One of my favourite ways to portray a character is by being efficient. I like one character to describe, through speech, another character. We could list the attributes of a character but by having another character do it is much easier to follow, and can be much more interesting for the reader. Here is something I wrote to portray one character without actually doing it. We might ask ourselves if we understand two characters; the described one and the person doing the describing. We might also ask ourselves if we can determine what kind of relationship the characters have.

She doubts herself

       'She doubts herself at times but then once she seems to get it together she just can't help letting you know. Mind you, she is very capable. The funny thing is though, for someone so small she can't 'arf make a big mess when she's angry...lot of tidying up to do afterwards. She's a tornado. Funnily enough, that's what makes her 'appy; tidying up, I mean. And that's what she does when she is happy, she sings; and she dances around her broom, and pulls faces into puddles of spilt water and fallen spoons. I came into the kitchen once when she didn't know. Singing away she was. Blimey! You've never seen anything like it. Frozen, she was. Solid. White. Scared witless. Then she kind of deflated, like a balloon. From a block of ice to a candle held too close to a fire. Melted, she did, right down to the floor. I laughed and laughed. I couldn't help it. I'd come home early from the pub. She couldn't work out why. Thought she had done something wrong. So, she rises again, all pitiful and about to cry but holding it in, like. Then she sits, all crumpled up with her head in her hands. I could see she was sobbing, quiet like. I couldn't understand it - she knows she's my bit 'o jam.'

Not content with just one character describing another, I decided to have another one describe the same character from a different perspective and point of view.

       'Quite frankly, I cannot fathom why she is with him. He won't marry her. As her mother, I was always the one she came to, but now its him. She's stuck to him like a limpet. All I did was care for her and show kindness, but him.....it's hot and cold with him. I suppose its the making-up. You know, the contrast. He bought her a music box. It doesn't even play anymore, but she winds it anyway and goes off in a dream. She's completely forgotten he over-wound it and that she cried for weeks; more than when her animals died in the fire. She can't stand cruelty - unless it comes from him! 
We went to the sea-side last week, she and I. She absolutely loved the Punch and Judy. I honestly thought she might die from laughing. But she can be quite embarrassing. One of the donkeys was in the sea and....passed wind. She pointed at it and shouted 'Ooh Look! Bubbles'. Helpless, she was. I had to walk away from her; quite embarrassing. Tcht! 
Sometimes, she looks so sad. I asked her one day, "What's wrong, Darling?". She didn't want to tell me. She just looked at me. "Mother, I am scared he might leave me one day." It reminded me of when our gaslights went out at home, and I found her in the dark.'

So, we should be able to glean some understanding what the character is like, and the relationships she has; as well as the relationship between the two characters describing the woman.

If I start a story after these two characters have introduced her, the reader has a good understanding of the opening scene:

       Among the crowd and the cries of the hawkers; where the pickpockets struck, a horse-drawn tram came to a faltering stop. From the rear, into acrid gas-lit fog two men in black capes stepped down. They paused and briefly looked about them, then moved towards a grimy two-storey building. The crowd parted. From an upstairs broken window came porcine grunts. Inside, coins changed hands, but always the shame remained in the smaller body. The clatter of clumsy footsteps retreated down the stairs, paused, as an obsequious greeting was muttered and then resumed. The two men stepped into the room causing the pale woman to flinch and draw back. Her mouth formed a silent 'o'. She had a pen in her hand, torn paper, ink, a music box, and a single flickering candle before her on a tiny, rickety table. Her belly, once swollen, lay slack from recent childbirth. A flea jumped from her washed-out blue shawl to her hair. She glanced into the shadows at her baby and a tear formed in her eye.

But who are the two men who have barged into the woman's home?

Exercises to create Characters

There are exercises in creative writing that have the student rewrite a piece from a different angle or point of view. There are also some that encourage using formulas to invent 'full' characters; like using a list of character attributes. I like to make my own exercises, though I would not be able to consider doing so without some experience of how to do it. Yesterday, I decided I would create characters inspired by the ingredients of my home-made toast-topper recipe. 

Food Ingredients as characters

Tinned Mackerel in Sunflower Oil - Well, the first thing in my mind is a fisherman constrained by an environment (the tin) that has a seal to it that exposure to the outside world is entirely absent (hermetically sealed) while the inner environment (sunflower oil) preserves the fisherman from change. We know that tinned food deteriorates in quality over decades but is still presentable in a changed world. Tinned Mackerel in Sunflower Oil is a Lighthouse Keeper on a remote island who can only get supplies by infrequent helicopter drops, weather permitting. So, total exclusion with no personal contact.

