5 Tips to Reveal a Character's Personality Smoothly

Intro to: 5 Tips to Reveal a Character’s Personality Smoothly

This post: 5 Tips to Reveal a Character’s Personality Smoothly, will hopefully help you with smooth characterization.

Characterization is the process by which the writer (you) reveals the personality of the character. And to do it smoothly, would be to do it in a way that is simple and easy for your reader to enjoy rather than feel like they are working to understand your characters’ personalities.

Have you ever been to a carnival or fair?

Have you ever gone and bought your $8 ticket only to get inside and end up paying $100 or more to do anything else all day?

$4 for fries

$2 for the Ferris wheel

$2 for the whirly spin

Before you know it your wallet is empty. But you had so much fun spending all that money and didn’t even think it was odd that they charged you $8 dollars at the beginning of the day just so you could get inside and pay them more money.

Now that’s what I call smooth.

But this acceptance of paying money to get in to pay more happened long ago and without you even knowing it.

The idea of “the fair” being in town was set up long ago to pull dollars out of peoples’ pockets in the set up so that the fried cheese curd man didn’t have to convince you to pay more money for his cheese curds. In fact, it was so smooth that the man at the gate didn’t have to try to convince you to get in for $8 just to pay the county more upon getting inside.

So how do we as writers become this smooth to get our readers to enjoy and digest mentally our characters’ personalities without having to use more words to convince them?

I call this trick the passive onlooker.

Tips to Reveal a Character’s Personality: #1

Make Your Reader the Passive Onlooker.

You’ve been the passive onlooker before.

You’re out in public and you see a dad holding his son’s hand to cross the street. You might not think much of it, but you might think that’s a good dad that cares about his son.

You look the other direction and see another parent dragging their screaming child across the street yanking on their arm viciously and you might think they’re a mean bad parent.

Now the point here isn’t whether either parent in this fictional (or not so fictional) scenario is a good or bad parent. The point is that you were a passive onlooker in this scenario.

You didn’t have to do any work simply looking and thinking. However, you did assume some personality traits of both of the parents you saw.

Let’s create that same scenario for our reader with our characterizations and what we want our reader to assume about our characters.

We don’t want to have to say, “She was kind and charming and caring.” We want our reader to see these traits in action as a passive onlooker.

Tips to Reveal a Character’s Personality: #2

The Setup.

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Just like they charge outrageous prices at fairs and carnivals and we gladly oblige, they don’t have to convince us at the gate that this is worthwhile because of the setup.

We are also going to create a smooth setup so our reader passively ingests who our character is hook, line, and sinker without much effort on their part.

To start a good setup you yourself need to know, “Who is my character?”

“What do I want my reader to assume about my character?”

Tips to Reveal a Character’s Personality: #3

Make a list of traits you want your character to have:

Protagonist
Drunk
Kind
Caring
Smoker
Cheap
Creative
Sad

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This example list is a small but a good start to get an idea in your mind of how you want your character to be received by your reader.

Next, for a good setup to work, you need to convince yourself.

Tips to Reveal a Character’s Personality: #4

Convince yourself.

Convincing yourself is not just important for your character’s future; it’s also great practice for you and will help you IMMENSELY when you’re trying to find the right actions and scenes to display to your reader the complex character they are following.

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So how do we convince ourselves?

Imagine you are sitting, having coffee with a friend and your friend says “Hey, I heard you met someone new last night.” (Your potential character). “What is her/his name?”

You respond, “Johnny.”

Your friend, “Oo Johnny, tell me about him. What does he look like?”

“Well, he’s tall. Handsome, but not too handsome. He’s not like a model or anything, just a normal good-looking guy.”

That’s okay but it’s not good.

“What color are his eyes?”

“His eyes are light brown.”

“Jawline?”

“Uh, his jaw isn’t too pronounced, pretty normal I guess. Oh! But his eyebrows are thicker than most men.”

Good, good. Getting better.

“Tell me about his personality.”

“Well, he’s kind and caring. He drinks wayyyyy tooooo much though.”

“Wait, if he drinks too much then how do you know he’s kind?”

Bingo. Now we have started to create a conversation about the character. I would encourage anyone to do this in-depth exercise or similar ones to help you think through who your character really is.

One, it’s fun and two, in order to smoothly convince your reader that your character is real, you need to know this character enough to tell your friends about them.

So, now we’ve gotten to another good point.

Your friend just asked the golden question and the question we must ask ourselves. How will my reader know they are kind?

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How do you know anyone is actually who they say they are?

Simple: observe them.

If someone told me every day for a month that they love to write but never actually wrote anything whenever I inquired of them about it, one might question whether they actually don’t like writing all that much, or they enjoy doing something else more. Because in theory if someone really likes something they’ll make time for it, even it’s just one minute a day. If someone can’t spend 60 seconds a day doing something, maybe they don’t actually like it as much as they thought they did, or they just don’t find it important enough to prioritize.

