How Objects in Your Story Reveal Character

photo by Joanna

Sometimes we’re tempted to explain to our readers how our characters feel. It’s as though we don’t trust the power of our own writing. Even when our scene is inherently frightful – our character is being held up at gunpoint let’s say – we might fall back on something like, David shook with terror.

That’s pretty abstract. And as far as your reader is concerned,  meaningless.

Readers don’t want to be told about your character. They want to become them. They want to feel their pain, their joy, and everything in between.

So there’s got to be something tangible in the real world for them to connect to. We’re sensual beings, after all. And the way to our most primal emotions is not through our intellect but through concrete images.

The poet Wei Tai once said, “Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects with the thing the feeling shows in the words.”

Great writing evolves most intently by our attention to the objects in our story or novel. So the way to get the greatest, most imaginative and emotional resonance is not by focusing on your characters’ feelings or their thoughts, but by selecting a world for them to inhabit.

We are what we see.

Or as Charles Baxter once said, “…when people look at things, things look back.”

So if you’re going to give us the contents of your character’s bedroom, or describe the street he’s standing on at night, ask if those details are anchored in your character’s consciousness.

What our characters pay attention to and how they perceive the world around them often reveal more about their feelings than an explicit explanation of their mood can.

A view of the sun rising over the bay, at the same exact moment, will look different to a woman whose child is missing than to a woman who’s just fallen in love.

Emotions are loaded. And they’re pretty complex.

We never feel just one emotion, but several simultaneous and conflicting emotions. Anger can be wrapped up in fear, hurt, disappointment, even love.

The world observed by and in relation to character can embody the full spectrum of emotional layers, feelings that the characters themselves are not equipped to articulate, much less understand.

Take this excerpt from Suzanne Berne’s novel, A Crime in the Neighborhood.

Here, ten-year-old Marsha is reacting to a series of upheavals; her father has just deserted the family to carry on a love affair with her Aunt Ada, and Boyd Ellison, a young boy in the neighborhood, has just been found murdered behind the Spring Hill Mall.  Shortly after these two events collide, here is how Marsha observes the objects in her house:

 I noted the worn patches in the hallway’s Oriental runner, the scuff marks on the stairs, the scorch at the back of the lampshade in the living room. The screen was coming away from the screen door in one corner, curling away from the metal frame like a leaf. The volume-control knob had fallen off the hi-fi, leaving a forked metal bud. Steven had spilled India ink on the sofa, and if you turned over the left cushion, you found a deep blue stain shaped like a moose antler. I had never realized our house contained so many damaged things.

Berne doesn’t tell us Marsha feels sad about her father’s absence. Or fear about Boyd Ellison’s murder. She doesn’t explain that everything Marsha’s learned to trust has been suddenly, irrevocably turned upside down. She lets the objects in her house carry those feelings. Her sadness becomes embodied in “scuff marks on the stairs,” in the “scorch at the back of the lampshade,” in the deep blue ink stain on the sofa cushion.

We know she feels malfunctioned, damaged, broken, and stained herself.

There’s camouflage and, at the same time, revelation.

The narrator tells us something essential about herself, but by shifting the focus to the things in her house, she avoids self-pity and sentimentality.

Objects then can be figurative representations for what our characters can’t, won’t, or refuse to acknowledge about their own condition.

The poet T.S. Elliot called this the objective correlative, and it’s a great way to put “show, don’t tell” into action. He believed the most important element in writing is this:

Rendering the description of an object so that the emotional state of the character from whose point of view we receive the description is revealed without ever telling the reader what that emotional state is or what has motivated it.

Here’s a writing challenge for you adapted from an exercise by the late John Gardner.

A single mother is waiting at a bus stop. She has just learned that her young daughter has died violently. Describe the setting from the woman’s point of view WITHOUT mentioning the daughter or the death. How will the street look to this woman? What are the sounds? Odors? Colors? What will she notice? What will her clothes feel like? Write a 250-word description.

This exercise is demanding. But it’s probably one of best ways I know of to break the urge to explain how your character feels.

The idea is to recreate the character’s experience of the emotion, to come at it aslant rather than directly.

Try it.

And share your insights in the comments below.