This week: Describing Characters Edited by: Max Griffin 🏳️🌈  
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Two newsletters ago, I asked for readers to give me input on future topics. The two leading choices were how to describe setting and character without interrupting the story. Last month's newsletter started that discussion and this month continues it.. |
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We can learn things from watching movies. Sometimes we can learn more from bad movies than good ones. And sometimes, even classics reveal, in retrospect, cringe-worthy missteps.
Consider 1941. That year, How Green Was My Valley won best picture over Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon. All three start with establishing shots, but in the first two these drone on forever with voice-over narration. At least in Kane, the narrator has a staccato, newsreel-style delivery, while in Valley, the tone is soporific, doubtless striving for peaceful.
In Falcon, however, the opening quickly establishes the setting—San Francisco, via iconic sweeps of the Bay Bridge and Fisherman’s Wharf—and then moves into Sam Spade’s seedy office. Almost at once, Bogart’s Spade meets Mary Astor’s Brigid and we’re off to the races. The contrast in openings confirms that action is almost always a superior choice to narration.
There’s a lot to learn from that opening interview in Falcon. For one thing, we glimpse Sam Spade’s cluttered desk, complete with a phone sitting atop a dog-eared phone book. Bogart’s body language is open but intense. He leans forward while Astor speaks, looking directly at her with a steady, unblinking gaze. He lights a cigarette as if illuminating what she is saying: he’s listening, receptive to her story. Astor, on the other hand, fidgets and keeps averting her eyes. She sits in a cramped posture, clutching the fur that drapes protectively over her body. The combination of setting, body language, and camera cuts add tension to the scene. Everything comes together to advance both character and plot. At the end, we know that Brigid is lying, that Spade has seen through her, and that he’s both cunning and shady.
In contrast, the narrated voice-overs in Kane and Valley are boring and tedious. They certainly tell the audience stuff, but Falcon puts the characters in motion and shows the audience instead of telling.
It’s also instructive to read the opening in Hammett’s book. The dialogue and body language in the movie, including Bogart’s use of a cigarette prop, closely follow the text. Some of the details about the office, though, are delightful. We learn Spade’s desk has an urn “filled with the remains of limp cigarettes,” and that “ragged gray flakes of cigarette ash dotted the yellow top of the desk.” A “buff-curtained window” let in an ammonia-scented breeze and the “ashes on the desk twitched and crawled in the current.” Cigarettes and ashes as a metaphor for the characters and their conversation. Brilliant.
In all three of these movies, the setting is important, even critical. But in Valley and Kane, the opening panoramas that establish the setting are narrated. The story doesn’t really start until we meet the characters and see them interacting with their environment and each other. In Falcon, that interaction happens almost from the first frame.
Hitchcock said that the audience cares about the characters. The plot, he continued, is there to give the characters something to care about. John Huston understood this before Hitchcock enunciated it, as his direction of Falcon shows.
What lessons can we learn from this little exercise? Well, “action good, narration bad” is certainly one, and perhaps the most important one. But the setting can also be a prop. Spade lighting a cigarette can illuminate more than his features. Brigid clutching her fur is hiding behind it.
The setting can become an active agent in the story. An ammonia-laden breeze can reveal the office is in an industrial area. Ashes twitching and crawling are more than just an unkempt desk—they are the past come alive. Cold can prickle the skin, heat can send sweat to burn the eyes. The rumble of a furnace can set a house atremble, or breathe warmth into a room. Setting can be both real and metaphor.
The same is true for character descriptions. In fact, the best descriptions are both.
The character descriptions in Hammett’s novel are revealing. From the first paragraph, we learn that Spade’s face is all angles, a sequence of v’s. The description concludes with, “He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan,” establishing Spade’s character in a single sentence.
Spade’s secretary gets two sentences that not only give her appearance but also insights to her character. “She was a lanky sunburned girl whose tan dress of thin woolen stuff clung to her with an effect of dampness. Her eyes were brown and playful in a shiny boyish face.” She’s nondescript, lanky, even “boyish,” and not glamorous at all.
In contrast, Brigid is breathless, and speaks so softly that “only the purest articulation made the words intelligible.” Whether the readers think it through or not, this suggests that there are meanings hiding behind her elegance and her actual words. We also learn that “She was tall and pliantly slender, without angularity anywhere,” in contrast to the angular v shapes in Spade’s features. When she enters the office, “She advanced slowly, with tentative steps, looking at Spade with cobalt-blue eyes that were both shy and probing.” When Spade asks what she wants, “she tortured her lower lip with glistening teeth and said nothing.” Except that “torturing her lip” speaks volumes.
While Hammett’s descriptions are clever and effective, there are certainly aspects of his opening chapter that date it to the previous century—it appeared in 1930, over ninety years ago. While much of the novel is more or less in Spade’s point of view, the first chapter decidedly uses a third person omniscient narrator, a choice that has all but disappeared from modern fiction. The chapter launches with that third person narrator standing outside the story, looking in, describing Spade’s appearance.
Indeed, describing the point-of-view character can be a puzzle since we don’t walk around thinking about how we look. There are techniques available, however. For example, Spade might have thought Brigit was “mid-twenties, at least ten years his junior.” Now we know both ages.
The thing to remember is that there is more to describing characters than clever descriptions, such as the examples from Falcon,. It’s still important to put your characters in motion, interacting with each other and their surroundings, showing what’s happening through their words and deeds. In the case of the point-of-view character, you can add sensations and, sparingly, thoughts. It’s important to be in the moment as well. For example, in the middle of an argument, a character is unlikely think about the color of her eyes, so don’t write something like, “Molly shot daggers from her blue eyes,” when you’re supposed to be in Molly’s head. She can’t see her eyes and is unlikely to be thinking about their color when she’s angry.
Describing a character’s physical appearance can help bring the character to life, but how a character looks is less important than who she is. Sometimes appearance contributes to understanding a character—Miles Vorkosigan in Lois McMaster Bujold’s novels is defined not by his physical disability but by his courageous response. In any case, to paraphrase Vonnegut, describing a character’s physical appearance needs done in a way that advances either character or plot, and preferably both.
I’ll close with one of my favorite character descriptions, this one from Double Star, a novel by Robert Heinlein. The first-person narrator has just met Dak Broadbent, and tells the reader, “He was the sort of big ugly-handsome galoot that women go for and men take orders from.” That description is so vivid, I remembered it despite it being over thirty years since I last read this novel. It tells us about the narrator and the character he’s just met. It’s brilliant. If only I could write so well.
Good luck and keep writing!
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