If someone can’t spend 60 seconds a day doing something, maybe they don’t enjoy or find that thing as important as they thought they did. Click to Tweet

So, how can I convince myself and my reader that Johnny is kind?

I’m going to create a scene where we observe that johnny is kind.

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Tips to Reveal a Character’s Personality: #5

Create the scene.

So here’s a quick scene that shows that even though Johnny drinks too much, he is kind in nature.

The scene:

Johnny left the bar late that night. He had his normal six, but after his eleventh, he couldn’t remember how many he actually had.

By the time he made it to his door he had sobered up a little from the time it took him to walk home but he thought it was 1:00 AM. It was closer to 4:00.

When he tried to quietly stumble through the door, he knocked over the plant that he had just bought last week to replace the other plant he knocked over previously.

“Crap,” popped out his mouth in a loud whisper.

He starred at it for a long moment and shook his head.

He stumbled and fumbled his way to the kitchen and took about 5 minutes to get a glass of water which he gulped down in seconds. He burped and made his way to the couch so he could enjoy passing out to some television. That would help drown out his thoughts.

He not-so-gracefully made his way back to the couch and plopped onto his favorite recliner.

Before he could find the remote he heard a noise from the steps. “Crap,” he whispered again.

“Dad?” It was Susan, his sixteen-year-old daughter.

“Hey, honeeeeey!” He was still whispering and slurred.

“Dad? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, honey. J-usts peachy.” He smiled a dumb grin that wasn’t hiding anything. “I didn’t meea-n touh wake youh. Sorry sweetieee.”

“You really shouldn’t be drinking too much, Dad.” She was cold.

“Aw, I know, honey.”

“And you need to be getting more sleep. Did you know it’s 4 am?” She kept her stern tone.

“Crap, I thought it wauhss 1:00. I’m s-so ssorry, honey.”

She let out a disappointed sigh, “Did you break something?”

“I’m s-so sorryyea.” His cracked as He began to cry a little. “I broke your new plant. I’ll get you a new one. I promissse.”

“It’s fine dad. I don’t want another one.” She kept her cold demeanor.

“I’m so sorry. s-s-sweetie.” He held back his cry but teared up more. “Do you want to go out for ice cream this-sweekends?

“I don’t think so, dad. Get some sleep. I’m going back to bed now.”

“Oh okay, honey.” His voice cracked again with shame and remorse. “Sleep tight, don’t let the bugs bite you.”

She walked back up the stairs without turning back, a little perturbed at her father.

Johhny never turned on the television. He just cried a little, ashamed of himself. He missed Lora as he passed out.”

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In this scene, we didn’t hit all of our listed traits. That’s intentional. Instead, I’d keep your list handy and create scenes trying to display at least one. But if others flow into it naturally, that’s great too.

From just observing this one scene, one could start to think that Johnny might be a habitual drinker. One might also start to think that he is kind. He could have been an angry drunk, but instead, we observe him being nice and kind in the scenario even though his daughter gives him a hard time and seems to resent his choices.

We also see that Johnny is sad, and one might start to question who Lora is who was introduced in the scene at the end. Lora might be his wife. Maybe she has left him, or passed away? (It’s good to create questions like these in your reader’s mind that you will answer later. But for this example’s purposes, we can at least start to see that Johnny might be kind, sad and a regretful drunk.

Now, of course, this is just a rough draft and it would be edited and read over several times by several or more people before hitting an audience, but the idea and practice are good, helpful and true.

5 Tips to Reveal a Character’s Personality Smoothly

So for your characters:

Try to make a quick simple list of traits
Write about them simply as if you were telling a friend
Create scenes that convince yourself and others that your character truly does possess these traits, without stating it straight out.

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5 Tips to Reveal a Character’s Personality Smoothly

Now you are on your way to being a smooth operator.

If you have done this setup well, your reader won’t be working to find out what your characters’ personalities are.

They will be enjoying your writing and storytelling abilities as they gobble it up off your pages of strategically laid out scenes that give a great mental picture of who your characters are.

Like I mentioned before characterization, well done is more like a marinated meat than a buffet. The more time it has to soak up the juices, the better.

You might not want to overload them with information about your character as if you just handed them an official brief on the character. Save that for the secret agents.

Take your time and show who your character is over much time and many scenes along the way.

This isn’t to say that your character can’t change along the way either (in fact, they should change in some way), but that change could make some of your other traits even stronger.

For example: Johnny could decide to quit drinking because he loves his daughter. This will strengthen the fact that he is kind and add that he is caring more about others (his daughter) than himself and his own desires.

Take your time to create scenes that intentionally display your character’s traits without listing them straight out. Present who your characters are through scenes and dialogue. Explain without explaining.

Put in the hard work so your readers don’t have to.

I hope this helps!

We hope you enjoyed 5 Tips to Reveal a Character’s Personality Smoothly and that it helps you to create characters and scenes that are engaging and fun for your reader.

Happy writing!

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5 Tips to Reveal a Character’s Personality Smoothly

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