By DeAnna Knippling
You have a minor character--a witness in a courtroom. How do you write your description?
If you're running on autopilot, you write something like
this: "He was tall--about 5'
11"--with blond hair and blue eyes, looking relatively fit." Which sounds like a police report. Or a checklist: gender,
height, hair/eye color (i.e., race), weight.
This gets boring after a while, both as a writer and as a
reader, because every single minor
character becomes a checklist.
Male/female, tall/short, dark/light coloring, heavy/average/skinny. What else is there to say? Lots of things.
But what? And how can
you do it without building an entire, time-consuming character dossier? Or without sounding repetitive?
I have three steps for you:
1.
Decide what the constraints are of your
story. Is it a serious mystery or a
black comedy? Is the story about family,
love, adventure, what?
2.
Pick three unique traits for your
minor character that don't go outside the constraints of your story. (This
means only one character can be "tall," too.)
3.
Hint at each of the traits three times.
The first step should be pretty obvious: you might
not want to build a class-clown, sassy old deaf lady witness in the middle of a
serious courtroom drama; you might run your story off the rails.
However, there's a neat implication to this first step. If you know the themes of your story, like
"Sometimes you have to take justice into your own hands," you can
build a witness who emphasizes your theme, just by the way you describe them. I'll get to that later.
The second step is more complex. At its easiest, you can just pick any three
things that fit within the context of your story. The things can be physical traits, habits,
philosophies, interests--anything. Your
witness could be a) from Texas, b) a lover of classical music, and c)
dry-skinned, all of which would fit within the context of a serious courtroom
drama. A caution--you can pick physical
traits, but you want to stay away from physical clues (like wearing a
ten-gallon hat or a Texas drawl) at this phase.
You want something easy to figure out from obvious clues; you don't want
the clues themselves yet.
The third step is the fun part. As you write, include clues for each of the
three traits, three times, in three different ways. For our witness, you could say that he has a
ten-gallon hat that he carries with him, a Texas drawl, and a certain
graciousness toward the ladies (including the judge). And he hums to himself, smiles at a lawyer's
bad pun about Bach, and is nodding in time to someone else's tapped foot. And he scratches his arm, has a tube of
flowery-smelling lotion in his pocket, and chews on the peeling skin of his
lips, almost as though he were nervous.
What you don't want to do, by the way, is list all three
clues pointing toward the same trait together.
You want to mix them up: Gerald Kinnerly swore himself in with a
proud, drawling 'Amen' on the Bible, then climbed up to the witness's stand and
chewed on his lips while the defense lawyer flipped through some papers. After a while, [the main character] realized
he was humming to himself. For a moment
she couldn't place it--but then it came to her.
Beethoven's "Ode to Joy."
You can do one or two clues at a time, too. You just have to use each trait three times.
Why three things?
Why three times?
It comes down to the human brain: one, we tend to get confused if there are too
many moving parts, and two, we tend to create patterns (even if none exist).
Why three things?
If a minor character has three different traits, there are seven ways to
combine them (for our purposes, the order doesn't matter): one trait at a time
(A, B, C), two traits at a time (AB, BC, AC), and all three of them together
(ABC). With two traits, there are three
ways to combine them, and with one, only one way. With four traits, there are fifteen ways to
combine them. And five traits,
thirty-one ways to combine them.
We don't want complexity in a minor character--we want
interesting. Three traits, with seven
ways to combine them is interesting, because we can remember, on average, about
seven things in our short-term memories: thus, phone numbers are seven digits
long, aside from the area code. Two
things is too easy; four things, too complex. Three is just right.
"Three things" is a handy rule of thumb for
describing anything, actually: stick with three things at any given
time...unless you want to hide a clue.
Then go for five or more things, and put the clue somewhere in the
middle. Most readers will remember the
first two things and the last one or two things. Want an example? Read a description of a murder scene in a
mystery. There will be more than three
things described; somewhere in the middle of the description will be the
important clue. Especially watch for
lists of things all in the same paragraph or sentence: She had one of those Jaime Lee Curtis
bodies, with long, brass nails, and bronzed lips that drifted, ever so
slightly, to the left when she talked, with a tiny Victorian hat pinned to her
head, a leather bodice, and boots that were tipped with steel at the toe and at
the very ends of the three-inch heels.
