Coming soon! A worksheet and course on characterization in nonfiction and memoir. To make sure you’re notified when these resources become available, please subscribe to the Resonant Storytelling Substack.

I’ve written about engaging the senses to bring your reader into an experience. The same principle holds true when you’re writing about people. To fully convey the essence of a person, it helps to show (rather than tell) through characterization.

Think of your favorite fictional characters. You can picture how they move, their facial expressions, their reactions to various other characters—as you read, a little movie plays in your mind, because the author has used characterization to show how they move, speak and interact with the world.

Resonant nonfiction writers don’t just describe people; they invite us to experience them as full humans, through the lens of storytelling. Think of it as the difference between a sketch portrait and an immersive experience, where the reader can see, touch, taste, hear, and feel what’s going on.

Back in the 19th century and earlier, description was more or less sufficient, because readers hadn’t been exposed to movies, videos or television. The ability to be clever or fanciful with words, or sentence structures, was highly prized. But today, with short attention spans that seek sensory experiences, writing needs to be like virtual reality on the page.

Consider these sentences:

• He was 52 years old, 6’4”, with hunched shoulders and a receding hairline.

• When he walked into any room, he had to duck lest his bare scalp hit the door frame. Four decades of this practice had given him a permanent hunch, as though he were afraid of the air above him. 

Neither of those is going to win a Pulitzer prize, but do you see the difference?

Description is telling the reader what someone looks like. Characterization means creating a hologram of a person in your reader’s mind. In nonfiction, your ‘characters’ are real people. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage over fiction: You can’t invent details, but you have real-world experience with the person, so it’s a matter of capturing their distinctive traits and evoking them accurately—or at least, accurately according to your perception (more on that in a moment)…

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