Bring Your Characters to Life on the Page

So many memoir writers are good at writing about themselves, yet they struggle to write about the other people who appear in their book. So today, I want to help you out. Our topic: How to bring your characters to life on the page. 

When you write about your characters, imagine the process being a bit like buying a house. If you were searching for your dream home, would you only want to know about the external characteristics — the color of the house, the pitch of the roof and if it had a deck?

Chances are, if you’re making such a large investment, you’d want to know more. You’d probably want to be invited inside, shown around, and told a story or two about who used to live there.

Has the house recently been remodeled? Is there a good school district nearby? Or did the previous owner move to Paris to be with her 90-year-old boyfriend?

Describing your characters is a similar process. If you just describe the outer shell, it’s as though you’re asking your reader to wait outside.

Here’s an example of a character description that is typically written by new writers:

"She was wearing a purple sweatshirt as she leaned back in her chair. The sweatshirt was emblazoned with the word “Harvard” across the front."

When it comes to describing your characters, the most important advice I can give you is to be subjective. By subjective, I mean that you need to interpret your characters for your reader and not just provide a physical description. 

A better description would be something like:

“Her sweatshirt was emblazoned with the word “Harvard” across the front. I imagined her days were filled with dreams of attending that Ivy League college. Would she get in? Would she make her father proud? I had no idea what that was like, to have come from generations of overachievers."

So what did I just do there?

I took the very same objective facts that I used a little bit earlier. And I interpreted those facts for the reader. I added subjectivity to help the reader understand what this character is really like. 

In fact, you might notice that this description is as much about the narrator as it is about the character I’m describing. And that’s exactly what a good memoir description does — it lets us in to the mind of the narrator. Everything you describe in your memoir should be filtered from the narrator’s point of view.

Being objective is boring. Believe it or not, your reader actually wants to be told what to think about the people you write about. 

Till next time! Happy writing.