This week, I'm going to discuss how to reveal a character's personality throughout the story. Next week, I'm going to discuss four types of characters. With that in mind, the process of writing and unveiling a character's personality is called characterization. There are two forms: indirect and direct.
Indirect characterization is when you reveal what the character is like through how they dress, how they talk, what their private thoughts and feelings are, their effect on others or through their actions. An example would be writing that a character causes others around them to feel tense and terrified, which might indicate that the character is an unkind individual. Direct characterization concerns directly telling your audience what the character is like. For example, you state that the character is kind, intelligent, arrogant, etc.
When writing, you can use one or the other, or you can utilize both of them. It depends on your preference. For example, you can write about a character who skips around daily and loves to pick flowers but also write that the character is cruel. If you only had included indirect characterization, your readers might think that this character is a happy-go-lucky kind of person, but since you directly told them that the character is mean, they understand that there's more to this character than meets the eye. But, you could've left the direct characterization out of the example and slowly reveal that the character is actually heartless rather than directly telling the readers. This might add more mystery to the character. Again, it's based on preference and how you want your story to carry along.
As a side note, posts might be shorter than usual since I've started back up in school. Some weeks might be longer again, depending on the workload I receive. Anyway, I hope that this helps!
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