As I noted in my previous article, “Stock Characters We Inherit, and What to Do With Them,” stock characters and archetypes can provide useful foundations for building characters. To truly challenge stereotypes, however, writers must learn to select and employ what, in Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway calls “significant details.”
As a writer, your job is to flesh out your characters, even the minor ones, with enough nuance and texture that a reader believes in them as people. To do that, you have to work through several modes of characterization at once. We need to see, hear, and smell a character. We need to feel their presence in a room. We need to watch how they move, whether it’s a muscle working in the jaw or the particular way someone throws a punch. We need to hear them speak: the words they reach for and the order they put them in. We need to know what they think, and whether that thought lines up with what they say and do. When the scene allows it, we should also catch what other characters make of them, and whatever the narrator gives away without saying it directly. All of these choices are details, and their careful selection is what creates verisimilitude: characters and scenes that are multi-dimensional and therefore believable.
A character only comes alive detail by detail. Building a scene means blending these modes of characterization until you get what novelist John Gardner, in his craft book The Art of Fiction, called a “vivid and continuous fictional dream” for the reader. You interrupt that dream the moment a poorly chosen detail or lack of detail makes us question the believability of the character or the events.
Janet Burroway draws a distinction between a concrete detail and a significant one. A detail is concrete if it appeals to one of the five senses. It becomes significant when it also conveys an idea or judgment. Burroway’s example, "The windowsill was green," is concrete: we can see it. The windowsill was shedding flakes of fungus-green paint is both concrete and significant because it conveys the idea that the paint is old and suggests the judgment that the color is ugly.
Significant details move us beyond the skeletal archetype and toward a more complex dynamic between how a character is perceived and who that character may actually be. This reflects our experience of trying to understand one another in life: an implicit acknowledgment that people are deeper and more complicated than they initially appear.
That judgment may be filtered through a character’s perspective, revealing how the character perceives the world, or it may emerge from the narration itself, creating a tonal shading that more indirectly reveals the consciousness shaping the story. Either way, the selection of details contributes to characterization. Significant details move us beyond the skeletal archetype and toward a more complex dynamic between how a character is perceived and who that character may actually be. This reflects our experience of trying to understand one another in life: an implicit acknowledgment that people are deeper and more complicated than they initially appear. By creating space between perception and reality, the careful selection of significant details—whether in constructing a character or laying out a scene—can help steer a writer away from stereotyping.
A stereotype works by handing readers a category and letting that category do all the communicating. This often happens when a writer relies on familiar clusters of clichéd traits: the fiery, sexually available redhead; the cold, ambitious career woman; the soft-spoken, self-sacrificing mother; the brooding, emotionally unavailable man; the flamboyant, fashion-conscious best friend. Such shorthand encourages readers to substitute a familiar type for an individual character. One way to resist it—and, more generally, flat writing—is to replace clichéd details with fresher, more particular ones. Another is to strip the character back to the underlying archetype or narrative function, then build the character outward again using details that complicate, contradict, or depart from the conventional version of that type. Filtering those details through a particular perspective can further individualize the character by revealing not only who is being observed but also the consciousness doing the observing.
Consider this example, which is largely free of character perspective and judgment: Terry Landon was twenty-two, six feet four inches tall, and broad-shouldered. He had medium-length, thick blond hair, tanned skin, blue eyes, and long eyelashes. Every detail is concrete and clear, but none is significant. Terry could be a romantic lead assembled from familiar shorthand—the specifications are all there: height, build, coloring. Yet the description was shaped neither for one particular person nor by one particular consciousness. It remains an inventory of traits, revealing little about the character being observed or the narrator or character doing the observing.
You can improve a flat characterization that tips toward stereotype not just by adding more detail but by selecting details that reveal something about both the observed and the observer. Take this version of Terry, seen by someone who finds him threatening:
Terry Landon filled the doorway, one broad shoulder nearly grazing the frame. His blond hair was combed neatly across his skull and back from his tanned face, but a muscle worked in his jaw, and his forearm tightened as his hand closed around the doorknob. He did not enter. He simply stood there, blocking the way, his icy eyes fixed on me without blinking.