Chopped Tinned Tomatoes - So, those plum tomatoes in a tin that we pay a bit more for because they are more refined than just Tinned Tomatoes. Tomatoes are still exotic to me, and I cannot help thinking about the death scene of Don Corleone in his garden tending his tomato plants and minding his grandchild in 'The Godfather' or tomato sauce on pizzas; so, I have an Italian man who is a bit more preened than any average man might have the time for (ah, 'metro-man'). Because the chopped tomatoes are also tinned this character is also constrained by an environment, but because tinned tomatoes are versatile and blend into many dishes as an ingredient rather than eaten alone, this character is popular and pervasive. 

Tomato Puree (not Passava) - Following the theme from the chopped tinned tomato character above but having a less sharp taste, this character needs no construction and I will take the easy way out and make this character a mature Italian woman who acts in a cohesive manner to keep family and groups together. She is complimentary to many environments. Because the tomato puree I buy is in a tube and only a squeeze is necessary to bring about its charm, then polite and reasonable attention towards this full-bodied mature character will bring about her influence. A respected character, who is often consulted to ameliorate and arbitrate. Her lesser being, perhaps younger, would be tomato ketchup - fun and cheeky and a social success, but you wouldn't take her home to your academic parents, even as a friend. Tomato ketchup is in the cupboard for those times of need, but you don't make a reservation in an expensive restaurant with it to share your woes; tomato puree wearing pearls of wisdom is the one for that.

Courgette - This is a rather bland character, as is it taste, which is distinctive as a green freshness. Youth leaps out at me with the energy and then sudden quiet of observing and listening not dissimilar to someone under twelve years old. So, a bright, inquisitive character, more poet than poser, and more thoughtful than robust, and easily overwhelmed by large forces. However, perhaps I can add some history to this character by the way it was brought into the mix. I had some courgettes in the fridge, still in the plastic bag I bought them in, from the supermarket. They were starting to go mouldy and I had to cook them the day I noticed the decay. I removed the rot and cut them into chunks and microwaved them to be put back in the fridge to include in something else; possibly just with spaghetti, garlic and a light cheese. So, the history of the courgette brings a back-story to this character as someone who was left to fester in a cold and sterile environment and rescued by someone who helped them live an existence better suited to their inner being; perhaps an orphan or street-child when young and now mild in disposition and easily overwhelmed.

Ginger - I put a tiny pinch into the toast-topper mix, yet the shape of this flavour, which due to its vibrant strength is not eaten as a nourishing carbohydrate, as far as I know, enlivens pretty much everything I eat. This is not conflict like oyster sauce, nor zest like lemon peel; this is fizz like an unexpected, much loved and familiar guest, who is always welcome at the dinner table with outlandish anecdotes and 'on-the-edge' jokes. Perhaps then, the ginger in the toast-topper should not be a character, and instead should be a situation (despite hunger in a man with experimental taste being the real reason). I think I will go with a warm evening of dining on a sea-front (I am thinking of the fisherman/lighthouse keeper and where to fit him in).

Salt and Black Pepper - Obviously, we all know salt and pepper. Alternatively, we all think we know salt, and some of us do not like pepper. The absence of salt in our diets means we will die, but not before we start to think weird (I think it is the sodium we need). With this in mind, I have salt not as a character, but as a binder in relationships. By itself, salt is something most of us find repulsive and do not want to observe to be present, yet we secretly crave it. However, some of us buy and eat food precisely because it is salty (fish and chips; salted peanuts; salt and vinegar crisps (Am. chips); salted chocolate; vodka shots; etc). For these latter people, salt is excitement, and for the rest of us, it is change in an environment; so I am going with exciting change; the opposite of stagnant lives. Because salt is a constant, so is change in all our lives, otherwise we think weird.

Black Pepper - Here is heat but not like the heat from white pepper, chillies, horseradish or mustard. This is a dark heat; a warming heat, yet it has dark shadows with constrained malice deep within it. This could be a character, but might be a situation or circumstance just as well, or easily. A jealous and spiteful admirer, or a slighted server in a restaurant, perhaps. Black Pepper could be a promise of a storm; a sonder-cloud warning of relentless destruction. Perhaps I will have Black pepper as treacherous.

Red Cabbage with Apple - A late surprise for me, as it might be for you. However, I have been eating a bit of this in the last few months out of a jar. It is the usual thing; having spirit vinegar with it. This is a late guest to the group, in reality, as in my imagined scenario. Red Cabbage infuses everything with its colour and has a slightly different flavour to just plain old White Cabbage that is over-boiled and served with mashed potato and some meat. Red Cabbage has a little surprise; a twist to an anecdote or joke. This is a character that has a stereotypical manifestation. This is Willy Wonka; Mary Poppins or Nanny McPhee. This is the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland but not the Mad Hatter. This is Emmett "Doc" Brown, the inventor-scientist in 'Back to the Future'. This person, male or female, wears a waistcoat. Red Cabbage is eccentric, harmless and fun. 

