Before I delve into characterization again (because it's tricky and fascinating both, and something I can talk about endlessly without tiring) I want to touch on a few points that have come up in the comments so far.
First off, and most importantly, there is a vast difference between writing about reading and writing about writing. Writing about reading is fascinating and wonderful and necessary, but it's not, actually, helpful when it comes to writing about writing. The writer has an audience in her head as she writes. That audience may be a specific person (who she is trying to impress? or apologize to? or make understand her?) or a group of people (her family, her congregation, her second-period english class?) or an imaginary person or people (the biographer writing about her brilliance after she is dead?) or some combination of the above, but I take it as a given that there is some person she is imagining receiving her words on the other side of this process. Very likely she is targetting her choice of words and images and meanings and subjects to this person in an idealized state of perfect communion that will never be realized by flesh-and-blood, who will inevitably bring their own biases and preconceptions to the work thus fucking the whole thing up. (Just kidding. Breathe.) But regardless, her job at the moment of composition is not to engage in direct communication with this idealized audience--that comes later--but to engage with the blank screen and make a series of choices. Writing about writing is about those choices. What the reader makes of it, later on, is a separate question and in a very real sense not really the writer's business. (Until they are using that information to evaluate their choices in order to make better choices for the next piece.)
The writer's business is to put her butt into the chair and make a series of choices about black marks on a white screen (or page). That's it. And the question becomes: why these marks, in this order? Is this the best choice that can be made or are there better ones? Do these marks in this order allow the writer to fulfill her purpose?
I take it as axiomatic that no one ever endures the tiresome business of putting anything into writing without some reason that appears sufficiently important at the time. A paycheque, revenge, a burning need to save the world, a deep conviction that everyone needs to know what it is like specifically to ride a trolley-bus in 19th century London, whatever. Writers have meanings and intentions because otherwise they wouldn't bother writing; they would spend their time more profitably by playing parcheesi or scrubbing the toilets. So: the bare fact that someone wrote something means that that someone had a reason to write that something, in other words, a meaning and an intention that they felt would best be served by black marks arranged in a particular order.
I really don't see how you can get around this. At the moment of composition, no one is trying to compose a text that will generate near-infinite meanings and interpretations. They are trying to say something. That something may be a question with near-infinite answers, or it may be a subject so complex that it will inevitably lead to near-infinite interpretations, but no one ever sat down and said (except facetiously, or egotistically) "I am going to write something, and spend two years on it, so that it can be debated in english departments and generate near-infinite meanings to keep a whole cadre of graduate students gainfully employed for as long as possible."
I don't mean to hammer the point home too much, but I think this is based on the difference between analyzing the ACT of writing vs. analyzing the PRODUCT of writing. In the act of writing, an author may be many things. They may be black, white, brown, old, young, sick, poor, rich, male, female, transgender, straight, bisexual, gay, blind, an amputee, deaf, able to communicate only by blinking or by hitting a key with a stick held between the teeth, even illiterate; the one thing an author cannot be in the act of composition is dead.
When it comes to the PRODUCT of writing, of course, you can kill the author off in as many gruesome ways as you can imagine. Eviscerate the bastard. Accuse Shakespeare of making half his characters gay as a statement on social conformism. Parse each and every syllable Blake ever wrote to determine the subtextual references to his economic class. Debate the innate feminism of Jane Austen's comedies of manners and the innumerable ways they elucidate the inevitable struggles women have with the social and political constraints of their roles. Tell poor Timothy Findley that whatever he meant to write didn't matter and now that you've got the book in your grubby hands you can tell him what he really meant and he can go stuff himself; once that book is in your hands, you are right.
But I am writing about what happens between the author's mind and the production of that finished text; the choice of which black mark to put where and why.
There was an anecdote in the Margaret Laurence biography, which might be apocryphal since I've seen it attributed to a number of writers: Margaret Laurence was talking to a neurosurgeon at a cocktail party. On learning that she is a novelist, he says to her, "I'm planning to write a novel when I retire." "Really?" she says to him, "I'm planning on taking up brain surgery when I retire."
(By the way, I put together a list of most of the writing books I have and have read on facebook under visual bookshelf, if any of you are interested in looking into this a little more. There are about thirty books on there right now and I'll add more as I get the time. This is nowhere near all of them. Also, since I know most of you are not on facebook, I'll put it on my library thing account as well, as soon as I can remember my password.)