Now take a version seen by someone in love with him:
Terry always forgot to duck beneath the kitchen doorway until the last second. The sun had lightened his hair at the temples, and when he smiled, one corner of his mouth lifted before the other. I noticed the small scar beneath his chin, the pale line across one knuckle as his hand gripped the doorknob, and the way his sea-blue eyes narrowed when he laughed.
In each version, we learn more about Terry and about the person observing him. The physical facts change only slightly, but the selection of details does, drawing us into something that feels more like an authentic human encounter. By acknowledging the flaws, biases, desires, contradictions, and limitations of both the observer and the observed, this movement toward particularity creates a more complex experience for the reader—one that resists easy categorization, complicates automatic emotional responses, and avoids stereotyping.
Take a scene from Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt. Two women meet for the first time across a department-store counter. Notice how Highsmith uses significant details to create a believable, complex first encounter between two women who will—spoiler alert—become lovers:
Their eyes met at the same instant, Therese glancing up from a box she was opening, and the woman just turning her head so she looked directly at Therese. She was tall and fair, her long figure graceful in the loose fur coat that she held open with a hand on her waist. Her eyes were gray, colorless, yet dominant as light or fire, and, caught by them, Therese could not look away. She heard the customer in front of her repeat a question, and Therese stood there, mute. The woman was looking at Therese, too, with a preoccupied expression, as if half her mind were on whatever it was she meant to buy here, and though there were a number of salesgirls between them, Therese felt sure the woman would come to her. Then Therese saw her walk slowly toward the counter, heard her heart stumble to catch up with the moment it had let pass, and felt her face grow hot as the woman came nearer and nearer.
“May I see one of those valises?” the woman asked, and leaned on the counter, looking down through the glass top.
The damaged valise lay only a yard away. Therese turned around and got a box from the bottom of a stack, a box that had never been opened. When she stood up, the woman was looking at her with the calm gray eyes that Therese could neither quite face nor look away from.
“That’s the one I like, but I don’t suppose I can have it, can I?” she said, nodding toward the brown valise in the show window behind Therese.
Her eyebrows were blonde, curving around the bend of her forehead. Her mouth was as wise as her eyes, Therese thought, and her voice was like her coat, rich and supple, and somehow full of secrets.
Highsmith never tells us that Therese is falling for this woman. She lets the details communicate it: the gray eyes, the loose fur coat held open with one hand, the blonde eyebrows curving around the forehead. Movement carries information, too. The woman doesn’t rush the counter but approaches slowly, prolonging Therese’s anticipation as the distance between them closes. Even an offhand question about a valise acquires tension when followed by: “That’s the one I like, but I don’t suppose I can have it, can I?” Highsmith also lets us into Therese’s body without explanation: a heart stumbling to catch up, a face going hot. By the time the passage arrives at “her voice was like her coat, rich and supple, and somehow full of secrets,” we understand what Therese is feeling, though Highsmith has never stated it.
Notice how these details belong specifically to this scene. The coat, the valise, the gray eyes “dominant as light or fire,” the stumbling heart, the heated face, and the “rich and supple” voice create a particular woman as Therese perceives her at a particular moment. That specificity keeps the scene from sliding into type. There is no “icy blonde” or “femme fatale”; we get the woman rather than the category.
Next week, in the final installment of this series, I’ll discuss the importance of sensitivity readers and the ways their role is sometimes misunderstood.
Washington, D.C., September 1964.
Judy Nightingale and Philippa Dolittle, née Watson, were once each other’s whole world. They haven’t spoken in years. Then Judy’s latest novel, The Savage Kind, drags their shared past into public view and forces an uneasy reunion.
Then comes the shock: Judy’s estranged birth mother—the woman who once tried to poison them both—has died, leaving her everything. A house. A fortune. A staff that watches her too closely. Soon after, letters begin arriving, each signed “Mother” and enclosing pages from Judy’s long-lost radio play, “Frankenstein’s Sister.” Warnings of revenge from beyond the grave.
The warnings turn real. After a dinner party thick with old grievances, a guest is dead, and Judy’s Mercedes is found in a ravine, its brake line cut. Judy is the intended victim.
She turns to the only person who ever truly understood her: Philippa, now married with a child, her past buried beneath a life she has worked hard not to examine. Together they follow the letters back toward everything they never resolved and toward a killer who has been patient for a very long time . . . and still writing letters.
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