How to Get Your Characters to Reveal More
When you write about characters, whether they are lounging in bed or sitting at a farmhouse table having dinner, you write about relationships. You write about entrainment. What they feel and think, their loves, hates, jealousies, power plays, regrets, betrayals, and loyalties comes out through what they choose to surround themselves.
Making use of this selected environment that purposely backgrounds your character can bring your story to life in a new way.
Painters call this surrounding the “negative space.” Negative in this context does not mean bad: it’s simply the atmosphere that embraces objects but is not them.
If you haven’t heard this term before, if you can’t imagine how it applies to writing, read on. I learned its power first in an art class. Then began to use it in my writing with astonishing results.
Power of negative space
I leaned the power of negative space as a young art student.
I was in painting class one day, struggling with a color study: one antique white vase on a blue cloth near two lemons. The still life was lit from the side by a halogen. It glowed.
My teacher gave us the assignment: do not realistically depict the vase and the fruit. Instead, explore the negative space—what was not the objects but what surrounded them.
I had no idea what this meant. Ever the rebel, I ignored her words. The objects were too amazing to not paint. I starting sketching the shape of the vase onto my canvas.
After half an hour, I stalled. Yes, I had drawn a very nice vase. The lemons were appropriately lemon-like in shape. But the painting failed to capture that ethereal glow I saw with my eyes.
These moments in a creative life! You hit the wall, hard. You come that close to scraping your project, maybe your future as an artist. Your mind natters away at how terrible you are. Why bother, right?
Luckily, my teacher knew these moments well. She stepped close to my easel, gave me a quirky smile, and asked me to step back.
“Squint at it,” she said. “What else do you see, beyond the vase and lemons?”
Nothing, I thought. The wall behind them. The rickety table they sat on. The metal hood of the halogen.
She shook her head. “Look at the atmosphere, the air around those objects. Consider its light as a reality, not just a background. You’re after showing the quality of these objects, right?'“
That was the glow I was missing. I nodded.
“When you’re unable to capture the essence of something, focus on what surrounds it. This is the negative space, and it often defines your object more accurately than the object defines itself.”
Surroundings show the essence
By not really paying attention to the people themselves, by exploring what surrounds them, I was able to translate this pivotal art lesson to my writing life. You may learn, if you try this simple technique, that it’s true: characters are defined by what they entrain with. What they love and surround themselves with.
In that painting, after my teacher’s help, I caught the flow. The simple vase and those bright yellow lemons now shimmered on my painting. I simply ignored them as objects and focused on what encircled them—the atmosphere that gave them shape and structure.
That’s negative space. I was thrilled, years later, when I tried it with story.
What do your characters entrain with?
Characters in fiction and nonfiction entrain with people (who they love, hang with, can’t stand). They entrain with beloved pets. They entrain with things (their chairs and soup bowls, photos on the wall, a rug by the door). They entrain with color and light and music and movement. It brings them to life.
When I visit the home or office of someone new to me, I study their space. Do you do this, even unconsciously? It’s slightly intrusive, perhaps. But the small details I notice, clue me into this person, more than anything they could tell me outright.
Consider films: settings are not just a room, but a reflection of the character who occupies that space. We recently watched The Interpreter, with Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman (highly recommended!). Kidman’s character is a white South African, working as an interpreter at the U.N. Her NYC apartment is filled with the country she left behind to move to the States. Very little in her environment reflects any entrainment with America, her adopted country, and we later learn why. Her losses and longings, her real loves, are shown to us in the very first scene in that apartment, as the camera scans the masks on the walls, the photographs, the weavings. The music she plays.
Her character is presented to us in fullness that we don’t get from her dialogue, actions, or movements. We get this character through what is not her.
People hide themselves
We all hide. Due to damage or intrusion by others, we hide what we love and sometimes we hide what we feel, if the emotions are strong or not acceptable. But that means we are only revealing a curated part of ourselves.
In real life, this promotes safety. On the page, it promotes stereotype.
Writers must work to find what’s not being said about the character. We explore the negative space that shows them wholly—beyond what they might tell us.
It’s not always easy to access, though. I use a variety of techniques.
All interactions must count
Aside from studying films for their negative space clues, it’s a fascinating exercise to read a book and make note of all the relationships for just one character in just one chapter.
I took a break from literary fiction this month. I wanted to indulge in an epic fantasy series, totally not my usual. I never really got into this genre (save for Game of Thrones, back when). But someone recommended Sarah Maas’s Court of Thorn and Roses series, and I got hooked. But I also studied how Maas reveals her characters through their negative space.
She depicts a character’s loves in various forms. We see romantic to familial interests, we see enemies and possible friends. We see environment very clearly shown (she’s aces at colors, textures, smells of a room, for instance).
She’s good at showing these loves and hates in every single interaction in her stories, which is what impressed me.
And the unique problems she invents—often a surprise. Mostly created by their relationships.
Listing the entrainments
Once I finished book five, I began a list: choosing one primary player, I scanned for every person, setting detail, or object met in each chapter, then examined why Maas might have chosen it to show an aspect of the person.
More often than not, she scored. Each interaction gave me a tangible clue about the character. How much do they hide, how much do they reveal?
I don’t read this genre much because it can get repetitive—especially in series—and repetition is predictable and steals my enjoyment. But I still came away with admiration for her skill. It’s work to be so down to detail, to make every single thing count. Lots of editing goes into that.
Subtext is a term used with dialogue—what’s not being said often speaks louder than what is. I consider negative space as subtext too. Negative space, what surrounds a character, speaks louder than many of the traditional ways we writers use to show our players onstage.
Collage
A final successful way to explore the negative space is via collage.
I choose colors, Pinterest images, shapes, hats and shoes, animals and objects that hint at who they are beyond how they present themselves. I do this for every one of my characters in every story I write. When I file my writer’s notebook for each finished book, as I’m doing now for my recent novel, Last Bets, I study the collages to see how they ended up aligning.
I made Rosie and Elly’s collages years ago, when I first began exploring their negative space elements. Now it’s eerie to see how close the final versions of these character came to those images I randomly chose.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Choose a scene that’s not quite coming together, in terms of how your character is revealed. Like my painting of the vase and lemons, it may not glow sufficiently. Ask the following four questions about the character in this specific scene.
Where are they standing in relation to this person, place, object?
What gesture or facial expression are they showing?
What’s their tone of voice as they interact?
How are they holding their body?
Or choose a well-working scene and follow my prompt given above: list every person, place, and beloved object your character encounters onstage.
Then ask: What might be missing? What might be too much to deliver in that moment?