Writer's Tip More on Characterization.

When writing a fiction piece, there are many ways to show characterization and bring the people in the stories to life.

Conflict is one of the ways characters are shown. A character can be in conflict with his environment, with himself or with another character. The character's actions and reactions to a conflict situation will reveal his true nature.

Action is another way to reveal a character's nature, how does he walk, what are his mental and emotional reactions to a situation calling for action? Knowing these things before describing the character in motion can add to the picture of who he or she is.

There are a number of types of tags that will characterize a story person. These include physical tags, such as the blond hunk or the skinny geek, appearance tags. Does the character wear what for them has become a uniform. He'd never seen her in a dress. Didn't he have anything to wear other than those ragged cutoffs. Mannerism tags. Does the character have a definite mannerism, such as running his hands through her hair or her twisting a strand of hair around her finger when she's nervous. Facial expression tags, Arching the eyebrow, a permanent scowl.

These are a few ways to show characters to the reader. Next week, I'll add more.

Writing Hints -- Tags

When writing dialogue, letting the reader know who is speaking is a good idea. There are things about dialogue that I'll deal with at a different time. This is about speaker identification.

Using things like he said, she asked, he answered or responded are the easiest way but so often this falls into a pattern and the writer decides to get clever and to use different words. Sometimes the choice of the tag word seems silly. He hissed is one I find funny unless the writer has used a lot of words with esses. The funniest one I ever read was "Let me go," she ejaculated. I kid you not this was in a manuscript I was critiquing. One problem with using other things to avoid using said, a word many readers skip over, is becoming so clever the reader wants to see what interesting new word you're going to substitute and the story is lost.

There are ways of avoiding these and one is showing the speaker taking some kind of action. "I will not go with you." Mary crossed her arms on her chest.
Mark glared. "You certainly will." This devise can be especially useful when there are a number of people in the scene. Nothing confuses a reader more than having to figure which character is speaking.

Now we come to adverbs. He said angrily. She said coyly. The use of adverbs with every tag or with many of them also can annoy a reader. Adverbs are best sprinkled in very, very small doses. Instead of adverbs, show how the person is speaking by an action or a choice of words.