Revealing Character

There are many ways to reveal information about your characters when writing a story. Today, I am discussing five levels that reveal information about your protagonist or antagonist’s character, the internal attributes that are distinctive to a specific character in your story.

Level 1: As writers, we’ve heard about showing versus telling a multitude of times, but let me shape this old adage to explain it through the eyes of a reader. If you tell me something about a character, I will accept it as true, but it is not yet supported by evidence. So let’s say, my level of trust is at a Level 1 out of five levels. Those five levels have to do with the believability of the information and how genuine the information feels to me as a reader.

Level 2: If that information that you told me about a character is supported by the things they say, the believability is raised to a Level 2. Although at this point, I don’t need the author to have told me the information, I discovered it through the dialogue.

Level 3: In this level, information can be revealed about the protagonist (or any character) through another character. Information about the protagonist, for instance, when provided by another character, strengthens the image the author is trying to create. As a reader, I find information revealed about the protagonist through another character more reliable than if the protagonist or narrator revealed that information to me. It might also reveal information about the character providing that information. It reveals their own feelings about the protagonist or even their motivations in the story. Perhaps what they reveal won’t be in line with my own impressions about the protagonist, but that in itself might reveal something else.

Level 4: What does it take to bump that up to the next level? I want to see what the author is telling me through the actions of the character. But along with believability, let’s remember we want it to feel genuine.  So, if you want the reader to find your protagonist is kind and generous, avoid cliches like “Katie snuggled the cute puppy.” Dig deeper, like maybe someone who is Katie’s nemesis at work is in trouble, and Katie offers them help even though the person causes her nothing but grief. Or, by helping someone, it comes at a great personal cost. So at this level, the protagonist’s words are supported by their actions, making the reader more connected to this information you’re trying to relay about your character.

Level 5: Reveal information about your character through how they see the world. This can show information about your character through how they feel about objects around them, the setting they’re in, the people they encounter, and about their view of life in general. I was reading a book last week called “Bring Me Back” by B. A. Paris. There’s a scene with Russian nesting dolls where the character Finn observes his girlfriend, Ellen, taking these dolls apart. And this is what he observes. “She takes a little Russian doll out and puts it down on the worktop amid its dissected relatives.” This grabbed my attention because I’d never heard or even thought to describe these little nesting dolls like that. But it gives an impression of how Finn views them in that moment, which adds to the atmosphere of the scene along with foreshadowing of how menacing these little dolls become in the story.

In this scale of creating a picture of a person’s character, Levels 1-2 are the weakest and could be left out if Levels 3-5 are strong enough. The levels are about layers of support that illustrate the person’s character, making it stronger than simply telling the reader. These methods take the reader on a journey of getting to know your characters and creating a connection between the character and the reader.

One cautionary point is that since characters reveal information about themselves through how they view things around them, you want to make sure that your characters don’t use the same language to describe something. For example, in the book I mentioned above, there is another scene involving the Russian nesting dolls where another character describes them in a similar way. The character Layla says, “When they arrived, I went a bit mad, unscrewing the wooden corpses as fast as I could to get to the smallest ones, leaving dissected bodies littering the floor around me.” The “dissected relatives” from Finn’s observation was so striking that when this expanded description from Layla used “dissected bodies” it rang out as an error that two separate characters would not have such a similar way of viewing these nesting dolls, especially since it was such a unique way to look at them. This isn’t in anyway a criticism on the book as a whole. It’s easier to see errors like this in the work of other people though. It often makes me reflect on my own work and I realize I’ve done the same thing. But had I not spotted the error in someone else’s work, I wouldn’t have found it in my own.

The same goes for dialogue. You don’t want all of your characters to have the same speech pattern or use the same phrases.

These are ways to enhance your writing. They are not rules you have to follow. There are other methods. And despite our best attempts, we’ll still miss opportunities to show instead of tell, we’ll not hit the level of believability that rings true to every reader, and sometimes we’ll have two characters describe something using the same words because the phrase is so common to us. But perhaps, these tips will unlock a new depth to your characters and story.

Are there any other ways that you like to reveal information about your characters? Do you have an example where an author did an excellent job of revealing information about a character without telling the reader the information?