Characterisation

This is an aspect of story-making that is frequently overlooked: how you present your character to your readers. How do we learn about them? Is it from other people's mouths, perhaps the old lady by the doughnut shop? Does the narrator discover an old letter revealing their past? That's the kind of 'characterisation' I am talking about. 

If you want to make a successful novel, you must include themes in it. These themes are usually created in the way and how you present your characters or key locations e.g. the haunted house where the story is based. Take note of this: I don't recommend building your character all at once, you should slowly, almost frustratingly reveal facets of their personality and appearance. One of the major flaws in books such as Fifty Shades of Grey - and other contemporary romance novels I have read like Wait For You - is that they repeat the same phrases in their descriptions of characters. It's very boring and tedious for the reader and makes them lose interest because the book they're holding is emanating the sense that it's not going to go anywhere. Reveal your character's green eyes in chapter one, their brown hair in chapter five, then their croaky laugh in chapter nine. Draw it out so you don't end up running dry. This technique of slowly revealing aspects of a character is most useful if you're writing a mystery, thriller or horror. 

There's nothing wrong with giving a full description of the character in chapter one - it happens a lot in romance novels - but you should leave something left for the chapters to come. Or merely avoid giving descriptions of the character, as a lot of successful novels do. Yet a lot of successful novels add in descriptions all the time, to build in their themes. It all depends on what kind of story you want to write - it could even depend on you wanting to use that repetition to enforce a certain theme. For instance, repeating the fact that the person has black eyes to convey the danger and evil within that character. 

So, I'm going to list some of the characterisation techniques I know: 

• Names - what do other people call them? Perhaps one person calls Roger "Roge," which would imply that she's close to him, where as everyone else calls him "Roger."
• Imagery and symbolism. 
• Comment in narrative voice - your narrator could be narrating about a character, or about themselves.
• What other characters say about them.
• What the character says about themselves. 
• Contrasts of the character and other characters that have stark contrasts to them. 
• Their actions - remember, 'actions speak louder than words.' 
• Amount of time and focus on exploring their character - which would suggest their importance to the novel.
• Focalisation
• Selective detail - (used mostly in mystery/thrillers) where the narrator picks out certain few features of the character e.g. their smile, as it is in The Great Gatsby, or their beautiful, small voice as Louis does with Claudia in Interview with the Vampire. This way, the characters become more memorable to the readers. 

That's all I've got for today. Adios! 

Gemma out x