Alternate Methods of Characterization- a summary of Robert Boswell's article in Tin House

Robert Boswell’s essay on Alternate Methods of Characterization

The summer issue of Tin House had a very interesting essay on alternate methods of characterization called How I Met My Wife by Robert Boswell. Wonderful essay, and if you can, get a copy of the issue and read it. For those who can’t get their paws on a copy of Tin House, I wanted to summarize some of the interesting ways Mr. Boswell suggested we consider alternate characterization in the article.

1. Blindness and the Unreliable Narrator: Mr. B describes an incident where he did not recognize a woman he was looking for, though she was sitting right in front of him. He didn’t see her because she was sitting with a man, and this particular woman sitting with a man was not a scenario that was able to penetrate his mind. He literally couldn’t see her. This blindness on the part of his character suggests the state of his mind with lovely clarity. It is a great subtle trick to write a point of view character who does not see something that everyone else sees, including the reader.

We have all had the experience of being blind to the faults of those we love. Taking that a bit further, and our characters can be literally blind to faults in those they love. They can literally not hear, not see. Love makes us fools, but we have all been fools, so we can forgive it in ourselves and in our characters.

This is one of the reasons I love a single POV character in a story. It’s so much more real, to have to stay in one mind, like we do in our own, and muddle through the blindness and confusion of a single person trying to figure out how another person thinks and feels.

2. The manner in which a character approaches the mysterious, or inscrutable—can define them. The character faces an unknowable, or inscrutable character or event, and that inscrutable character acts as a mirror, reflecting the person back. Take an obvious example of a husband and wife in the middle of a fight, but the husband refuses to argue, sits at the table and reads his paper and ignores his wife. We don’t know what he’s up to or why he’s behaving this way. But we are going to know quite a bit about his wife by how she responds to his behavior. Does she get louder and louder, her voice rising shrilly until she’s hysterical? Does she reach over and pinch him hard enough to leave a bruise? Does she go silent, and serve him a breakfast without a word with the toast burnt black as coal? Can we see the scene, with neither of them speaking, and he is reading the paper and she is holding a very sharp knife behind him, leaning against the stove, running her finger along the edge?

3. A defining characteristic—a reductionist approach, but very powerful. Greed, or lust, or hunger. Not a cardboard cutout of a character, but one characteristic which tends to overwhelm other, more moderating characteristics. Easy to do this with evil, of course, but an interesting challenge to do it with love. How would we write a character who is so full of love that the other parts of her character are subsumed? Would she be sympathetic or tragic or a joke? Strong, or a weak reed? Blanche Dubois or Mother Theresa?


4. Comparison and contrast: this can be physical characteristics, of course, but more interesting when we see the contrast between the ways characters respond to a situation. Boswell describes The Wheel, which is a technique I particularly love, as a single place or event, and you run all your characters through it, and see how they act. Here’s an example. We have a man with his dog in the park. He has a tennis ball and he’s trying to get the dog to play fetch. The dog will not play until the man accidentally throws the ball into the pond, and then the dog wades into the water and brings the ball back, sopping wet. If my pov character was this dope with the dog, I would love to run some characters through the park with him, see what they would do.

Who is going to yell at the dog, then ignore him if he won’t play? Who is going to wade into the pond after the dog in a panic, thinking he’s about to drown? Who’s going to run like mad away from the dog, because he’s sopping wet and about to shake muddy water over everyone in his path?

There was an episode of a TV show I like, Longmire, which did this idea of characterization particularly well. The sheriff’s daughter was the victim of a hit and run. It didn’t take long to figure out what had actually happened, but then every single person in this girl’s life figured out how her hit and run was really their fault, because of something they had done or not done, and they went about trying to punish themselves in a way that was unique to their particular natures. Very subtle and very human.

5. Put a character in your story who says what most people know not to say: But I beg of you, no more autistic characters. As the mom of an autistic kid, I’m sick to death of them in every show and story. They’re everywhere. It’s true autistic kids say exactly what they’re thinking, and don’t have the social skills of a peanut, but other people say stupid things as well. Give us a break, okay?

Okay, so the point of this character who speaks the truth when it is socially inappropriate—it is an excellent character tool, to show how people respond to this behavior. Other socially inappropriate behavior could work well here, too—give our characters a chance to reveal themselves. Some people are going to be kind, and some are not.

6. The forced choice—usually a moral dilemma. You have to choose death for yourself or the rest of Planet Xerxes. What if Jim had to pick Mr. Spock or Bones? What did it tell us about Captain Kirk that he refused to play by the rules during the Kobiashi Maru? When there is no good choice, what sort of choice is your boy going to make?

7. Say the hardest things about your characters. Push to get at their deepest and ugliest motivations. This makes them real. It makes us recognize them as brothers. It makes their choice to be a good man that much more painful and beautiful. This is very very hard to do well.