From The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller:

At the edge of the field, by the shadow-line of the hedge, a dog, or something like a dog, raised its head into the light, studied them a moment, the two women upright in the bareness of the field, then dropped out of sight again, soundlessly.

This sentence ends a chapter. The dog, or something like a dog, doesn’t reappear. It adds menace and tension to the novel, partly because of the situation (two pregnant women in a cold, snow-covered field), but also because of the word choices Miller has made. “Edge,” “shadow,” “into the light,” “studied,” “bareness,” “out of sight,” and “soundlessly,” for example. Most of all, the point of view allows readers to know something that might be scary that the characters do not.

Two exercises, then. First, can we use the same words Miller does to create the opposite feeling for readers? We might allow ourselves to add words or see if we can change only their order. How are things different if the women watch the dog, for example? Second, how might we use the technique Miller uses? In other words, what can we let readers know that characters do not? How might this alarm readers, or how might it please them?

Consider these sentences from Hemlock and Silver by T. Kingfisher: “I thought long and hard about Isobel telling me to be tactful. But Isobel was what she was, and I was what I was, and if thirty-odd years and a lot of poison hadn’t changed that, I might as well embrace it. Tact is overrated anyway. And if I started being tactful now, he’d probably die of shock.” The italics are in the original.

I think decisions characterize, but in addition to their actions, what a character refuses to do can characterize them. Melville’s Bartleby is one example of this. In the paragraph above, the main character makes a decision and refuses to change. On one level, they reject their arc. On another, they remain true to themselves against social and familial pressure and perhaps at odds with gender norms.

So, what will your character decide not to do? How might that put them at odds with larger social forces around them? In what ways might it encourage conformity? (See Frank Lentricchia’s Criticism and Social Change, pages 102-107 espeically, for more.)

Consider this sentence from Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel:

Artemis Victor has no idea what it takes to own a house, but she knows what it takes to beat other people, which is what owning property seems like, beating other people at owning a piece of the earth and making that piece of earth yours, not to be shared with other people, because the owning of the property is a product of your victory over other humans, as in, you won more dollars than them so now this slice of land is yours for keeps.

Artemis is one of the young women boxers in Bullwinkel’s novel. This one-sentence summary of her appears early in one of the sections of the book in which she boxes. The novel is organized like a March Madness bracket, with each pairing of characters having a winner that moves on to the next pairing until finally the two characters most likely to win box each other. One thing to learn from Bullwinkel is the value of a clear organizational structure for a novel, especially one with many characters.

The sentence above is its own paragraph. It stands out on the page. It also reveals key elements of one character, specifically. It suggests what she does not know and how she thinks about the world. This is stated directly and succinctly. As readers learn more about the character, such as her feelings about her sisters, for example, Artemis becomes more rounded. So, one technique for writing a round character is a concise, memorable sentence juxtaposed with contrasting scenes. The sharper the contrast between the scenes and summary, the more sides the character will seem to have and the better readers will get to know them.

Lorna Crozier’s prose poem “Vituperative” is an excellent example of several techniques. It also effectively models a structure. The title tells readers the name of the poem, and the body shows the title. This showing includes images driven by sensory language, synonyms, and examples. Poetic strategies include alliteration. Rather than the happy ending readers might be trained to expect, consistent with its title, the prose poem doubles down on its bitterness.

Simple and powerful.