Apple - This could be sharp and tangy, or crisp and sweet, or soft with a texture like cardboard. The apple with the Red Cabbage, because it has so many varieties that are familiar to each of us, yet seems infinite in range, must be a dog. Apple is Red Cabbage's accompanying compliment. It is said that owners resemble their pets. I think that means that a dog, as a pack animal, adapts its behaviour to the pack to which it belongs. Apple then, is an exciting dog that could be entertaining on its own, yet is the foil to Red Cabbage's strange habits.

Toast - Here is the platform or carrier on, or in, which the characters and circumstance is played out. A bus can not be imagined to be a similar platform as toast, because a bus provides distraction by passing through environments, while toast tastes the same from end to end and corner to corner. So, a bit more free thinking, and often crudeness works well in memory techniques, so why not use it here; maybe,  using a toilet cubicle for number twos, in a public convenience (Am. bathroom) OR waiting in an airport departure lounge OR simply stick with a family-run local restaurant which has the same local customers, day in and day out.

Coffee, Mulberry Molasses and Vanilla

The room faded

That Mulberry Molasses you have at the back of the fridge since forever, tastes good in black coffee with a drop of vanilla essence. You can really taste the dark, and strangely seductive fruity promise of a full relationship before a wash of vanilla reason joins the briefly intriguing conversation. The taste is complex and is much like walking on a quiet beach at dawn with the attractive person from the party, not looking for, but open to a hiding place, only to be hailed by the person's partner. You search each other's faces for the same desire you both feel and see it reciprocated and then look towards the cheery but woolly interruption. Again, a glance at each other and then you exhale. 

Oooo! The first sip was sharp and bitter, but there was something in it. Ah, perhaps the pairing was not quite right. But just as you find some features in other people queer and then they become quaint with anticipation, the second sip carries with it a knowledge of what to expect; it allows a deeper sense of flavour to be appreciated. It is much more like the long snog after a first kiss on New Years Eve; hungry and explorative; and mutually giving. There is a mustiness like a light perspiration of flavoured alcohol has permeated the freshness of perfume and scent that was applied hours ago. The kiss and the smell is organic. It is almost primeval and immediate in its intent; now it is tasted. With the kiss broken the taste lingers. But it will be a memory of that moment when full desire of an illicit encounter was unfulfilled. A look into each other eyes and then another deep promising kiss, and then the sounds of the noisy room comes back and you are separated by the crowd; the moment and chance has gone.

I drank only one cup of coffee like that yesterday afternoon and didn't finish it; but there was still some left in my large mug, so I made a fresh coffee over the top of it. The mulberry was still there and the vanilla accompanied it and if I had been looking out a window out of a party I would have seen them leaving together as they should do. I would have looked longingly at one of them and known that without the other, the promise would have been filled but the guilt would surpass the pleasure. Despite the overwhelming sweetness it has in itself, Mulberry Molasses without vanilla makes coffee dark and bitter. It fails to sweeten it. Adding a fruitiness it competes for dominance and fails. Instead it highlights the dark and bitter nature of black coffee that even added sugar cannot erase. I can tolerate eating sugar from a spoon but an equal amount of Mulberry Molasses is too sweet. In coffee, it is a quick and hungry grope in a dark alley; good-looking but ultimately cheap and treacherous. In marriage, it is better behaved and mature and must always be only a soft moment of 'maybe' and never something that needs to be secret.

I wonder, if I add milk to the coffee, mulberry molasses and vanilla,  I might legitimise my relationship with Mulberry Molasses in coffee. With milk acting as a soft blanket, the vanilla, if I add it, might be the smell of a home that comforts us as we embrace. The sharpness will still be there in the background, but it will be our first kiss when our teeth and foreheads bumped, and the touch was truly and honestly ours, without guilt, secrecy or regret. 
 

Creating characters from snippets of conversation

A moment of sonder

If I ever, one day, want to create characters for stories, I think I would try to remember all the snippets of conversations I had inadvertently overheard while waiting in a queue, or just passing someone, and I would write them down.

In London, England, I overheard a young woman, with a slight, maybe French, accent say, ‘Don’t be mean to me just because I am young!’ I was struck by this because it was something that seemed only possible to enter the head of someone who is not British. Maybe I am closeted by confirmation bias – I had never heard a similar comment in a British accent, yet I can’t help thinking that her upbringing included a reasoning that youth is no bar to intelligence or understanding; not a sense of entitlement, more an understanding that she was not fettered. She seemed to recognise that she lacked experience but that was all that was missing for her to instantly understand something that other people had heuristics for, or for British people in England just grew up knowing.
 

