I’m not sure when microcharacterization becomes fully fledged characterization, and I’ve been debating whether it’s a matter of scale, if it looks different in flash than it does in longform. I don’t have a specific answer, whether it’s a phrase, a line, or a paragraph, but the microconstruction of characters always serves a function in a particular moment in a way that fully fleshed characters cannot achieve.
This morning, as I’m sitting on my dad’s couch, delighted by the birds that have come the feeder, I realized I’ve fully turned into my grandparents. It’s December in Minnesota, there’s fresh snow on the ground, and all my dad’s feeders are full. There’s two downy woodpeckers at the suet feeder, soon chased off by a slightly larger hairy woodpecker. Chickadees and cardinals and squirrels are making fast work of the three feeders hanging by the Korean lilacs. I love chickadees. They’re my favorite.
I remember first learning the term charismatic megafauna in an environmental literature class almost fifteen years ago—a term to describe elephants and tigers, lions and leopards, pandas and dolphins—large animals that have a sort of widespread popular appeal and a perceived symbolic value as a result. They’re the poster animals, the plush toys in the zoo gift store. When I asked my professor about the equivalent charismatic minifauna, he seemed confused. I said, “We don’t feel the same about moths the way we do about butterflies, or honeybees versus wasps. Nobody puts a wasp on a poster and expects it to sell.” At the time, when I Googled the term, nothing came up, neither on the internet nor in the environmental circles I was working in. It comes up on a Google search now.
Brian Doyle makes use of both the hummingbird and the blue whale in “Joyas Voladoras,” and he’s playing on the reader’s unearned, but valid, reaction to those animals in a way that leads us directly towards the insight he wants to share, a condensed flash., and I had an insight of my own while teaching this essay, in which three students wrote drafts where problematic parents played a role, but they did not wish to elaborate further. I respected that. I’d been teaching them all semester that they did not have to write what hurts, that a reader is never entitled to more of them than they’re willing to give. There are good reasons not to put particular people into scene or, into action. Sometimes we do not need or want them to occupy that much page space, but we do need a little more insight, which can be as little as a phrase, or a sentence. It does not need to be much more than that.
The ethics of are part of the ethics of creative nonfiction, writ large. I distrust anyone who says, I can write whatever I want, it’s my story. Words can cause harm—both to ourselves and to others. Writing about things—and people—that hurt can also harm us, as writers, and there are good reasons why I don’t want to give particular people that much attention, but they still need to exist as characters on the page.
Microcharacterization, then, is the small work of creating characters in a phrase, in a sentence, or other compressed space that serves three particular functions: to establish motivation and goals, to reveal conflict and complications, or to illuminate relationships. Microcharacterization differs from description in that description is static and one-dimensional. I’m not sure when microcharacterization becomes fully fledged characterization, and I’ve been debating whether it’s a matter of scale, if it looks different in flash than it does in longform. I don’t have a specific answer, whether it’s a phrase, a line, or a paragraph, but the microconstruction of characters always serves a function in a particular moment in a way that fully fleshed characters cannot achieve.
Just as Heather Sellers argues the difference between description and images as being that images have context and action, the same kind of articulation is useful here: the difference between description and microcharacterization is function—and the trick to telling the difference is looking to see what that phrase or sentence does. Often, microcharacterization is most effectively delivered—and recognizable— in relative clauses, like Debra Marquart’s characterization of her husband on the first page of The Horizontal World: “‘Is that a house?’ I asked my husband, who knows best to drive and remain quiet the closer we get to ground zero.” What makes this far more than description, however, is its function: “who knows best to drive and remain quiet the closer we get to ground zero” reveals if not a conflict, then a definite complication. We know from this first page that they are going back to Marquart’s home in North Dakota for the death of her father, but we know nothing yet about her relationship with her family, yet they’ve made this drive often enough that her husband knows to remain quiet, an action that only comes from time and repetition, and even though we don’t know if she’s asked him to remain quiet, or he’s figured it out on his own as they approach her homeplace, a place she calls ground zero, the place where things happen, or in the case of its common parlance, the site of the former Twin Towers. That in itself gives the reader a tone to the phrasing. Maybe he is quiet out of reverence, but I smell conflict. As readers, we are not entitled to any more than what the writer wants to give, but the effect of this kind of characterization is like a chord lingering in the air after the note has been struck.
