WWW: Breathing Life into Characters

There are a lot of ways to bring a character to life. Dialog is a favorite of mine but it's far from the only one. Descriptions can be helpful as can knowing what's going on inside one's brain. Sometimes it's an attitude or a particular trait that instantly brings someone to life, that calls to a reader to identify someone, good or bad, with only a few words.

Of course, in real life, people are all too quick to decide how they feel about someone based on a sentence or a look or gender or race or accent. However, a writer can play on stereotypes to make an impression (though, when I do that, I prefer to twist that later so you realize there's more there), but making someone come alive with only a few well-chosen sentences is a skill that can help all kinds of fiction, even some nonfiction, short or long.

Take James Herriot, who was, in my opinion a master at the reminiscent anecdote and at bringing characters to life.

"Oooh, I never 'thought you were such a 'eartless man, Mr. Herriot." Her chin trembled and she looked up at me reproachfully.

"But, Mrs. Beck," I said. "I assure you I'm not being in the least heartless. I just cannot carry out a major operation on your cat for ten shillings."

"Well, I thought you would've done it for a poor widder woman like me."

I regarded her thoughtfully, taking in the small compact figure, the healthy cheeks, the neat helmet of grey hair pulled tightly in a bun. Was she really a poor widow? There was cause for doubt. Her next-door neighbor in Rayton village was a confirmed skeptic.

There's a wealth of information on Mrs. Beck in those few short sentences, not specifics of what she looked like (though there are few of those), but a great deal about who Mrs. Beck is. And, given James Herriot's gifts, I could have pulled a passage from nearly any page in the book (All Things Wise and Wonderful)

Here's a snippet from one of the books I haven't finished yet (with a younger version of my husband as the main character):

Personally, Lofar wasn’t sure it was magic at all. He thought it was more attitude: ‘I’m supposed to be here, so look elsewhere.’ Actually, a lot of magic was like that, more attitude than magic. That might be another reason that, once Lofar learned a spell, he could always perform it better than Keldron himself. Lofar had attitude and he knew how to use it.

That’s how he got to be Keldron’s apprentice in the first place. He’d been five years old, abandoned, a waif of a beggar who had marched directly up to Keldron in his black and silver silk clothes and, turning up his tiny nose at Keldron’s proffered silver, demanded to be taught magic. Keldron had insisted that he didn’t teach any more—too old—but Lofar had been more stubborn than he.

So, here he was, ten years later, resting on a collapsed mushroom, wet, shivering, in the dark, waiting for who-knows-what, hidden in plain sight, liable to be beaten within in an inch of his life by this same—and surprisingly strong—old man when he returned. Lofar couldn’t repress a grin. Aye, this was the life for him.

See, I bet you know Lofar pretty darn well.

I've done the bring a character to life in a few short sentences before, but it was really designed with short stories in mind. So, what I'd like to do here is get folks to write a passage, briefly, that provides enough insight to get the feel of someone, either a character they wrote or a passage from a book that brought a favorite character to life.