On Writing Romance_ How to Craft a Novel That Sells - Leigh Michaels [75]
A moment later, he hurls the wheel on the floor, and it rolls away, to almost exactly the same place. ...
"Right," I say after a pause. "Right. Well ... enjoy your flight."
This woman proves herself a heroine when the kid flings the toy a second time, and she doesn't lose her temper. (She also doesn't fetch it a second time, which makes it pretty clear she's not a wimp.)
• Through another character's thoughts. This technique is easy and tempting, but the character doing the thinking should be a major character, not a minor
one. Having the hero think about the heroine can be useful, but allowing the heroine's hairdresser to characterize her takes the focus off the main story. In Deborah Hale's Regency novella Cupid Goes to Gretna, the hero's thoughts linger over the heroine just as his gaze does:
As he let his gaze linger over Miss Ivy, Oliver wasn't so sure. In sleep her features had taken on a soft, ingenuous caste that accorded well with her temperament. Like a child, she was full to the brim of high spirits and sunny optimism without a thought to spare for the harsh practicalities of life or the troublesome consequences of her impulsive actions.
Elsewhere in the story, we've seen Miss Ivy's high spirits and sunny optimism for ourselves, but now we know how the hero views her, too.
• Through another character's words. What one person says about another can't always be taken at face value, but the opinion is likely to be straightforward and reasonably honest. Whether it's true is a different matter, because that depends on the insight of the person who's talking. In either case, however, the readers get a better picture of the person who's the subject of the conversation. In her single-title contemporary First Lady, Susan Elizabeth Phillips gives a thumbnail characterization of a character through the hero's words:
The attorney glanced at the folder, then looked back up at Mat. "You admit your ex-wife was pregnant with the older girl when you married her."
"... Sandy told me the kid was mine, and I believed her until ... one of her girlfriends told me the truth. ..."
"You sent her money for a number of years."...
"Sentiment. Sandy had a good heart; she just wasn't too discriminating about who she slept with."
Of course, while Mat's telling us about his late ex-wife, he's saying quite a bit about himself as well.
• Through another character's actions. If a character walks through a room and the dog cringes to get out of her way, nobody needs to say much about the kind of person that character is. Without resorting to graphic violence, Roxanne Rustand uses a daughter's reactions to her abusive father to give us a clear picture of him in her long contemporary category romance A Montana Family.
He turned and started down the hill, one meaty hand clenched tight as a tourniquet around her arm.
She tried to escape into that secret place where she didn't feel the pain. ... She knew all too well what awaited her in that house. ...
She charged forward and rammed into her father's back. ... And then she ran for her life.
This daughter's reaction—first attempting to mentally distance herself, then resorting to physical violence, and then fleeing—clearly shows what sort of man her father is.
• Through physical description. This is probably the most-used characterization technique—especially by inexperienced authors—and one of the least effective. It's particularly useless when the description is phrased in generalities or when
it is overly detailed. Standards of beauty vary, so merely saying, "She was beautiful" will mean very different things to different people. But listing the details that mean beauty to you may turn off readers with a different definition.
When a point-of-view character describes another character, the readers get a picture of both of them, as shown in Arlene James's inspirational romance Deck the Halls-.
He backed up a step ... and took in the whole of her