Danger, however, was it present so on perceived that they did not by any means rank as misfortune with her. Sorrow came a gentle sorrow, but not at all in the shape of any disagreeable consciousness. Miss Taylor married. Alright, so finally we get to where this reader is very direct to what's inside. The first store to this, there was a lot of externals, but now we're totally internal entries basically saying, Look, here's the bad part of Emma. Emma gets her own way too much and she thinks very well of herself. But life is so wonderful right now. She doesn't even really conscious that these are her down, downsides. So here's Ana, pretty wealthy, has friends. Everything's going great, but what does she, she likes having her own way. She's a bit proud. And what the author is doing here in giving us this wonderful description of Emma is setting us up for the whole story. We know going into this that we're going to see Emma pretty Emma have to deal with the fact that she likes her own way and she's proud. Basically, we know that what's going to happen. She's not going to always get her own way and she's going to have to have a comeuppance with her pride. We're going to see that this young woman is going to trip up in these ways. The authors set us up for this, and then we get right into the plot. And this last sentence is, is plot directed sorrow came a gentle sorrow that but Ms. Taylor married. And Miss Taylor Mary is the thing that sets us off into the story. Everything else that follows in this story happens because Ms. Taylor got married. This is such a wonderful description because the author has totally her own personality here. She has clear, decisive judgments about Emma and she seems very content to tell us the audience what they are. If m is pretty, she's there, she's this. But even when you read these descriptions had some clever rich, it's not the kind of description that just says, I'm always so kind and so beautiful. And so there's a, there's a sort of sarcastic notice, there's a bite to this author. So you really see here that the author, herself or himself is its own character, is her own character. So we really get a sense not only of Emma, this is totally set us up for Emma. Emma is backstory with MS. Personality and we see where the train is going. We know what, in a sense, what m is going to face. It's a very rich character description in this way. Just a great model, not only for the store to the story, but what would be a longer character description that actually tells us a tremendous amount of backstory and sets us off onto the plot. 10. Character Descriptions Examples: Let's look now into description of Ebenezer Scrooge that Charles Dickens gifts and his story, a Christmas Carol. He was a tight fist, had handed the grindstone Scrooge, squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covered his old sinner. Hard and sharp flint from which no stealer ever struck out generous fire, secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled, his cheeks, stiffened his gait, made his eyes read his thin lips blue, and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, on his eyebrows, and his wife Marie chin. He carried his own low temperature about always about with him. He iced his office in his dog days and he didn't follow it one degree at Christmas. So what you have here is this. This is also an author in which there is a decisive opinion about screwed. And we're not seeing this from Scrooge's perspective. We're seeing it from the authors. This is tremendously emotional. I mean, there's just so much emotion in this author about this and we're not mincing words. There is no, whereas with Emma, it was sort of this polite way of saying that she had these character traits. There was a, there was a politeness to with this. Well, let's do this in the proper way. That's not here. This is he's squeezing, is reaching his grasping scratching, cutting. Then notice how we get the character descriptions and how the internal effects, the external with the cold inside of the heartless is inside of him, froze his features. We get this pointed nose and the shrivel cheeks. And he has this stiff gait and is red eyes, is thin blue lips. And all of that seems totally connected with his personality. So that when the author describes those features were also know that we're getting a description of what's inside of his heart. So you have this kind of marriage of both internal and external here That's just really rich and just deeply, deeply emotional and pushing the story forward. I mean, we really get the sense this is a bad person and he sums this up so quickly. And it's very expeditious that lets us just get right into the story. But this would be an example that is just deeply, Here's Scrooge and here's how it is. We don't really get a lot of plot here as we did get with the AMA example. This really is all focused right in on Scrooge, but it sets us up to go forward totally understanding who He is. A brief example here from To Kill a Mockingbird. And this is just a sentence or two. But it tells us so much. Now this is coming from Scouts perspective and To Kill a Mockingbird, scout is the narrator. She's a young girl or we would call her, I would say the main protagonist. And this is just in the first descriptions in which she's describing Macomb County in which she lives. Notice here she says men's stiff colors wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies based before noon, after their three o'clock naps. And by nightfall were like soft T cakes with frostings, sweat, and sweet attack them. So here's, she's just describing the people who are living in her town, the men and the women living in her town. But what she's really describing here is the heat. She's describing the town itself and she's doing it through character descriptions by saying that men's stiff, starched colors because of the heat and the humidity, we're totally wilted by noon and that women were basically going through the day. They would take a bath, they put on more powder. They would take a bath. They put on more powder, but they'd sweat so much and it would