Eben has already written about the kinds of characters we want to see in your writing, but this week, while I was reading Orson Scott Card’s book dedicated to creating compelling characters, I found a nugget of his writerly advice that I felt deserved to be shared.
People become, in our minds, what we see them do… This is also the easiest form of characterization. If your character steals something, we’ll know she’s a thief… If your character gets a phone call and goes off to teach a third-grade class, we’ll know she’s a substitute teacher. If he tells two people opposite versions of the same story, we’ll know he’s a liar or a hypocrite.
Orson Scott Card, from Characters & Viewpoint Card (1988)
The essence of this quote is that characters are the things they do. This focus on the verb (particularly the transitive, preterite verb) helps not only establish character but also generate conflict, progress the plot, and reveal that all these elements are really one element.
The story that can be talked about is not the true Story and all that.
Many of the stories we get are static. They sit and ponder themselves for a while, their characters simply being described or simply describing something they see. If there is plot, it is summarized in exposition, which is really a more abstract way for a character or a narrator to describe something they are seeing. Very few submitted stories actually involve a character doing something.
In other words: these stories tell, not show.
But actually, characters who perform multiple, well-chosen verbs actually need very little space on the page to become fully fleshed out. As an example, these were some of the characters I encountered when I recently locked myself out of the apartment.
Normally, if I lock myself out, I punch a code into the lockbox on the front door and use the master key to access my room. Then I put the master key back. But this time, the master key was gone, and I was shit out of luck.
While I waited on the curb outside my building, I met an older man who came out of the other building and looked up and down the sidewalk for somebody who wasn’t there. I asked him if he knew who lived in the apartment next to mine. He hesitated, and I thought he was going to brush me off, but then he stooped closer and asked me to speak up. I repeated my question and very slowly he nodded.
“It’s, uh, not clear,” he said haltingly, “I don’t…”
I explained to him that I had been locked out of the building and he nodded again. He tried his key at my door, but it did not work. He shrugged apologetically.
“The, uh, keys used to be the same,” he explained, “Because the, uh, people in, uh, that building had to, uh, do, uh, their laundry in, uh, ours.”
Unable to help me, he went on his way. But I had gotten the idea by now to buzz the other apartments in my building to ask if they could let me into the building. I had an idea that I would ask my neighbors to let me crawl through their windows. So I clicked the buzzer on each apartment until a young man appeared at the door.
“Do you need me to let you in?” he asked.
“Oh my god, yes.”
“No problem,” he said, “Honestly, it’s no big deal. I had this happen to me already to be honest. It happens all the time. To be honest, once I figured out that my front door key would unlock my apartment door, I started to just use my front door key all the time.”
Although he had let me into the building, I still had no way of opening my own apartment. He showed me the emergency contact numbers posted in the hall above the mailboxes and said that I should call them to get myself back into my apartment. Awkwardly, I shuffled up the stairs, following him. On the second floor, we both paused. I set my laundry on the floor. He glanced back quizzically at me.
“You need anything else?” he asked.
“Actually, I was wondering if you could, you know, use your front door key on my apartment door,” I asked, “I mean I kinda hope it doesn’t work, cuz you know, that would be pretty scary, but maybe, you know, if it did…”
He stared at me.
“Could you maybe just try?”
“Uh, yeah, sure,” he said.
He put the key into my lock and jiggled it one time before he gave up.
“Yeah, kinda glad that didn’t work,” I admitted.
“You know, you could try knocking on that door,” he said, nodding at my neighbor’s door, “I remember one time the people in your apartment did that and I think they like, climbed through the window or something.”
“I was gonna do that next.”
“Cool, well, good luck then,” he said.
I sat on the steps while he unlocked his room and then shut the door. I knocked on the neighbors’ door several times, but there was no reply. Similarly, when I called the help line, no one answered. The so-called “building emergency” number was also unavailable. I sat down on the steps and resigned myself to waiting for my neighbors to show up.
A few minutes later, I heard the front door open. Hoping that it was my neighbors, I ran downstairs, but instead it was a man who lived in the basement. Still, he was at least someone else who might know something, so I caught him as he was about to go downstairs and asked him if he knew what happened to the master key.
“What master key?” he asked. “You mean the mail key? Cuz I can’t get my mail. My box is broke and I have to wait for the mailman to come and I catch him like that. Cuz if not, I gotta go down to the post office and that’s far. It’s expensive too.”
“No the ones in the lockbox.”
“Oh, shit, I don’t have the code to the lockbox,” he said. “Nah I don’t know how to help you brother. You know you can call the landlord but they gonna be closed on the weekend, and there’s also the maintenance guy who’s gotta come fix the apartment if you call him. Hold on. Lemme see if I’ve got his number for ya.”
