Writing About Character: Voice and Development
As a drama teacher you often have to help students move between rehearsal room instincts and analytic writing. Time is limited. Classes are mixed in ability and interest. Yet the ability to write about character connects textual readings, performance choices and assessment tasks in a practical way.
Working with character need not become an open-ended theoretical exercise. Practical analytic tools can make discussion clearer and give students language they can use in essays, portfolios and rehearsal notes. The lenses I use tend to keep attention on what a character does in a play rather than what we feel about them.
To track a character across a play I find four linked lenses most useful: voice, objectives, obstacles and relational dynamics. These lenses give students concrete things to observe and to cite when they write about change or continuity within an act or across the whole play. For a broader discussion of how writers' intentions and performance interact, you can return to our main hub at Playwrights in Drama: Intent, Text and Performance.
Voice
By voice I mean the distinctive way a character speaks and thinks on the page. Voice includes sentence length, rhythm, word choice, use of rhetorical devices, and whether the character uses literal or figurative language. Voice can show education, social class, emotional state and also the distance between a character’s public face and private thought.
In Shakespearean drama a soliloquy often opens up interior voice in a way that contrasts with public speech. Students may note how a character’s syntax loosens in private moments, or how metaphors recur as a kind of mental habit. In Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Nora’s early chattiness gives way to sharper, more economical speech as her understanding of her situation tightens. Pointing out such shifts helps students move from adjective-led descriptions to evidence-based claims.
In the classroom, a simple activity is to give students a short passage and ask them to annotate for the features of voice, then to rewrite a few lines in a different register to test what changes in perceived motive or status. When they write, encourage verbs of action — a character “claims”, “evades”, “presses” — rather than static labels like “angry” or “weak”.
Objectives
An objective is what a character wants in a scene or beat. Framing aims as objectives keeps analysis active. It also connects directly to performance choices because objectives lead actors to specific tactics.
Classical examples lend themselves to large objectives that change shape. Macbeth’s early objective may be to secure power; later it can narrow to self-preservation and legacy. In modern drama, Willy Loman’s defining objective of wanting to be well liked reframes many of his actions across the play. Tracking how objectives expand, narrow or reverse across acts helps students make sense of plot and of character development.
In teaching, ask students to state objectives in a single clause with an active verb and a concrete target. For example, “to persuade Duncan to name me” or “to keep the family from knowing the truth”. Over several scenes, students map the objective at the start and end of each scene and note moments when an objective shifts. This makes for precise evidence in written responses.
Obstacles
Obstacles are whatever stands in the way of an objective. They can be external rules, other characters, physical barriers, or internal conflicts such as fear or denial. Distinguishing the type of obstacle sharpens interpretation and performance alike.
Antigone’s classic conflict pits family duty against state law, so the obstacle is explicit and political. In contrast, Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire faces both social ostracism and inner denial; the obstacles are layered and sometimes self-generated. Teaching students to separate external impediments from internal resistance clarifies where agency sits within a scene.
A practical classroom task is to give students an obstacle and ask them to improvise a scene where the character escalates their tactics in response. Watching how choices shift when obstacles intensify reveals which tactics align with the character’s voice and objectives. When students record these improvisations, they can later select moments as evidence for written analysis.
Relational dynamics and assembling the analysis
Relations between characters are not static. Power, affection, suspicion and alliance all move through a play. Mapping how characters influence one another across scenes makes development visible and supports comparative claims in essays and portfolios.
Consider Iago’s relationship with Othello. Iago’s voice and tactics change how Othello’s objectives and obstacles form. Noticing the causal flow — who initiates, who responds, who is changed — helps students argue how character, not just plot, produces tragedy. In more contemporary texts small shifts in reciprocity can have large interpretive consequences, as when a partner’s lack of belief undermines another character’s resolve.
When you ask students to write a paragraph about a character, a practical structure is to start with a short claim about voice, show how that voice drives a specific objective, name the principle obstacle, and then demonstrate how a relational shift alters the character’s path. Ground each point in a short quotation or a clear scene description and end with a comment on performance implication — what an actor might need to emphasise or withhold. Over time, small adjustments to the conditions around this can make the skill feel more accessible.
Portfolios benefit from this method because it produces tight, justifyable micro-essays rather than broad, unsupported readings. Students can collect annotated moments from rehearsal, pair them with a compact analytic paragraph, and show the examiner both textual understanding and practical theatre thinking.
These lenses are tools rather than a rigid formula. Use them selectively depending on the text, the assessment task and the students’ needs. Clear, evidence-linked descriptions of voice, objectives, obstacles and relationships often yield more persuasive essays and richer rehearsal notes than a long list of traits without anchors.