HOW CHARACTERS SUCCEED: ALLUSIVE DESCRIPTIONS
FOUR ELEMENTS FOR BETTER CHARACTER DESCRIPTIONS
These past months I’ve plunged down the Olivia Manning rabbit hole. In the middle of all my other reading, I’ve managed to read book four of her Fortunes of War hexalogy (God, what I wouldn’t give to have written a hexalogy, just to be able to use that word on the regular) and throughout Manning has afforded me many invaluable lessons, both as a reader and a writer, and I’m sure there are many still yet to come. She’s a taut spare writer; her terseness speaks to my own style, her ability to render complexity simply is something I long to master.
I’m one of those writers who reads while they write; I don’t suffer from the trepidation that my reading will somehow overwhelm my voice or vision. In all honesty I want my reading to influence my writing. Fiction requires so much to make it sing — it is the art of a thousand tasks — and if you’re like me, if you’re not one of those books-every-two-years writers, you’ll take any and all help.
For me, my most reliable adjunct is my reading. My reading not only inspires me, rekindles that love that brought me to the page, but also often reminds me of some vital element I’m leaving out of my own work that the writing itself does not always reveal.
So as some of you know I’ve been writing this Gilgamek novel and on the main it’s been a pretty good experience. I’ve discovered some strengths I never thought I had, and discovered some rather surprising weaknesses. Por ejemplo, I realized in this long process that my Character descriptions tend to be on the weak side. In fact I calculate that I’ve rewritten my central Characters’ intro descriptions at least a dozen times each.
That’s a lot even for me. I’ve done Character descriptions in my fiction before — this ain’t my first rodeo — and yet in this novel I just wasn’t hitting and couldn’t understand what I was getting wrong.
And then I read the following description in book four of Manning’s hexalogy, The Danger Tree.
Her hair, brown in its depths, golden where it had caught the sun, hid most of her face and her bath robe, of white towelling that enhanced the warm shade of her skin, hid her body except for the arm and the rising curve of her breast, yet the impression she gave was one of extraordinary beauty. He could scarcely find breath to say, ‘My name’s Simon Boulderstone. I’m Hugo’s brother.’
This is the first time we meet Edwina Little, one of the novel’s significant figures, and you will notice Manning’s portraitist gift — her evocative economy, her gemcutter’s precision. But this paragraph also provided me with exactly what I’d been looking for: a masterclass of how to do my Character descriptions right.
(I ended up flipping back through the first trilogy and discovered that nearly all her key Character descriptions share most of the elements woven into this Character description.)
Here’s how I broke it down (because of course I have to break everything down in order to understand it):