Catch the murder weapon?
Probably not, until I pointed out there was one.
Why three times? The first number that we tend to see
patterns in...is three. Like Ian Fleming
said, "Once is an accident. Twice
is coincidence. Three times is enemy
action." When something happens
once in our lives--like getting hit by lightning--we call it a miracle, a
tragedy, or just something completely random.
When it happens twice, we're on the fence; it might have been
coincidence...we tend to group that kind of thing as "luck."
But when it happens three times, we see a pattern, and we
start coming up with explanations for it.
If your buddy gets hit by lightning three times, well. They must have an overcharged human
electrical system or something. It
doesn't really matter if the explanation is true or not--once we
"see" a pattern, we invent a reason for it. Scientists have to fight against jumping to
conclusions from apparent patterns; we, as writers, might as well use that
tendency to our advantage.
Why not more than three times? You can, but with caution. Once we see a pattern, if the pattern keeps
repeating, we either get annoyed at it, mock it, or tune it out. Let's say we know someone who gets struck by
lightning every six weeks, like clockwork.
We stop thinking of it as interesting, instead seeing it as something that we can
take for granted. And if the reader can
take a single word in your book for granted--why write it? The reader is paying you to be
interesting! And how often is this minor
character going to show up, anyway? Is
it really a minor character?
Now...there are reasons to break a rule of three for a
character. Once you have a reader's
expectations set with a pattern (three things), then you can mess with the
pattern. Want to hide a murderer, but
not so deep that a reader will never figure it out? Set up a pattern of three traits/three times,
just like you would any other minor character, and then have them do one thing
that clearly violates the pattern you've set up.
The subtlety of subtext.
Among writers, subtext is generally used as "the real
subject of a conversation." For
example, your characters are ostensibly arguing about whether to plant tomatoes
or potatoes next spring, but they're really arguing about whether to stay
married. However, that's a limited view
of subtext. For writers, subtext is any
underlying theme, used in any part of writing.
For our purposes, if you know your theme (some writers would
rather have it emerge organically; if so, you can use the same technique while
editing to make sure you didn't go off-theme while you're editing), you can
build it into the three traits for minor characters.
Let's say your theme is "The justice system is
broken." Three traits we could pick
for our witness could be a) is rich, b) hates the defendant, and c) feels
bulletproof because of her Mafioso brother-in-law.
When you build subtext into your minor characters using
character traits, you can be really obvious or really subtle--whatever fits
your style. Just remember that overusing
subtext can make your story feel like a rant, for better or worse. For a more toned-down character, you might
want a) is rich, b) has bad memories of going through the justice system as a
teen, and c) is somewhat rude to everyone, as a defensive mechanism.
In the end...
Minor characters are a minor tool, and you don't want to
spend all day drafting out the backstories of every hairdresser, dog-walker,
and butler in your story.
You first want to make sure your minor characters don't
derail the story. Second, you want to
make sure they're interesting. Third,
you want to repeat the themes of your story, as appropriate.
So grab three character traits that won't derail your story,
that might even reflect your theme, and run with them: but don't run too far,
or you'll end up with a minor character that spins off into another book.
Wait a minute...
About the Writer: DeAnna Knippling started freelancing in May 2011 and wouldn’t be able to do it without her wonderful family and friends, especially her husband. In fact, she owes a lot to Pikes Peak Writers for helping her be a better writer, especially through the Write Brains, both in the lectures and in meeting lots of other writers.
Her reason for writing is to entertain by celebrating her family’s tradition of dry yet merry wit, and to help ease the suffering of lack of self-confidence, having suffered it many years herself. She also likes to poke around and ask difficult questions, because she hates it when people assume something must be so.
For more kicks in the writerly pants, see her blog atwww.deannaknippling.com or her ebook How to Fail & Keep on Writing, available at Smashwords, B&N, Amazon, and OmniLit.