The man scrolled through his phone. I had almost lost all hope since I already knew that the emergency helpline wouldn’t work, but hearing about a maintenance guy who would come, now that sounded more promising. The man tapped on a number in his contacts.
An automated female voice said, “Thank you for calling the Boston Unemployment Aid Office–”
He shut the phone quickly.
“Hold on, I’ve got it in here,” he said.
I watched from the stairs above him as he sorted through his emails and went back to the one he must have gotten when he moved in here. It was a classic landlord email with big blocks of text and there, highlighted in blue, the important phone numbers. He scrolled down the email chain. Then he gave me the maintenance guy’s number.
“Yeah, so call him. He’s gonna be available, but you know it could be a while. You need a place to chill? You can come down to my apartment and chill with me if you want while you’re waiting for him to show up.”
I seriously considered it. I didn’t want to stand in the hallway, but then I thought of my neighbors coming home, and I decided it would be better to stand in the hallway anyway so that I wouldn’t miss them. I thanked the man for his offer.
“Feel free to knock on my door if you need anything,” he said, “Good luck.”
Back sitting on the steps in front of my door, I called the maintenance man. It rang a few times, but just when I thought he wouldn’t answer, the phone clicked. I heard a TV show in the background. Some kind of talk-show with pundits. He asked who I was. I introduced myself, my full name and what apartment I was in. I explained I was subletting and I’d gotten myself locked out. I told him that needed help. He sounded pissed.
“Aight, well, if I come down there, it’s gonna cost you forty bucks,” he said.
“I can pay,” I said.
“You’re gonna have to pay me in cash, on arrival,” he said, “None of this, ‘My wallet is locked inside the apartment’ kinda stuff, you hear me?”
I didn’t have any cash, but I knew where to find an ATM.
“Sure, that’s fine,” I said.
“I don’t know how long it’s gonna take me to get down there,” the maintenance guy said, “I gotta go all the way down there on public transit. And you know how long the buses take, especially on a Sunday. Who knows if they’ll be on time.”
“That’s alright,” I said, “I got nowhere to be, so I’ll just wait for you until you get here.”
The maintenance guy sighed.
“Hey, you know what, let me tell you something, but you can’t tell nobody about this–”
And then he told me where the master key was.
I can’t tell you this because it scared the shit out of me the way he talked. It was like a bad drug deal. Go to this location. Turn here. Look left. See [the location of the keys]. And when I returned the keys he told me to let him hear the audio of them clattering into the location where they were being kept. Then he wanted pictures. And when he was satisfied, the maintenance man told me never to lock myself out again.
Or else.
The reason he was so pissed is because one of the realtors couldn’t work the lock box and instead settled on leaving the keys in an unsecured location for the maintenance man to find.
If this was a story I wanted to submit for publication, and I wasn’t so afraid of my maintenance man, I would have kept those final scenes as well. It would need to have some greater purpose beyond describing a small moment in my life. But I am scared of the man who can get in my apartment and this is still an inchoate short story. Still, it shows five distinct characters.
the older man from the neighboring apartment who was willing to help but unable to actually do anything,
the helpful neighbor who quickly felt imposed on,
the overly helpful unemployed basement neighbor who accidentally gave me the information I needed,
the weirdly threatening but secretly good-natured (or lazy) maintenance man who resolved my problem, and
me, the narrator, who could be alternatively described as resourceful or bumbling, depending on how a reader felt. (Certainly the maintenance man was unimpressed.)
These characters did not require much beyond their actions. I didn’t need to tell you, for instance, that the old man and the young neighbor, were both Asian, or that the old man was very tall, and the young man had a pony tail. I didn’t need to mention that downstairs neighbor wore basketball shorts and a Red Sox cap. The maintenance man existed entirely as a voice in the phone. And I, well, I didn’t need to tell you me life story for you to understand that I forgot my key doing laundry.
These facts may or may not have been self-evident, but the point is that they were either unnecessary or implied. We judge people by their actions.
Finally, it is worth noting that my understanding of the various characters was not clear until after I wrote about them. Particularly in the case of the helpful neighbor, I noticed as I was writing that his seemingly unrelated actions were adding up to a more coherent characterization than I first thought. Although I didn’t get it at the time, this “helpful” neighbor clearly wanted me to ask someone else for help.
Let your reader determine that the “helpful” neighbor felt imposed upon while you simply continue to have him refer the narrator to alternative solutions. As writers, you should forego the abstract and prioritize the concrete.
There is, however, one last piece of advice Card offers on this kind of characterization.
It’s easy—but it’s also shallow. In some stories and with some characters, this will be enough. But in most stories, as in real life, just knowing what someone does while you happen to be watching him or her isn’t enough to let you say you truly know that person.
Orson Scott Card, from Characters & Viewpoint Card (1988)
Dominique 
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