Place
I once learned that Stradivarius’s instruments were so superior because the wood he used was grown during the Little Ice Age—when the climate was colder and the growth rings were smaller—and so the character of the instrument was inextricable from the time and place where the trees were grown. We know that terroir separates the flavor of food grown in different places, so why should people be any different? I have argued for years that we cannot fully know who we are unless we know where we are. When microcharacterization is constructed via place, it functions as deep mentality, and often this deep mentality is not something a character can put into words. Janet Burroway writes that “your [non]fiction must have an atmosphere because without it your characters will be unable to breathe,” and I have often adapted this into other contexts. Microcharacterization takes advantage of the kind of context that is more potent for its distillation. For example, in Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, she writes,
If Daddy’s past was more intricate to me than my own present, Mother’s was as blank as the West Texas desert she came from. She was born into the Dust Bowl, a vast flat landscape peppered with windmills and occasional cotton ranches. Instead of a kitty for a pet, she had a horny toad. She didn’t see rain fall, she said, for the first decade of her life. The sky stayed rock-white and far away.
We are always shaped by our and timescape and by the complexities involved in forming our cells from that place, particularly one as close to the bone as the Dust Bowl in Texas. In the case of Karr, the function of this microcharacterization is multipurpose. In the course of five sentences, we see a relationship between Karr and each parent and see a specific understanding of her mother. By characterizing her mother through the place she came from, where there is a fine line between deprivation and expansiveness, Karr is constructing a character whose foundation of how she understands the way the world works is filtered through what this child understands as normal. A child who grows up with a horny toad for a pet, rather than a dog or cat, gives the reader a flash of understanding into a character that would otherwise take pages to construct—and it’s worth repeating that sometimes such an extended portrait is not necessary or desirable. There’s something so arresting in the knowledge that Karr’s mother, not having seen rain for the first decade of her life, would have registered the lack as normal, not an aberration. Functionally, it is shedding a particular angle of light on how this character sees the world and the reader—and the narrator— can understand the ripple effects it causes.
Action
To distill this even further, a character in action layers function of choice into the richness of context. A character making the choice to act in a certain way, even if it is small or unconscious, often reveals a value or value system—or, at the very least, a deliberate thought process. Values are recognized as family, stability, education, or independence, and a value system is the compilation of interrelated actions we take to pursue or achieve those values. A character might value stability, but the value system consists of the structure of what they will and will not do to achieve that stability, whether it is paying their workers poorly to make a bigger profit or fully funding their Roth IRA, even if it means buying the cheaper toilet paper.
Marya Hornbacher writes in “Drifters (Interstate 35),” “Ruth smoked because she said it assured her that she was alive: her visible exhaled breath was proof.”—and readers know something about how Ruth looks at the world and lives in it, the deliberate choice not just to smoke, but the action of inhaling and exhaling for this very particular reason, because even through decades of anti-smoking legislation and messaging, Ruth has deliberately chosen to continue smoking. The function of microcharacterization via action is putting characters into moments where they deliberately shape their own lives, rather than letting the world act on them from a passive point. The function of agency cannot be overstated, simply because much of personal nonfiction contains characters making choices that hurt or perplex others, so illuminating that agency is important. Why do we do what we do?
We know something about a grandmother who drinks her morning coffee from an old souvenir mug from Six Flags, or a father who has eaten the same Lucky Charms for breakfast for the last forty years. We know who people are by the things they do and the way they do them and when it is delivered in micro form, in the spareness of a sentence or two, it illuminates something fundamental about who and what they value. Barrie Jean Borich, in “Deep Portrait: On the Atmosphere of Nonfiction Character” writes,
The sparest of actions can convey, as in photographs, the emotional resonance of the human body. A middle-aged woman at the wedding stiffens, and her spouse narrows her eyes, when a man they do not know places his hands on her bare shoulders and leans in to whisper into her ear. A newly married retiree notices her new daughter-in-law collects old teapots, then seems to forget the man she just married as she drifts into a memory about her dead husband’s antique business. The light across the spare bedroom lengthens as a man tells his adult daughter that his mother, her grandmother, never seemed to love him. Compression, attention, detail, intense witness, and authorial love for the human experience are some of what deepen the lyric portrait.
In adapting Borich’s larger idea for my purposes, I consider Michael Kleber-Diggs’ “There Was Tremendous a Softness,” in which he writes,
My grandparents moved at a precious pace, never watched television back then, mostly drank decaf, and listened to Paul Harvey and the Kansas City Royals on AM radio. They had dentures and rarely ate at restaurants or after 6:00pm. They had chifforobes and davenports. They had slipcovers. There was a small marble-topped table in the living room with one of those glass dishes on it filled with sublime ribbon candy that was so old it had gone soft.
“[They] moved at a precious pace.” While this example is a bit longer, it still functions in micro form. We have a good understanding of who his grandparents were, simply through their actions—or lack of actions—in their day and the words they used to construct their place in the world. I am reminded of my own grandparents’ living room, where they watched their beloved Minnesota Twins on the television on mute, with the radio tuned to WCCO simply because they liked the radio announcer better than the television.
