How Fiction Works Writing Meme - Day Twenty

[meridian_rose]

20 - An absence of characterization can be as powerful as characterization in knowing a character. Agree? Disagree? Any examples in your own writing?

Disagree. It can be useful as a sort of 'blank slate' for readers to fill up with their own impressions, perhaps, but it doesn't help anyone to know a character.

Comments

[brontefanatic.livejournal.com]

Although I always read these fiction writing memes, I don't always comment because I often don't know what to say.

But this - I don't even understand the concept. How can an absence of characterization be as powerful as characterization in knowing a character? I can understand if you are reading or writing something in which one character is so alien that the other characters, and the reader, can't understand them, but even that has to lead to some resolution.

So, yeah, like you, I disagree with this.

[meridian_rose]

It was a puzzling one. I thought it might refer to a character we never see 'onscreen', a far off king, perhaps, or absent master of the house. We only develop a picture of them through the other character's - perhaps conflicting - POVs. But that doesn't tell us truly about the character in question, but about the people commenting on them.