Hello, dear subscribers, and welcome back to Daily Themes.
This week’s exercises take a series of different angles towards the task of describing character. They ask you to describe a stranger, a friend, a character of your invention, and finally, yourself. The exercises are followed by a selection of literary character descriptions to inspire you. Some may be familiar to many, others less so.
As ever, you can attempt all of the exercises in sequence or pick one or two that take your fancy. However you choose to do them, please do send your results to us at editors@creativecritical.net and we will share them in a subsequent post (anonymously if you prefer).
Thank you for reading! We hope you enjoy the exercises.
(P.S. New subscribers might want to look at this post, which explains the project and its origins)
Exercises:
This week you will write five character descriptions, each from a different, though not necessarily unrelated, point of view.
1. Develop a description of a character type beginning, ‘He/she was the kind of person who...’ Such a description (and such phrasing) is common to the sort of fiction with which you are no doubt familiar. (Examples: ‘He was the sort of person who lives in a shack...’ or ‘in a rented apartment...’; or ‘who carefully hunts out all the cashews in a bowl of mixed nuts...’ or ‘for whom any injustice, no matter how remote, was a deeply personal affront...’ or ‘who only felt at home at funerals.’ ‘She was one of those people who fail to find daily life attractive or interesting, and who seek compensation in an “unseen world”...’)
2. Write a description based on careful observation of someone whom you don’t know. Take notes on what this person looks like when he or she is eating, talking with another, shopping, playing frisbee, approached by a dog, or whatever. This should not be merely a catalogue of details, but an ordered composition that amounts to a visual reading of someone’s personality.
3. Write a description of someone whom you do know that is based on this person’s nature, rather than on his or her appearance. Describe what he or she is like, not what he or she looks like. (How do you write about what you cannot see – i.e., about ‘soul,’ ‘mind,’ ‘spirit,’ disposition to behave in different ways at different times, and so on? And how important are concrete words here?)
4. Invent a person and compose a description of the ‘outer’ person which reveals (gets to the heart of) the ‘inner.’
5. Self-portrait: Look at yourself in the mirror. Write a description of the person whom you see there.
Examples:
1)
Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life was a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience. The dialect was on her tongue to some extent, despite the village school: the characteristic intonation of that dialect for this district being the voicing approximately rendered by the syllable UR, probably as rich an utterance as any to be found in human speech. The pouted-up deep red mouth to which this syllable was native had hardly as yet settled into its definite shape, and her lower lip had a way of thrusting the middle of her top one upward, when they closed together after a word.
Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along to-day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her rinth sparkling from her eye: and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles
2)
My father's family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicity than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.
I gave Pirrip as my father's family name, on the authority of his tombstone and my sister – Mrs. Joe Cargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the Character and turn of the inscription, ‘Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,’ I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine – who gave up trying to get a living exceedingly early in that universal struggle – I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
3)
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible – or from one of our elder poets – in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper. She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common- sense. Nevertheless, Celia wore scarcely more trimmings; and it was only to close observers that her dress differed from her sister's, and had a shade of coquetry in its arrangements; for Miss Brooke's plain dressing was due to mixed conditions, in most of which her sister shared. Dorothea knew many passages of Pascal's Pensees and of Jeremy Taylor by heard; and to her the destinies of mankind, seen by the light of Christianity, made the solicitudes of feminine fashion appear an occupation for Bedlam. She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions of drapery. Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractions, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it.
George Eliot, Middlemarch
4)
He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got his living as ship-chandler's water-clerk he was very popular.
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
5)
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I Whenever I find have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principal to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people's hat's off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to my ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
6)
Her son was of a fair, sun-tanned type, rather above middle height, well-made, and almost exaggeratedly well-dressed. But about him also was the strange, guarded look, the unconscious glisten, as if he did not belong to the same creation as the people about him. Gudrun lighted on him at once. There was something northern about him that magnetised her. In his clear northern flesh and his fair hair was a glisten like sunshine refracted through crystals of ice. And he looked so new, unbroached, pure as an arctic thing. Perhaps he was thirty years old, perhaps more. His gleaming beauty, maleness, like a young, good-humored, smiling wolf, did not blind her to the significant, sinister stillness in his bearing, the lurking danger of his unsubdued temper. ‘His totem is the wolf,’ she repeated to herself. ‘His mother is an old, unbroken wolf.’ And then she experienced a keen paroxysm, a transport, as if she had made some incredible discovery, known to nobody else on earth.
D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love
7)
A CONTEMPLATIVE MAN Is a scholar in this great university of the world; and the same his book and study. He cloisters not his meditations in the narrow darkness of a room, but sends them abroad with his eyes, and his brain travels with his feet. He looks upon man from a high tower, and sees him trulier at this distance in his infirmities and poorness. He scorns to mix himself in men's actions, as he would to act upon a stage, but sits aloft on the scaffold a censuring spectator. He will not lose his time by being busy, or make so poor a use of the world as to hug and embrace it. Nature admits him as a partaker of her sports, and asks his approbation as it were of her own works and variety. He comes not in company, because he would not be solitary, but finds discourse enough with himself, and his own thoughts are his excellent play fellows. He looks not upon a thing as a yawning stranger at novelties, but his search is more mysterious and inward, and he spells heaven out of earth. He knits his observations together and makes a ladder of them all to climb to God. He is free from vice, because he has no occasion to employ it, and is above those ends that make man wicked. He has learnt all can here be taught him, and now comes to heaven to see more.