I had a French female friend who told me that while she was still learning English, she had put too much powder on her face, and so asked her new English boyfriend to ‘blow off’ on her face. (Blow off is English slang for farting). She said he looked really shocked, because he didn’t know her very well. As an invite to me to freely visit, she once told me to ‘just come in and pop’. I think she was attempting a euphemism though; sort of a ‘double entendre’. Let’s face it, the French know what a ‘double entendre’ is. I really liked her then, but just smiled, not really knowing that she liked me back; she told me later, just before she moved away from the area.

I was on the same bus as a young mother with a baby that incessantly cried. I didn’t mind; I just felt really sorry for her. Her look of concern and helplessness was so pitiful. I couldn’t help though because I had just had eye surgery and was blind in one eye on a moving bus. She didn’t know that the bus engine noise would be extremely loud for a new baby, and she didn’t know how to comfort her new baby. When I passed her to get off the bus, I noticed her melting face filled with gratitude for the three elderly women attending to her and her baby. To this day, she might think how wonderful the ladies were in quietening her child, but I suspect she should thank the driver for delivering us all to the bus station safely, and naturally switching the engine off.

Surrounded by people, I overheard a man of perhaps 30 years, say to himself, ‘I just want someone to talk to.’

As I passed someone queuing to get into a music gig, I overheard him say to his friend, ‘I wish I didn’t know so much.’ I think he had a high IQ and didn’t know what to do with it.

I overheard a woman in a supermarket in the summer of 2020 almost shout to a shop assistant that she has a breathing condition. She wasn’t wearing a mask (Covid 19 lockdown in the UK). I suspect her boyfriend was one of those people who think it is cool to have maximum agency over their lives despite how negatively it affects everyone else. I imagine that he knows he annoys people and that is his signal to himself that he is in control over his life. 
 

I overheard two people about twenty feet apart in a residential road:

Exasperated, one said, ‘Why don’t you just come to me if there is a problem?’

The other called over his shoulder, ‘Because you have no respect for other people, and so you can’t understand a single word I say to you!’

I used to play a game with my children in the car. Later, I played the same game with some of my employees while we were travelling abroad. ‘What do you think that person there is thinking?’ I would point out, or earmark someone in our view, across the street at traffic lights or in a park we were passing. Usually, the answers were quite mundane. But, I would always offer something like, ‘At last it is raining so I can test this umbrella I bought from a trader in the Sahara desert’; or ‘This is the fifth time this month that someone has stolen my car!’ when someone was walking or cycling; or ‘If I sit on this bench long enough perhaps the Council will put a plaque on it as a memorial to me.’ If I saw someone dancing and looking down, I might say something like, ‘Oh no! I know where my son’s stick-insects are now!’ My children and employees never seemed to understand that there is much more going on in other people’s lives than is evident to onlookers. They had never experienced a moment of sonder, or ‘the feeling one has on realising that every other individual one sees has a life as full and real as one’s own, in which they are the central character and others, including oneself, have secondary or insignificant roles’. (Dictionary.com)

I would have been delighted if the people we were observing were playing the same game and had targeted us, pointing their fingers and laughing.

‘Sonder’ is also Africaans for ‘without’ from the Dutch word ‘zonder’.

In searching for the word ’sonder’ in a thesaurus, I came across the word ’spissitude’ which I think means ‘density’. I would definitely have a drunk character in a play say ‘spissitude’ rather than ‘density’.

My 1962 Roget’s Thesaurus does not have ‘sonder’ in the index.

My 1982 ‘Concise Oxford Dictionary’ does not have ‘sonder’.

The best definition I can get for ‘sonder’ is from the OED www.oed.com under ‘sonder-cloud’. I used my library card to log in, under ‘Institutional Access’.

‘Now historical and rare.

A cirrocumulus cloud.

1816 Cirrocumulus, or Sondercloud, i.e. cloud consisting of an aggregate of clouds asunder (from A.S. sond, Old Eng. a-sonder and sonder): the distinguishing marks of this cloud being that of separate orbs aggregated together, and the change to this cloud from others is a separation of continuity into particules.

(OED 2025, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/sonder-cloud_n?tab=meaning_and_use )

So, if we apply this wonderful definition of cirrocumulus sonder-cloud to people, we can have a ‘cloud’ of people casting a mottled shadow on the world. Shadows are not necessarily bad though, they provide shade from the searing sun, and contrast in an otherwise too brightly lit environment. Alternatively, we might like the idea of a lesser chance of sunburn. Because cirrocumulus clouds are so high up, we on Earth only detect a dimming of light and not distinct shadows. So, a ‘cloud’ of people are probably more portentous, than distinctly instrumental in changing an environment – more of a feeling at the back of one’s mind of a lesser quality of life in the present yet the reason is not immediately evident.

https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=852553&tag=sixth+sense (my blog on sixth sense and shadows)

Cirrocumulus clouds are those ones that look like lambs tails, or when there is about to be a change in weather, they might be seen when a sky is described as a ‘mackerel sky’.