Exercises:

This week you will write five character descriptions, each from a different, though not necessarily unrelated, point of view.

1. Develop a description of a character type beginning, “He (she) was the kind of person who…” Such a description (and such phrasing) is common to the sort of fiction with which you are no doubt familiar. (Examples: “He was the sort of person who lives in a shack…” or “in a rented apartment…”; or “who carefully hunts out all the cashews in a bowl of mixed nuts…” or “for whom any injustice, no matter how remote, was a deeply personal affront…” or “who only felt at home at funerals.” “She was one of those people who fail to find daily life attractive or interesting, and who seek compensation in an ‘unseen world’…”)

2. Write a description based on careful observation of someone whom you don’t know. Take notes on what this person looks like when he or she is eating, talking with another, shopping, playing frisbee, approached by a dog, or whatever. This should not be merely a catalogue of details, but an ordered composition that amounts to a visual reading of someone’s personality.

3. Write a description of someone whom you do know that is based on this person’s nature, rather than on his or her appearance. Describe what he or she is like, not what he or she looks like. (How do you write about what you cannot see–i.e., about “soul,” “mind,” “spirit,” disposition to behave in different ways at different times, and so on? And how important are concrete words here?)

4. Invent a person and compose a description of the “outer” person which reveals (gets to the heart of) the “inner.”

5. Self-portrait: Look at yourself in the mirror. Write a pate on the person whom you see there.

Examples:

1)

Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life was a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience. The dialect was on her tongue to some extent, despite the village school: the characteristic intonation of that dialect for this district being the voicing approximately rendered by the syllable UR, probably as rich an utterance as any to be found in human speech. The pouted-up deep red mouth to which this syllable was native had hardly as yet settled into its definite shape, and her lower lip had a way of thrusting the middle of her top one upward, when they closed together after a word.
Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along to-day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could someti see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her rinth sparkling from her eye: and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.

2)
My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicity than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.
I gave Pirrip as my father’s family name, on the authority of his tombstone and my sister–Mrs. Joe Cargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the Character and turn of the inscription, “Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,” I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine–who gave up trying to get a living exceed- ingly early in that universal struggle–I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence.

3)
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible–or from one of our elder poets–in a paragraph of to-day’s newspaper. She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common- sense. Nevertheless, Celia wore scarcely more trimmings; and it was only to close observers that her dress differed from her sister’s, and had a shade of coquetry in its arrangements; for Miss Brooke’s plain dressing was due to mixed conditions, in most of which her sister shared. Dorothea knew many passages of Pascal’s Pensees and of Jeremy Taylor by heard; and to her the destinies of mankind, seen by the light of Christianity, made the solicitudes of feminine fashion appear an occupation for Bedlam. She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in guimp and artificial protrusions of drapery. Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractions, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it.

4)
He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got his living as ship-chandler’s water-clerk he was very popular.

5)
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago–never mind how long precisely–having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I Whenever I find have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principal to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people’s hat’s off–then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to my ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

6)
Her son was of a fair, sun-tanned type, rather above middle height, well-made, and almost exaggeratedly well-dressed. But about him also was the strange, guarded look, the unconscious glisten, as if he did not belong to the same creation as the people about him. Gudrun lighted on him at once. There was something northern about him that magnetised her. In his clear northern flesh and his fair hair was a glisten like sunshine refracted through crystals of ice. And he looked so new, umbroached, pure as an artic thing. Perhaps he was thirty years old, perhaps more. His gleaming beauty, maleness, like a young, good-humored, smiling wolf, did not blind her to the significant, sinister stillness in his bearing, the lurking danger of his unsubdued temper. “His “His totem is the wolf,” she repeated to herself. mother is an old, unbroken wolf.” And then she experienced a keen paroxysm, a transport, as if she had made some incredible discovery, known to nobody else on earth.

7)
A CONTEMPLATIVE MAN Is a scholar in this great university of the world; and the same his book and study. He cloisters not his meditations in the narrow darkness of a room, but sends them abroad with his eyes, and his brain travels with his feet. He looks upon man from a high tower, and sees him trulier at this distance in his infirmities and poorness. He scorns to mix himself in men’s actions, as he would to act upon a stage, but sits aloft on the scaffold a censuring spectator. He will not lose his time by being busy, or make so poor a use of the world as to hug and embrace it. Nature admits him as a partaker of her sports, and asks his approbation as it were of her own works and variety. He comes not in company, because he would not be solitary, but finds discourse enough with himself, and his own thoughts are his excellent play fellows. He looks not upon a thing as a yawning stranger at novelties, but his search is more mysterious and inward, and he spells heaven out of earth. He knits his observations together and makes a ladder of them all to climb to God. He is free from vice, because he has no occasion to employ it, and is above those ends that make man wicked. He has learnt all can here be taught him, and now comes to heaven to see more.

