When you write in any point of view that isn’t omniscient, you get to write a story through the eyes of a biased character. Every word of the book is filtered through the POV character’s eyes. The best part is that you can make your prose fulfill two roles: description and characterization.
Characterization Through Description
What I want to show today is how you can describe setting, characters, and events in your story in a way that also shows who your POV character is as a person. The trick is to think about how your character would see things and then let that come out on the page. It may not be completely truthful, but it will be the character’s truth.
Noticing
The first thing you can do is pick what kind of things your character will notice in a scene. If they are skittish, they may identify all the threats and where the closest exit is to them. If they’re self-conscious, they’ll assess things by amount of wealth and presentation. Each character will unconsciously see the scene differently.
They will also not notice certain things that others will. Men may not see that a thread is lose in a dress’s embroidered hem, but a woman might. A person who is military trained will pick up on threats based on a person’s posture while a civilian won’t. Showing what kinds of things your character will not notice is just as telling as what they do notice. Now, you can’t state it outright in the prose that they don’t notice something, but the readers will pick up on their ignorance.
For example, in Daevabad series by S.A. Chakraborty, there is a character who is not a people person. He often misses interpersonal clues, especially when it comes to romantic relationships. It is never outright stated, but the author wrote him in such a way that we can be in his POV and still see how things go over his head. It leaves the reader laughing at his ignorance while the character is completely unaware that there is something worth laughter.
Seeing
After you know what your characters will notice, you must figure out how they will see those things. How will they describe the world to the reader? Are they a mathematician who will see everything in black and white terms, or an artist who sees things in imaginative ways. Both people will describe a sky differently. The mathematician may say the sky is full of rain clouds. Yet the artist could describe it as swirling tones of gray ready to drop tears to wash away the world’s mistakes. One is matter-of-fact, the other’s whimsical, but both are an accurate view of the weather.
Interpreting
The last step in using description for characterization is to show how the person interprets the things around them. Let’s take the example I made above about how the artist describes the sky. The clouds are ready to “drop tears to wash away the world’s mistakes.” Although that feels like an interpretation, it’s not quite. I can see this statement being taken one of two ways.
One, that the character is wallowing and wants to cry away her mistakes. Two, the character sees it as a beautiful thing, how tears can cleanse a person of their strong feelings so they can move past their mistakes. One interpretation is full of self-pity, and the other is filled with hope. Both have sad undertones, but the interpretation is what makes the reader really connect with a character. It’s taking a description one step further so we can see inside her mind.
Practice Exercise
Before you try this on a whole book, start small. Pick a POV character, and write one scene. Show the character noticing, seeing, and interpreting what’s around him or her. Once you complete that, write the exact same scene but through another character’s POV. Show how they experience the scene differently. If you want a real challenge, make a character notice, see, and interpret something in a way that isn’t universally true, yet make it true for that character. Try to show as much of the character’s personality as possible in your descriptions. Good luck!
Final Thoughts
Using character bias to tell a story is always fun. I love when I write a scene and readers tell me a sentence doesn’t read truthful. They see the scene for what it is and tell me, “This isn’t right. The fact he doesn’t give her a gift doesn’t mean he hates her.” I just smile and nod. Yes, that’s true. But what is my character’s truth? That no gift means he doesn’t like her. It’s all through her perspective, and being able to show that perspective while also conveying the truth of the situation is a fun challenge.
Thanks for reading!
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