Question

How do you change a direct characterisation into an indirect characterisation?

Answer 1

Hint: Characterization is the art of revealing fictional characters’ natures and personalities by creating them and building up a character for the readers. It has many facets. There are two main ways to reveal characters:- direct characterization, and indirect characterization. We will discuss the two in the complete answer section.

Complete answer:
Let us discuss how a direct characterisation can be changed to an indirect characterisation.

A Direct characterization’ is the one in which the author gives the details of the character explicitly. The author describes the character directly to the readers as the author has made the character to be. For example, telling the reader a character’s desires, life philosophy or current emotional state explicitly.

In contrast to direct characterization, there is indirect characterization that shows readers the characters’ traits without explicitly describing them. Readers come to know about the character gradually as they come to know it. A direct characterisation can be changed to an indirect characterisation by inducing the following:-
Dialogue – Say for example where a character’s bossy, kind, mean, or other qualities come through.
Actions – what a character does for example jumping in front of a car to save a dog. it reveals, incidentally, their character in this case that a character is needlessly kind.
Description – although associations differ from country to country, culture to culture, how a character looks often gives indirect characterization. We might assume, for example, a pale-skinned character who wears glasses and is always behind the books, is antisocial and hides away from the sun.

Note: A direct characterisation is always built up by the author. It is a result of the author’s creation of a character, the way he or she wants to portray it by directly specifying details about the character whereas an indirect characterisation is possibly extracted by the readers on the basis of the role of the character , its dialogue, its perceptions and other implicit factors.