8)
A CHILD Is a man in a small letter, yet the best copy of Adam before he tasted of Eve or the apple; and he is happy whose small practice in the world can only write his character. He is nature’s fresh picture newly drawn in oil, which time, and much handling, dims and defaces. His soul is yet a white paper unscribbled with observations of the world, wherewith, at length, it becomes a blurred note-book. He is purely happy, because he knows no evil, nor hath made means by sin to be acquainted with misery. He arrives not at the mischief of being wise, nor endures evils to come, by foreseeing them. He kisses and loves all, and when the smart of the rod is past, smiles on his beater. Nature and his parents alike dandle him, and tice him on with a bait of sugar to a draught of wormwood. He plays yet, like a young ‘prentice the first day, and is not come to his task of melancholy. All the language he speaks yet is tears, and they serve him well enough to express his necessity. His hardest labour is his tongue, as if he were loath to use so deceit- ful and organ; and he is best company with it when he can but prattle. We laugh at his foolish sports, but his game is our earnest; and his drums, rattles and hobby-horses but the emblems and mocking of man’s business. His father has writ him as his own little story, wherein he reads those days of his life that he cannot remember, and sighs to see what innocence he has out-lived. The older he grows, he is a stair lower from God; and, like his first father, much worse in his breaches. He is the Christain’s example, and the old man’s relapse; the one imitates his pureness, and the other falls into his simplicity. Could he put off his body with his little coat, he had got eternity without a burden, and exchanged but one heaven for another.
(John Earle, Miscrocosmography, 1628)

9)
His method of life particularly qualified him for conversation, of which he knew how to practice all the graces. He was never vehement or loud, but at once. modest and easy, open and respectful; his language was vivacious on elegant, and equally happy upon grave or humorous subjects. He was generally censured for not knowing when to retire; but that was not the defect of his judgment, but of his fortune; when he left his company, he was frequently to spend the remaining part of the night in the street, or at least was abandoned to gloomy reflections, which it is not strange that he delayed as long as he could; and sometimes forgot that- he gave others pain to avoid it himself.
(Samuel Johnson, Life of Savage)

10)
He was a very good-looking young man indeed, shaped to be annoyed. His voice was intimate as the rustle of sheets, and he kissed easily. There was no tallying the gifts of Charvet handkerchiefs, art moderne ash-trays, monogrammed dressing- gowns, gold key-chains, and cigarette-cases of thin wood, inlaid with views of Parisian comfort-stations, that were sent him by ladies too quickly confident, and were paid for by the money of unwitting husbands, which is acceptably any place in the world. Every woman who visited his small, square apartment promptly flamed with the desire to assume charge of its redecoration. During his tenancy, three separate ladies had achieved this ambition. Each had left behind her, for her brief monument, much too much glazed chintz.

(Dorothy Parker, Dusk Before Fireworks)

Characters

11)
SWM, 35, 5’9″, imaginative, intelligent, attractive, creative, Manhattan businessman with a passion for the arts, more or less highbrow tastes, some scholarly interests, warmth, sensitivity, strength, a sense of humor, and sanity. seeks exceptional SWF, 26-38, slim and non-smoking, with similar qualities (occupation, of course unimportant but imagination very important). Please re- spond with at least a page about you. Phone number essential for reply. NYR Box 10066.

(The New York Review of Books)

12)
The superior man will not run petty risks, nor indeed risks of any kind if he can help it, because there are so few things he considers worth while. But he rises to meet a crisis and, so long as that lasts, he will put his life in peril for the cause, since he is not the man to purchase life at any price.  It is also part of his character to confer benefits. But he hates receiving them. This is  because the former action implies superiority, the latter inferiority. When he does repay a service it is with interest, for in this way the original benefactor will become the beneficiary and debtor in his turn. Again, the superior man is suspected of having a better memory for benefits conferred than benefits received. Another mark of the superior man is his refusal or reluctance to ask anyone to help him, while always being ready to bring help himself. And he stands on his dignity with those who are high in public esteem or favourites of fortune, but does not assume airs in his dealings with persons of no great distinction, because to maintain one’s superiority in the presence of notabilities is not easy and im- presses others, so that here a dignified manner is not unbecoming of a gentleman, though in the worst of taste when one is dealing with humble people as bad as hustling the weak. … Since it is an indication of fear to conceal one’s feelings, the superior man is bound to be open in his likes and dislikes, and to care more for the truth than for what people think, and to be straightforward in word and deed. … He is not a gushing person, because nothing strikes him as a subject of mighty admiration. … He does not care for personal talk, being indisposed to speak either about himself or anyone else. … In troubles which are unavoidable or of no great consequence he is not pathetic or pressing, for that would be to give them too great consequence. … And that he never hurries (or so people think) and has a deep voice and a deliberate way of speaking. For the man who believes that there is little or nothing worth getting excited about will not be prone to hurry or be high-strung and as a result shrill in his tones and bustling in his movements.
Such, then, is the great-souled or superior man.

(Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics)

13)
Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil. She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life. She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands. She is like the merchants’ ships; she bringeth her food from afar. She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens. She considereth a field, and buyeth it; with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard. She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms. She perceiveth that her merchandise is good; her candle goeth not out by night. She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff. She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy. She is not afraid of the snow for her household: for all her household are clothed with scarlet. She maketh herself coverings of tapestry; her clothing is silk and purple. Her husband is known in the gates, when he sitteth among the elders of the land. She maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant. Strength and honour are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come. She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness. She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness. Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her.

(Proverbs 31: 10-28)

14)
Caesar:
Antony,
Leave thy lascivious wassails. When thou once
Was beaten from Modena, wher thou slew’st
Hirtius and Pansa, consuls, at thy heel
Did famine follow, whom thou fought’st against
(Thou daintily brought up) with patience more
Than savages could suffer. Thou didst drink
The stale of horses and the gilded puddle
Which boasts would cough at. Thy palate then did deign
The roughest berry on the rudest hedge.
Yea, like the stag when snow the pasture sheets,
The barks of trees thou browsed. On the Alps
It is reported thou didst eat strange flesh,
Which some did die to look on. And all this
(It wounds thine honce that I speak it now)
Was borne so like a soldier that thy sheek
So much as lanked not.

(Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra)

15)
…thence the royal actor borne,

The tragic scaffold might adorn;
While round the armed bands
Did clap their bloody hands.

He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene,
But with his keen eye
The ax’s edge did try;

Nor called the gods with vulgar spite
To vindicate his helpless right;
But bowed his comely head
Down, as upon a bed.

That was the memorable hour,
Which first assured the forced power…

(Marvell, “An Horatian Ode”)

16)
Such pleasure took the serpent to behold
This flowery plat, the sweet recess of Eve
Thus early, thus alone; her heavenly form
Angelic, but more soft, and feminine,
Her graceful innocence her every air
of gesture or least action overawed
His malice, and with rapine sweet bereaved
His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought:
That space the evil one abstracted stood
From his own evil, and for the time remained
Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed,
of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge;
But the hot hell that always in him burns,
Though in mid heaven, soon ended his delight
And tortures him now more…

(Milton, Paradise Lost)

17)
Though they had now been acquainted a month, she could not be satisfied that she really knew his character. That he was a sensible man, an agreeable man,- that he talked well, professed good opinions, seemed to judge properly and as a man of principle,–this was all clear enough. He certainly knew what was right, nor could she fix on any one article of moral duty evidently transgressed; but yet she would have been afraid to answer for his conduct. She distrusted the past, if not the present. The names which occasionally dropt of former associates, the allusions to former practices and pursuits, suggested suspicions cat favourable of what he had been. She saw that there had been bad habits; that Sunday-travelling had been a common thing; that there had been a period of his life (and probably not a short one) when he had been, at least careless on all serious matters; and, though he might now think very differently, who could answer for the true sentiments of a clever, cautious man, grown old enough to appreciate a fair character? …

Mr. Elliot was rational, discreet, polished, but he was not open. There was never any burst of feeling, any warmth of indignation or delight, at the evil or good of others. This, to Anne, was a decided imperfection.

Mr. Elliot was too generally agreeable. Various as were the tempers in her father’s house, he pleased them all.

Lady Russell saw either less or more than her young friend, for she saw nothing to excite distrust. She could not imagine a man more exactly what he ought to be than Mr. Elliot; nor did she ever enjoy a sweeter feeling than the hope of seeing him receive the hand of her beloved Anne in Kellynch church, in the course of the following autumn.

