Characterization and Conflict

ELA 30 || Lesson 6.2 Handout

A character comes alive on the page in two ways. A writer can tell you directly what a character is like, stating plainly that someone is stubborn or generous or worn out. That is direct characterization, and skilled writers keep it in reserve because it does the reader's thinking for them. Far more often, a writer relies on indirect characterization, showing you what a character says, does, and notices, and trusting you to draw the conclusion yourself. When you read a scene and think this person is patient, or this person is scared, without the narrator ever saying so, you are watching indirect characterization at work.

Conflict is what puts pressure on a character until those qualities show themselves. Internal conflict happens inside a character, a struggle between two feelings or two loyalties. External conflict happens between a character and something outside them: another person, a group, nature, or the expectations of a society. Many strong stories run both kinds of conflict at once, an outer disagreement that forces an inner one into the open.

Underneath character and conflict sits worldview, the assumptions a person or a community holds about how life works and what matters. A writer can build a story so that one character's worldview collides with another's, and neither has to be right for the collision to matter. The friction itself is the point. Watching two worldviews rub against each other reveals something about both that neither could show on its own.

Emma Lee Warrior, a Peigan writer from the Piikani Nation in southern Alberta, handles this with total control in "Compatriots" (1987). Lucy, pregnant and exhausted, spends a day hosting Hilda, a German visitor obsessed with finding real Indians. Warrior never tells you that Lucy is patient and worn down by other people's expectations. She shows you instead. Lucy washes her face in a basin because she has no running water. She feeds her uncle Sonny, sick and shaking from drink, a bowl of soup without complaint. She answers Hilda's excited questions about sun-dances with a flat, tired honesty. The external conflict, Lucy's real life against Hilda's romantic fantasy of Indian life, forces an unspoken internal one: how much of herself does Lucy owe to a stranger's expectations, and how much can she simply refuse to perform. Warrior lets you feel Lucy's worldview, grounded and done with pretending, through what Lucy does and says, never through explanation.

As you read "Compatriots," watch for the moments where Warrior shows you a character instead of telling you about one. Where do you see Lucy's worldview colliding with Hilda's, and what does that collision reveal that a direct description never could?