Dialogue
Dialogue is, to echo Jonis Agee’s mantra, what characters do to each other. When I wrote my mother’s obituary, it began with “my mother was the kind of person who said pleased to know you, not pleased to meet you” because the subtle difference mattered to her, and the flash of this dialogue illuminates something deep in her character. Microcharacterization via dialogue is always relational: one person is always speaking to another. Often, the function is most visible in the dialogue action—not dialogue tags. It may be that the character is acting—or feeling—in opposition to what is spoken, which creates friction, and friction, which is not the same as conflict, is always interesting. Tim Cahill’s “This Teeming Ark” starts this way—:
It was like trying to drink a beer on the subway at rush hour. Jostled from all sides, I stood hard against the flimsy railing of a makeshift stall and tried to hold my place against various swirling currents of humanity.
Several of the drunks I’d been cultivating peeled out of the crowd to greet me.
“You are my friend,” said Maurice, who at nine o’clock in the morning was already in the condition I aspired to achieve. “Buy me a beer.” It was his ritual greeting.
“No way in hell,” I said, which had become my ritual reply (emphasis added).
—and presents a strongly voiced grounding within a moment of time, but in these few lines, we understand the relationship of the two men, as well as who they are individually—at least for the space of a few days on the River Congo. Cahill also layers time into the characterization, implying that these two men have said these words to each other often enough that it has become a ritual, and rituals are always based in a relationship, whether it is interactions with other people, with the divine, or with the past.
The use of dialogue in microcharacterization is more than the way we talk reveals who we are, the linguistic quirks of a family or a geographical dialect, or silence used as a weapon. In the earlier Marquart example, the lack of speech is notable for its silence. It’s my great-grandfather, who was the kind of person to say to my grandmother just as he was about to walk her down the aisle: “I give it six months.” What’s not clear, all these decades later, is whether he intended to hurt my grandmother or whether he intended to put her back up and challenge her to stick out her marriage when it got tough, just to spite him. Both could be true. Dialogue is what characters do to each other and the bruise from this single line of dialogue lingers, aches.
Appearance
There’s always a trend—Fjallraven backpacks, vat-sized Stanley mugs with straws, Esprit tote bags and neon Hypercolor shirts—but a person’s appearance is always constructed, always deliberate, which makes an author’s secondary construction even more necessary. When description has meaning, depth, purpose, and function, it moves into microcharacterization. The difference is subtle, but important. In Marya Hornbacher’s “Drifters (Interstate 35),” she writes,
There’s a picture of us a few days before we left on what we came to call our Big Adventure, sitting side by side on the stoop of an old brownstone up north. It was before our femme phase, and we are a study in contrasts: Ruth with her shaved head and Daisy Duke shorts and Birkenstocks, leaning into the camera to show off her spectacular cleavage, and me, knees akimbo in worn-out Levi’s and a James Dean T-shirt with rolled up sleeves. Ruth has a giggling flirty look, and you can tell she’s batting her eyelashes; I have a crew cut, sunglasses and a smirk. It was the early nineties, when girls shaved their heads but not their armpits and slept mostly with each other, trying to sort out what it meant to be brave (emphasis added).
The photograph remains a simple description until the final sentence, when the author steps back and creates context. Because Ruth and the narrator’s appearance is given a turn, a torque, a volta, it constructs their desires as people and gives deliberate purpose to how they find their way in the world—“trying to sort out what it meant to be brave.” Readers see this very specifically through the way these two women have constructed their appearance and the way Hornbacher has delivered it to the page.
Conclusions
In H is for Hawk, Helen MacDonald writes, “I took comfort in the blithe superiority that is the refuge of the small” and I think about hummingbirds, goshawks, and the power in compressed space. When I drive home, I count the red-tailed hawks on light posts and fence posts, hear my three-year-old niece’s disdainful “it’s a Cooper’s hawk, Mom” when my sister misidentified an aerial visitor. We lamented when the three that lived in our neighborhood nested elsewhere when the city tore up the street. Microcharacterization, at its heart, has the same delicate, intricate power, the fineness of intention, the flicker of shadow across our path that causes us to look towards the source. Barrie Jean Borich writes, “Our pages then are shadow realities made of the embodied intelligence of image, sound, and suspended moment intersecting with the visible and invisible histories that carried our people into the current moment, allowing us to experience any human subject as flawed and full, and therefore alive.”
This article copyright Karen Babine and fourthgenre.org. All rights reserved.
