Character Traits - Ruben D. Gonzales

Writing about characters and their physical appearances is a talent. The challenge is to write just enough to make sure your characters are believable without dumping a lot of useless descriptive stuff that doesn’t help the story along. If you describe someone as fat/heavy/ stout then make sure there is a reason that a character’s weight is important in the story. If you just say your detective weighs 240 pounds but then the character is never affected by the extra weight in your story then the words were wasted. Why not say he was skinny then?

You could say… It was a good thing Richard weighed 240 because he needed every pound to move the boulder off of Emma’s pinned leg before the water rushed in and drown her right before his eyes.

Or … The teenager took off like a bullet and in 10 seconds put a hundred yards of hot black pavement between them. Richard hated to run and labored if he ever did. When he got to the end of the block he turned the corner and stopped and looked. The kid was a speck disappearing in the distance and Richard knew a quick end to the case disappeared with him.

In my latest book – Murder on Black Mountain – my main character, Emma Shaw, can read auras. That’s a pretty interesting character trait, maybe interesting in all by itself. But for Emma, she uses the gift to help solve the mystery of her brother’s murder, so it is much more than interesting. It is essential in the story.

Make sure there is a purpose for your main character to wear glasses. Maybe it’s a sign of his intelligence, or shyness, or he uses it as a prop when making a point. Also, if you are going to use the prop effectively then make sure it is used at other times in the story besides at the beginning when you introduced him. And don’t forget he is wearing those glasses when he comes in from the rain. Wouldn’t he need to take a moment to wipe them off? Perhaps like…Once inside the entryway Richard took off his glasses, pausing to wipe the rain drops from the lens, and using the time to formulate a plausible reason to explain his finger prints at the murder scene.

I’ve taken a few writers seminars and on this character topic we were instructed to make a chart of all our characters and list all their attributes from the physical to the emotional. What do they like to eat, watch, read, smell, or drink? Do they like to exercise or are they the sedentary type. Of course most of the traits for the minor characters never make it into the story and only the very main characters get a chance to use the full range of character traits. But the exercise of writing down the emotional/physical traits of your characters ahead of time helps you organize the development of your characters through action and not just description.

Make sure each descriptive detail you write contributes to the characters actions. Keep track of the attributes you assign your characters to make sure the character stays in character throughout the story. If one of your main characters hates the water he probably should hate the water during the whole story, and you should mentioned that once or twice more during the story, especially if later he is forced to awkwardly jump into a raging river to save someone.

There are all kinds of people in the world so let's invite an eclectic mix of them into our stories.

www.rubendgonzales.com