What is a Character?

This afternoon Failed Novelists were in my living room discussing what is characterisation. My biggest problem as a writer, said James, is creating characters. Specifically, he wanted in his story to express a character through the narrator, and by seeing through that person's eyes rather than self-analysis or self-description. Because analysis and description (either the "self-" variety, or of others) is the obvious way to make characters. It is also a bit like telling and not showing. That is I think why James wanted to avoid it.

He asked us to suggest books where particularly vivid characters are built up through the eyes of the narrator. I said, well this is kind of the point of all books, at least in first person. But it's something that happens over a novel length, it gains in intensity with time (how strange); so there is not a trick to doing it in a short story. Unless, as somebody pointed out, you make your character extreme in some way: a religious fundamentalist, maybe, someone who sees the world in an obviously abnormal way. I didn't think of this at the time but you could perhaps count the narrator of A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time in this group.

But I don't think I would call that character 'particularly vivid.' And now I am thinking that 'vivid' is the wrong word, that is the source of the trouble. Because what we should think of is ourselves (that is the essence of first person narrative anyway, right?). Do we have vivid characters? I take that word to mean clear-cut or well-defined, bright, easy to pick out. I don't think I am like this. Far more likely maybe that other people see me like this - people who know me less well?

I am vague. I am the narrator of my own life, and my character is expressed in the way I interact with the world (including inside my head). It is also of course formed by those interactons present and past. So in fiction I think we are going the wrong way if we are trying to build 'a vivid character.' We might do so only by making a cardboard cut-out: it's in your face but it can't speak to you. Real people are alive in their own worlds, and that is what makes up their characters. When you write, don't try to build characters: build worlds.