For a long time, I resisted reading novels, stories and articles in this way: I thought it would ruin the experience of reading to be simultaneously decoding it for writing strategies and techniques. And it did, a little. But by now I can't help it: I read on three tracks. Track one: Oh no, what next for poor Susie Q? Track two: What an interesting commentary on the ways that women negotiated their identities in 1950s Pakistan. Track three: I like the way the author slowed the action down and intensified the emotional response by spending half a page describing the lightbulb and the tree outside the window. All quite separate. These days, I know I'm reading a good book when Track One drags me off and I forget about Tracks Two and Three for even fifteen minutes (then go back and immediately reread it to see how the author made me forget myself); and these days, similarly, a book can be riveting and enjoyable and have deep and meaningful insights and symbols, and if I can tell that the author was careless or sloppy, I still hate the book. I can remember for example a well-regarded fantasy series that I quite liked until I realized that the author's attributions (or speech tags--the "he said"s and "she yelled"s and "the child wondered"s of fiction, that tell you who is speaking) stunk. Derivative, flabby, cliched garbage; and now I can't read the books anymore, because I can't stand his attributions.
So there's that risk.
On the other hand, at the very least you'll write more consciously, if not considerably better.
Make no mistake: you are already doing this whenever you sit down to write anything. You may not be aware of it, but it is happening under the surface. How could it be otherwise? The black marks wouldn't be getting themselves down onto the screen in that order without you--without your choices. No one can promise that anyone will be a brilliant writer by following a particular strategy, but I can promise that if you are conscious of your writing strategies, your writing will be more effective.
It's like looking at houses. I'm confident that you've been in a number of houses. Some of them you liked, and some of them you didn't, and maybe you knew why or maybe not. Possibly you eventually went to school and learned how to discuss houses and analyze your reactions and describe a house's style, antecedents, context; the uses to which a house could be put, the number of people who could live there, and what the architecture of the house says about the roles of the people who live in it. All interesting and valuable things.
Now we're going to go inside a few houses and rip the drywall off so we can see where the studs are, what's holding the thing up, where the pipes and wires were laid, if there's any rot. Every stud, every beam, every pipe, every wire, every outlet, every fixture, every door, every window, every joist, every nail was placed where it is for a reason. Every bit of it is the result of human agency and choice.
It's the difference between appreciating houses (or texts) and building them.
Before I delve into characterization again (because it's tricky and fascinating both, and something I can talk about endlessly without tiring) I want to touch on a few points that have come up in the comments so far.
First off, and most importantly, there is a vast difference between writing about reading and writing about writing. Writing about reading is fascinating and wonderful and necessary, but it's not, actually, helpful when it comes to writing about writing. The writer has an audience in her head as she writes. That audience may be a specific person (who she is trying to impress? or apologize to? or make understand her?) or a group of people (her family, her congregation, her second-period english class?) or an imaginary person or people (the biographer writing about her brilliance after she is dead?) or some combination of the above, but I take it as a given that there is some person she is imagining receiving her words on the other side of this process. Very likely she is targetting her choice of words and images and meanings and subjects to this person in an idealized state of perfect communion that will never be realized by flesh-and-blood, who will inevitably bring their own biases and preconceptions to the work thus fucking the whole thing up. (Just kidding. Breathe.) But regardless, her job at the moment of composition is not to engage in direct communication with this idealized audience--that comes later--but to engage with the blank screen and make a series of choices. Writing about writing is about those choices. What the reader makes of it, later on, is a separate question and in a very real sense not really the writer's business. (Until they are using that information to evaluate their choices in order to make better choices for the next piece.)
The writer's business is to put her butt into the chair and make a series of choices about black marks on a white screen (or page). That's it. And the question becomes: why these marks, in this order? Is this the best choice that can be made or are there better ones? Do these marks in this order allow the writer to fulfill her purpose?
I take it as axiomatic that no one ever endures the tiresome business of putting anything into writing without some reason that appears sufficiently important at the time. A paycheque, revenge, a burning need to save the world, a deep conviction that everyone needs to know what it is like specifically to ride a trolley-bus in 19th century London, whatever. Writers have meanings and intentions because otherwise they wouldn't bother writing; they would spend their time more profitably by playing parcheesi or scrubbing the toilets. So: the bare fact that someone wrote something means that that someone had a reason to write that something, in other words, a meaning and an intention that they felt would best be served by black marks arranged in a particular order.