(Austen, Persuasion)

18)
Prince Vasili was not a man who deliberately thought out his plans. Still less did he think of injuring anyone for his own advantage. He was merely a man of the world who had got on and to whom getting on had become a habit. Schemes and de- vices for which he never rightly accounted to himself, but which formed the whole interest of his life, were constantly shaping themselves in his mind, arising from the circumstances and persons he met. Of these plans he had not merely one or two in his head but dozens, some only beginning to form themselves, some approaching achievement, and some in course of disintegration. He did not, for instance, say to himself: “This man now has influence, I must gain his confidence and friendship and through him obtain a special grant. Nor did he say to himself: anne is a rich man, I must entice him to marry my daughter and lend me the forty thousand rubles I need.” But when he came across a man of position his instinct immediately told him that this man could be useful, and without any premeditation Prince Vasili took the first opportunity to gain his confidence, flatter him, becce intimate with him, and finally make his request.
(Tolstoy, War and Peace)
19)
Basil Ransom had got up just as Mrs. Luna made this last declaration; for a young lady had glided into the room, who stopped short as it fall upon her ears. She stood there looking, consciously and rather seriously, at Mr. Ranson; a smile of exceeding faintness played about her lips — it was just perceptible enough to light up the native gravity of her face. It might have been likened to a thin ray of moonlight resting upon the wall of a prison..
(Henry James, The Bostonians)

20)
He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he ad- vanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got his living as ship-chandler’s water-clerk he was very popular.

(Conrad, Lord Jim)

21)
All Natives have in them a strong strain of malice, a shrill delight in things going wrong, which in itself is hurting and revolting to Europeans. Kamante brought this characteristic to a rare perfection, even to a special self-irony, that made him take pleasure in his own disappointments and disasters, nearly exactly as in those of other people.
I have met with the same kind of mentality in the old Native women who have been roasted over many fires, who have mixed blood with Fate, and recognize her irony, wherever they meet it, with sympathy, as if it were that of a sister. On the farm I used to let my houseboys deal out snuff, –tombacco the Natives say,– to the old women on Sunday mornings, while I myself was still in bed. On this account I had a queer lot of customers round my house on Sundays, like a very old, rumpled, bald and bony poultry yard; and their low cackling, for the Natives will very rarely speak up loudly, made its way through the open windows of my bedroom. On one particular Sunday morning, the gentle lively flow of Kikuyu communications suddenly rose to ripples and cascades of mirth; some highly humorous incident was taking place out there, and I called in Farah to tell me about it. Farah did not like to tell me, for the matter was that he had forgotten to buy snuff, so that to-day the old women had come a long way, as they say themselves, boori, for nothing. This happening was later on a source of amusement to the old Kikuyu women. Sometimes, when I met one of them on a path in the maizefield, she would stand still in front of me, poke a crooked bony finger at me, and with her old dark face dissolving into laughter, so that all the wrinkles of it were drawn and folded together as by one single secret string being pulled, she would remind me of the Sunday when she and her sisters in the snuff, had walked and walked up to my house, only to find that I had forgotten to get it, and that there was not a grain there, –Ha ha Msabu!

(Isak Dineson, Out Of Africa)

22)
Berg and Vera could not repress their smiles of satisfaction at the sight of all this movement in their drawing room, at the sound of the disconnected talk, the rustling of dresses, and the bowing and scraping. Everything was just as every- body always has it.
Pierre … had to sit down to boston. At the card table he happened to be directly facing Natasha, and was struck by a curious change that had come over her since the ball. She was silent, and not only less pretty than at the ball, but only redeemed from plainness by her look of gentle indifference to everything around.

“What’s the matter with her?” thought Pierre, glancing at her. She was sit- ting by her sister at the tea table, and reluctantly, without looking at him, made some reply to Boris who sat down beside her. After playing out a whole suit and to his partner’s delight making five tricks, Pierre, hearing greetings and the steps of someone who had entered the room while he was picking up his tricks, glanced again at Natasha.

“What has happened to her?” he asked himself with still greater surprise. Prince Andrey was standing before her, saying something to her with a look of tender solicitude. She, having raised her head, was looking up at him, flushed and evidently trying to master her rapid breathing. And the bright glow of some inner fire that had been suppressed was again alight in her. She was completely transformed and from a plain girl had again become what she had been at the ball.

Prince Andrey went up to Pierre, and the latter noticed a new and youthful expression in his friend’s face.

“Something very important is happening between them,” thought Pierre, and a feeling that was both joyful and painful agitated him and made him neglect the game.
…Berg was satisfied and happy. The smile of pleasure never left his face. The party was very successful and quite like other parties he had seen.

(Tolstoy, War and Peace)