Characterization vs. Character

You have portrayed the main characters of your story. Perhaps it’s a fantasy. The princess cursed with the gigantic nose blunders about the palace, knocking glasses off trays and making everyone duck. The young man with the huge ears wears a massive hat and lives simply in a farm carved out of the deepest glade in the forest. Both sets of parents are finely cast—the king and queen in their ermine-lined robes, the peasants in their buckskin outfits. Each pair bemoans the fate of their child in the authentic accents of their ancestors and move about using proper manners or rustic rituals. Nicely done, but there’s a problem.

You’ve drawn us a picture but not shown us a soul.

In his classic screenwriting book, Story, Robert McKee succinctly defines the difference between characterization and character.

Characterization is “the sum of all observable qualities of a human being” as the first paragraph describes. Examples are:

• Age
• Intelligence
• Gender, and sexuality
• How one speaks and gestures
• One’s values, attitudes, and personality
• Choices of home, clothes, and transportation.

Character lies beneath the surface of characterization at the heart of the subject’s humanity, the soul. Will the character be:

• “Loving or cruel?
• Generous or selfish?
• Strong or weak?
• Truthful or a liar?
• Courageous or cowardly?”

McKee stresses that character is only revealed when choices are made under pressure: “… the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential nature.” Further, he believes the best stories go beyond simply revealing character. They show how that inner nature changes, either for good or ill, over the course of the tale. This is the character’s arc, and it is at the core of the story’s structure as well.

In a future post, I’ll discuss the blending of character and plot in greater detail. For now, I challenge you to go deeper into your characters. Get under their daily habits. Turn up the fire in your plot and burn away everything but their essence. Ask yourself:

• What choices do they make?
• How do they change?
• What becomes of them?

Show us the answers to these questions and you’ll have a story we’ll all want to read.

© 2011 by Will Limón