Into Their Mind's Eye

Into Their Mind’s Eye

Since we’ve taken a look at the “physical” aspects of characterization, we should have a somewhat better feel for what we can do to present our characters to our audience as they would outwardly appear. This month’s article will focus on a couple of the “inward” areas of characterization. I imagine this will be mostly review for everyone, but it’s still good to think about these areas.

While it is very important that the reader be able to grasp what a character looks like or how a character behaves, to keep a reader involved they must connect with your characters on a more intimate level. It’s not enough to see the character, your reader wants to understand them as well. You need to let the reader get into your character’s “minds eye”.

As your story progresses and when faced with whatever situations confront them what are your characters feeling? Through introspection, action, or through the interpretation of another character, let the readers know what is going on in your characters head. Create the necessary emotional bond between your characters and the readers, and you will maintain that all important fictional reality. Being able to see into a character allows the reader to be a part of the story.

Another questions to ask yourself is what motivates your character? What drives them to do what they do in your story? You might want to reveal some history about your character or let the reader in on a part of the character’s life that is only divulged to them. Perhaps your character hates their job. Show the reader that through action or thought. Maybe your character loves someone else. What do they do about that feeling? What drives them to do what they do in your story. Let the reader in on their secrets.
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On a separate note, and again this is probably review, but one of the things that I always remind myself when I create a character is that I need to stay out of the characters way, especially when in comes to the “internal” aspects of a character. What I mean by this is that I want the character to be a unique creation and not just a fictionalized representation of myself. Even the most autobiographical fiction should divorce itself from your day to day life somewhat. Often the best characters that you create will be a tweaked reality or will be unlike yourself in any way. It’s easy to write about a character that looks different, but it is also just as important, in most instances, to have characters that don’t think exactly like you.

On that note, here is the next writing exercise:

Take the character that you created in the previous exercise and give them a quest. In one page or less, let the readers know why this quest is important to the character, what they feel about the quest, and what they think they need to do to accomplish the quest. The quest doesn’t need to be anything overly dramatic, it could be as mundane as completing something at work. If, however, something overly dramatic fits, feel free to run with it. After we post our exercises, we should be prepared to discuss what tools we used and why we used them. Of course we can discuss any other aspects of the creation of characters as well. If you did not participate in the previous exercise, go ahead and create a new character, providing them with both “physical” and “internal” realities, but please keep it to less than one page.

Have fun writing.