John Earle, Microcosmography
8)
His method of life particularly qualified him for conversation, of which he knew how to practice all the graces. He was never vehement or loud, but at once. modest and easy, open and respectful; his language was vivacious on elegant, and equally happy upon grave or humorous subjects. He was generally censured for not knowing when to retire; but that was not the defect of his judgment, but of his fortune; when he left his company, he was frequently to spend the remaining part of the night in the street, or at least was abandoned to gloomy reflections, which it is not strange that he delayed as long as he could; and sometimes forgot that- he gave others pain to avoid it himself.
Samuel Johnson, Life of Savage
9)
He was a very good-looking young man indeed, shaped to be annoyed. His voice was intimate as the rustle of sheets, and he kissed easily. There was no tallying the gifts of Charvet handkerchiefs, art moderne ash-trays, monogrammed dressing-gowns, gold key-chains, and cigarette-cases of thin wood, inlaid with views of Parisian comfort-stations, that were sent him by ladies too quickly confident, and were paid for by the money of unwitting husbands, which is acceptably any place in the world. Every woman who visited his small, square apartment promptly flamed with the desire to assume charge of its redecoration. During his tenancy, three separate ladies had achieved this ambition. Each had left behind her, for her brief monument, much too much glazed chintz.
Dorothy Parker, ‘Dusk Before Fireworks’
10)
SWM, 35, 5'9", imaginative, intelligent, attractive, creative, Manhattan businessman with a passion for the arts, more or less highbrow tastes, some scholarly interests, warmth, sensitivity, strength, a sense of humor, and sanity. seeks exceptional SWF, 26-38, slim and non-smoking, with similar qualities (occupation, of course unimportant but imagination very important). Please respond with at least a page about you. Phone number essential for reply. NYR Box 10066.
From The New York Review of Books
11)
Though they had now been acquainted a month, she could not be satisfied that she really knew his character. That he was a sensible man, an agreeable man, that he talked well, professed good opinions, seemed to judge properly and as a man of principle, this was all clear enough. He certainly knew what was right, nor could she fix on any one article of moral duty evidently transgressed; but yet she would have been afraid to answer for his conduct. She distrusted the past, if not the present. The names which occasionally dropt of former associates, the allusions to former practices and pursuits, suggested suspicions not favourable of what he had been. She saw that there had been bad habits; that Sunday travelling had been a common thing; that there had been a period of his life (and probably not a short one) when he had been, at least, careless in all serious matters; and, though he might now think very differently, who could answer for the true sentiments of a clever, cautious man, grown old enough to appreciate a fair character? How could it ever be ascertained that his mind was truly cleansed?
Mr Elliot was rational, discreet, polished, but he was not open. There was never any burst of feeling, any warmth of indignation or delight, at the evil or good of others. This, to Anne, was a decided imperfection. Her early impressions were incurable. She prized the frank, the open-hearted, the eager character beyond all others. Warmth and enthusiasm did captivate her still. She felt that she could so much more depend upon the sincerity of those who sometimes looked or said a careless or a hasty thing, than of those whose presence of mind never varied, whose tongue never slipped.
Mr Elliot was too generally agreeable. Various as were the tempers in her father’s house, he pleased them all. He endured too well, stood too well with everybody. He had spoken to her with some degree of openness of Mrs Clay; had appeared completely to see what Mrs Clay was about, and to hold her in contempt; and yet Mrs Clay found him as agreeable as anybody.
Lady Russell saw either less or more than her young friend, for she saw nothing to excite distrust. She could not imagine a man more exactly what he ought to be than Mr Elliot; nor did she ever enjoy a sweeter feeling than the hope of seeing him receive the hand of her beloved Anne in Kellynch church, in the course of the following autumn.
Jane Austen, Persuasion
12)
Prince Vasili was not a man who deliberately thought out his plans. Still less did he think of injuring anyone for his own advantage. He was merely a man of the world who had got on and to whom getting on had become a habit. Schemes and devices for which he never rightly accounted to himself, but which formed the whole interest of his life, were constantly shaping themselves in his mind, arising from the circumstances and persons he met. Of these plans he had not merely one or two in his head but dozens, some only beginning to form themselves, some approaching achievement, and some in course of disintegration. He did not, for instance, say to himself: ‘This man now has influence, I must gain his confidence and friendship and through him obtain a special grant.’ Nor did he say to himself: ‘Pierre is a rich man, I must entice him to marry my daughter and lend me the forty thousand rubles I need.’ But when he came across a man of position his instinct immediately told him that this man could be useful, and without any premeditation, Prince Vasili took the first opportunity to gain his confidence, flatter him, become intimate with him, and finally make his request.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
13)
Basil Ransom had got up just as Mrs. Luna made this last declaration; for a young lady had glided into the room, who stopped short as it fell upon her ears. She stood there looking, consciously and rather seriously, at Mr. Ranson; a smile of exceeding faintness played about her lips – it was just perceptible enough to light up the native gravity of her face. It might have been likened to a thin ray of moonlight resting upon the wall of a prison.
Henry James, The Bostonians