HOW CHARACTERS SUCCEED: CHARACTER ACTION ECONOMY
OLIVIA MANNING'S SECRET TO BETTER CHARACTERS
One of the joys of reading as a writer, beyond the joy that is reading, is all the swell learning on offer.
I’ve been loving my way through Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War hexalogy, and throughout Manning’s taught me quite a lot about character description and why it’s better not to be so comprehensive on this front — something I’ve been messing up in this latest project.
As a consequence, Manning’s also really helped me to rethink what I’ll call Character Action Economy. As I and many other writers have emphasized repeatedly, Characters are best understood through multiple frames and approaches: what they say, think, do, their relationships, etc — but nothing helps to sell a character like their actions.
The actions your characters take, like their relationships, are precisely what makes them legible to readers — what makes readers recognize your Characters as people (or people analogs).
Manning is awesome on this front, but for very specific reasons.
First and foremost she doesn’t tolerate idle characters, not even minor ones. Manning might have a gift for portraiture but her characters are never still lives; they are always up to something, always on the make, always taking actions that reveal their Character and therefore are always coming through to the reader.
No wonder Manning doesn’t always need to describe her Character’s particulars in full — she sketches the important details, provides the Character punctum — and then lets the Character’s actions do the real lifting.
But what I’ve noticed — and this is really the point — is how scrupulously Manning stays away from defining Characters through a single habitual action.
