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Fictional Narrative Basics - Character
Unit Completion Date: End of Week 5
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Learning enough about your characters is only the first step. Once you know enough about your characters for you to write the story, you have to decide what information will be most convincing for your reader. Fortunately there are a few ideas you can use as guidelines. While all of these ideas are not appropriate to all cases, at least one of them can usually step forward to help you out of a difficult spot in writing your story.
As I've said before, direct reportage of a character's internal state does not usually engage the reader unless that internal state becomes manifested in the character's world through some type of action, behavior, or series of events that expresses outwardly the emotion that the character feels inwardly. Probably the best articulation of this idea comes from T. S. Elliot, who described such external expressions of internal states as "objective correlatives."
One key to identifying which information about your character is most important is deciding what parts of the external world act as an objective correlative for your character. Some habit, some set of objects, anything in your character's environment that seems to be a touchstone for your character's internal dilemma is likely something that you should focus on in character development. While knowing what music the character listens to or what's on his plate at dinner may give some indications of the character's general tastes and sensibilities, too much of this information can weigh a story down rather than keep it afloat.
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