A character is a lens through which actions, objectives, relationships (etc) are viewed.
The combination of these factors gives any of the characters an individual perspective with regard to the narrative and of course determines the actions and reactions of that character.
Character Sketching is the practice of writing a scene out from inside that perspective — following one character through the events as they experience them, in the vocabulary they think in, with everything they cannot see left out.
How does 'Character Sketching' work?
Setting out different characters' perspectives at any point in a narrative, provides an excellent base for the creative development of a work.
This technique has the additional benefits of helping to create and flesh out characters - and also to develop the voice and characteristic dialogue of a character.
Character Sketching begins with a specific idea (i.e. a subject, concept, theme, direction, belief that is the focus of your work).
The Character Sketching technique is then used to add general ideas (i.e. diverse, different and disparate ideas derived from creative thinking) to this specific idea.
The combination of the specific and the general will lead to a potential scenario (point-of-departure) for a creative work.
The lens is a way of noticing, not an opinion
A character does not observe a room neutrally. A joiner reads the joints. A farmer reads the weather in the light. A decorator reads the ground beneath the paint. A lens is a trained way of noticing, and it works on the page because it is involuntary — the character could not set it aside if they wished to.
This is why the technique produces voice rather than description. Philosophy arrives through profession: one compressed line of professional observation will do more work than a paragraph of stated belief.
The test: could this observation have been made by any competent narrator? If the answer is yes, there is a narrator in the passage, not a character.
The sketching card
Five lines, filled in before a word of the passage is written. It takes a minute, and it is the whole technique.
Character — who is crossing this scene.
Objective — what they want out of it, in a single clause.
Lens — the trained way of noticing they cannot switch off.
Register — the working vocabulary their thoughts arrive in: joinery, weather, contracts, pigment, debts, tides.
Blind spot — what this lens guarantees they will miss.
The fifth line is the one most often left out, and it is where the drama comes from. A lens is partial by definition, and the reader sees round the edge of it. That gap between what the character notices and what the reader can work out is dramatic irony — produced automatically, simply by writing from inside one person at a time.
Running the technique
One. Choose the scene at its point of maximum pressure. A character sketched at rest produces a description; a character sketched at the moment their plan begins to fail produces a person.
Two. Fill in the five lines of the card. Do not negotiate with them afterwards.
Three. Write three hundred words from inside the character, with no narrator permitted. Everything in the passage must be something this character would notice, in the words they would notice it in.
Four. Mark every sentence that could have been written by anybody, and cut it. What survives is the voice.
Five. Run the same scene again from a second character, and read the two together. What each of them gets wrong about the other is usually the plot.
Four ways to write the sketch out
The same card can be discharged in several forms, and each yields different material.
The narrated passage. Close third person, the character's lens carrying the prose. The standard form, and the one that goes straight into the draft.
The character's own record. A diary, a letter, a report, a minute of a meeting. The strongest of the four for voice, because a character writing about themselves is also deciding what the record will say — and the distance between the two is character.
Paired sketches. The same events written twice, from two characters in turn. Neither passage need ever be used; the value is in the collision.
The unwritten sketch. What the character would never set down, in any form, for anyone. This generates the subtext the finished scene can then be built to withhold.
Illustration: Character Sketching
The following are examples of passages from The Tailor that were facilitated with the Character Sketching Creative Technique:
* * * *
Character: Anjali
Objective: Maintain control
Lens: Nothing has changed
Register: The workroom — cut, colour, design; the river finding a new course
Blind spot: What her composure is doing to the woman opposite her
Anjali entered the room as if this were just another off-the-shelf encounter between the women, placing the files she was carrying on the cupboards to the right of the entrance door. Panya, who had remained seated as that was the pattern to be followed, was shaken by the unexpected normality of Anjali's approach, and bought herself some time by asking, 'How did it go?'
'I could feel that the messages were striking home,' Anjali answered in a measured manner. 'You know when the cut and colour and fearlessness of the design is there. One of the Directors around the meeting room table became quite irritated. It was as if he knew that the river was flowing on a new course, in a new direction, and he could do nothing to stop it. His arguments were soon swept away by the endorsements from the other Directors.'
* * * *
Character: Panya
Objective: Maintain control
Lens: Fear of the consequences of change
Register: The pattern, the foundation, alteration and repair — the tailoring of a settled world
Blind spot: That the pattern she is working to no longer fits what is in front of her
Panya had regained her poise and was back on script. 'You are being pulled out of shape by your ambition,' she said deliberately but serenely. 'There is no foundation to this work. It can take us nowhere. You have made our tailoring subversive. This obsession has corrupted you like a fungus. It is rotting away the base that we have worked too hard to fasten in place.'
Panya was now on her feet. She would work to the pattern - or at least as closely to the pattern as this unfurling affair would allow.
'The role of the Tailor is to sew comfort into the world,' she said with a rehearsed delivery. 'If your fashion leads to this outcome of so much upheaval and conflict, what is the good of it?'
'Alteration and repair fit within the structure of this valley and the lives of the people who live here. The fabrication of your design can only be forged in a hot fire of change and destruction. The cost is too high for this little tailoring business to even consider.'
Illustration: the character's own record
The second of the four forms, taken from Spectrum – The Grey Law (work in progress). Angela Owen is a decorator, and the scene is a meeting she has planned carefully and then watched come apart. She is writing it up the same evening.
Note what the form adds. Angela is not only recording the meeting — she is deciding what the record of it will be, and the reader can see her doing it.
* * * *
Character: Angela Owen
Objective: Establish an account she can stand behind
Lens: A decorator's eye for a scheme — what holds the picture together, and where it fails
Register: Grounds, coats, light, balance; standing back from the wall before returning to it
Blind spot: That the account she is composing is also an alibi
I am writing this down while I can still put it in order. Tomorrow it will have settled into whatever shape I have given it tonight, and I would rather that shape were accurate.
I have been trying to fix the moment it turned. It was not Helen's first answer, which was sharper than agreed but defensible; I could still have carried it. It was before that. She had stopped looking at the Examiner and she was looking past my shoulder at the door, and I thought she had heard someone on the stair and was afraid. She was not afraid. I have seen Helen afraid.
After that she went where I could not follow. Each time she spoke I had a place to stand ready for her and each time she stepped past it. I could feel the scheme going: the blue holds the picture, the red carries the eye, and there comes a point in any scheme where one colour must carry the weight — but not where the red simply cuts loose and leaves the rest of the wall to explain itself.
She has let me stand in front of a Fraternity and say a thing she knew to be
Let me put that differently. The account I gave the Responsible Brother is not true, and I gave it in good faith, and there is no version of what happens next in which anyone will care about the distinction.
If I am asked — by the Responsible Brother, by the Chair of the Decorators, by anyone who was not in the room — I shall say that the difference between Helen and me was as visible as it was because it needed to be visible. That a Fraternity which appears to speak with one voice on a matter like this is a Fraternity nobody will believe. That we knew what we were doing.
I have read that back twice. I cannot tell whether it is a lie.
What to look for when it is working
The passage could not be reassigned to another character without rewriting every sentence.
The character's profession is doing the thinking, not decorating the thinking.
Something true is visible to the reader that the character has not noticed.
Nothing in the passage is explained to the reader that the character would have had no reason to explain.