I really don't see how you can get around this. At the moment of composition, no one is trying to compose a text that will generate near-infinite meanings and interpretations. They are trying to say something. That something may be a question with near-infinite answers, or it may be a subject so complex that it will inevitably lead to near-infinite interpretations, but no one ever sat down and said (except facetiously, or egotistically) "I am going to write something, and spend two years on it, so that it can be debated in english departments and generate near-infinite meanings to keep a whole cadre of graduate students gainfully employed for as long as possible."
I don't mean to hammer the point home too much, but I think this is based on the difference between analyzing the ACT of writing vs. analyzing the PRODUCT of writing. In the act of writing, an author may be many things. They may be black, white, brown, old, young, sick, poor, rich, male, female, transgender, straight, bisexual, gay, blind, an amputee, deaf, able to communicate only by blinking or by hitting a key with a stick held between the teeth, even illiterate; the one thing an author cannot be in the act of composition is dead.
When it comes to the PRODUCT of writing, of course, you can kill the author off in as many gruesome ways as you can imagine. Eviscerate the bastard. Accuse Shakespeare of making half his characters gay as a statement on social conformism. Parse each and every syllable Blake ever wrote to determine the subtextual references to his economic class. Debate the innate feminism of Jane Austen's comedies of manners and the innumerable ways they elucidate the inevitable struggles women have with the social and political constraints of their roles. Tell poor Timothy Findley that whatever he meant to write didn't matter and now that you've got the book in your grubby hands you can tell him what he really meant and he can go stuff himself; once that book is in your hands, you are right.
But I am writing about what happens between the author's mind and the production of that finished text; the choice of which black mark to put where and why.
There was an anecdote in the Margaret Laurence biography, which might be apocryphal since I've seen it attributed to a number of writers: Margaret Laurence was talking to a neurosurgeon at a cocktail party. On learning that she is a novelist, he says to her, "I'm planning to write a novel when I retire." "Really?" she says to him, "I'm planning on taking up brain surgery when I retire."
(By the way, I put together a list of most of the writing books I have and have read on facebook under visual bookshelf, if any of you are interested in looking into this a little more. There are about thirty books on there right now and I'll add more as I get the time. This is nowhere near all of them. Also, since I know most of you are not on facebook, I'll put it on my library thing account as well, as soon as I can remember my password.)
For a long time, I resisted reading novels, stories and articles in this way: I thought it would ruin the experience of reading to be simultaneously decoding it for writing strategies and techniques. And it did, a little. But by now I can't help it: I read on three tracks. Track one: Oh no, what next for poor Susie Q? Track two: What an interesting commentary on the ways that women negotiated their identities in 1950s Pakistan. Track three: I like the way the author slowed the action down and intensified the emotional response by spending half a page describing the lightbulb and the tree outside the window. All quite separate. These days, I know I'm reading a good book when Track One drags me off and I forget about Tracks Two and Three for even fifteen minutes (then go back and immediately reread it to see how the author made me forget myself); and these days, similarly, a book can be riveting and enjoyable and have deep and meaningful insights and symbols, and if I can tell that the author was careless or sloppy, I still hate the book. I can remember for example a well-regarded fantasy series that I quite liked until I realized that the author's attributions (or speech tags--the "he said"s and "she yelled"s and "the child wondered"s of fiction, that tell you who is speaking) stunk. Derivative, flabby, cliched garbage; and now I can't read the books anymore, because I can't stand his attributions.
So there's that risk.
On the other hand, at the very least you'll write more consciously, if not considerably better.
Make no mistake: you are already doing this whenever you sit down to write anything. You may not be aware of it, but it is happening under the surface. How could it be otherwise? The black marks wouldn't be getting themselves down onto the screen in that order without you--without your choices. No one can promise that anyone will be a brilliant writer by following a particular strategy, but I can promise that if you are conscious of your writing strategies, your writing will be more effective.
It's like looking at houses. I'm confident that you've been in a number of houses. Some of them you liked, and some of them you didn't, and maybe you knew why or maybe not. Possibly you eventually went to school and learned how to discuss houses and analyze your reactions and describe a house's style, antecedents, context; the uses to which a house could be put, the number of people who could live there, and what the architecture of the house says about the roles of the people who live in it. All interesting and valuable things.
Now we're going to go inside a few houses and rip the drywall off so we can see where the studs are, what's holding the thing up, where the pipes and wires were laid, if there's any rot. Every stud, every beam, every pipe, every wire, every outlet, every fixture, every door, every window, every joist, every nail was placed where it is for a reason. Every bit of it is the result of human agency and choice.
It's the difference between appreciating houses (or texts) and building them.