be so humid that the powder basically turns to icing on their skin and they're like little t cakes. What makes this so wonderful is not only the imagery itself, but she tells us the daily habits of these characters and what they do. She tells us how they look. Indeed, we can think about how they smell, if you would imagine someone who's put a lot of powder on themselves, how they might smell. But it also tells us something about what these people do in their day-to-day lives. And again, scouts perspective because she describes them. Soft T cakes. Well, these are the sorts of women who would have had soft T cakes. So simply scout using that description of t cakes tells us something about her understanding and her experiences as a child. She isn't going to connect talcum powder on a woman melting as the same way that a soldier might who'd been through a war, he might make a totally different association. But because she's a young girl and they have t kicks often, that's the analogy that she makes. And therefore, we're learning something about these women and these men. We learn something about the setting itself in the heat, but we also understand something about scout and her perspective. Always be thinking about that perspective. If your child is the perspective and tell things from a child's perspective, don't give me analogies. Don't give me descriptions that are too mature for your narrative. You always want to respect. The history and the characteristics of the narrator himself or herself. The final example I have for you, I am not going to read it all because it's long. But it is a wonderful description of Catherine slope or from Henry James Washington Square. And I highly recommend that you read it. What you'll get from this description is a tremendous amount of backstory. You will find in it that you'll walk away knowing a lot about Catherine, a lot about her father, Something about her aunt, a lot about her history, where she came from, how she grew up, how other people perceive her. It's a long description, but it really is all actually character description for Karen slope or it's just the Henry James works so much narrative in and work so much description of other characters that you walk away with just an absolute wealth of information about her. Also, when you read that description, note the authors own perspective about Catherine. This is a, this is an omniscient author. And so we jump around into different people's heads. We get different people's perspectives of Catherine, but the author also has one, and the author really can describe her sometimes and not the most flattering of terms truly. Sometimes. It's a judgmental way. For example, when he talks about her mind, he says, Catherine was decidedly not clever. She was not quick with her book, nor indeed with anything else. She was not a normally deficient, and she mustered learning enough to acquit herself respectively in conversation with her contemporaries, among whom it must be avowed, however, that she occupied a secondary place. It is well-known that in New York, it is possible for young girl to occupy a primary one. So it just, that description is really very demeaning. I mean, he just flat out says she was not clever, she was not quick. But he goes, but she wasn't totally stupid. She wasn't abnormally deficient. And even his language like she mustered learning enough. He didn't say she learned enough to have she knew enough to have decent conversation. She mustered up enough. We get this sense of Catherine having to really, really try just to learn like she mustered enough. She had to really try just here she is. She's not even terribly smart and the smarts that she's got it she really had to work for is what he's saying. And even then he says, Even for all of that, she's just like everybody regards her as sort of secondary. So just in those few sentences, we get the author's opinion of Katherine. We get information about Catherine and indeed her own thoughts. This idea of having to muster up the energy, but we also get the community's perspective upper just in those few sentences. This is how tightly Henry James packs in information. The description itself goes on and on and on. But when you read it, there is every sentence packs so much description in it, which is why I've included it here. And again, I really do recommend that you take a look at the whole thing. Having said all of that, let's take a moment and talk about your class project and final thoughts about the course. 11. Class Project: The class project for you for this course is to write a series of character descriptions for one character. I recommend that you try writing your character from a variety of different angles based on the things that you have read about and heard about. In this class, the goal is to just to try and experiment with writing in different ways. You have a little worksheet for you to fill out for this. And you will note that the worksheet asks you to consider what is my perspective? What are my goals for this scene? What are my goals for this description? What are the internal and external things that I want to describe? Then to then go about actually writing that description so that the worksheet actually sets you up to answer certain questions and then set you off on the path of writing that actual description. I hope this class was helpful for you. If it was, please do look at my other courses. I have a variety of classes that all would help bolster your character description writing. So I encourage you to take a look at those. I'm also on YouTube. I'm on hand. I have a website, Barbara dance.com. I hope you will check those things out as well. I would ask that if you enjoyed this course, please, please leave a review. It helps me continue to make courses for you. It helps me to come up with the new things that I wanted to teach. And it helps your fellow students make good decisions about the courses they want to watch. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you're having a wonderful day. And as always, I wish you the very best of luck with your writing. Thank you. Buh-bye.