‘Direct characterization’ means the character details authors explicitly describe.

 For
example, telling the reader a character’s desires, life philosophy or current emotional
state explicitly.

Here’s an example of direct characterization from Virginia Woolf’s To the

Lighthouse (1927). Woolf explicitly shows what characters think of one another. For
example, an artist staying with the Ramsay family, Lily Briscoe, thinks about a man
Mr. Bankes who has called Mr Ramsay a hypocrite:

‘Looking up, there he was – Mr. Ramsay – advancing towards them, swinging,
careless, oblivious, remote. A bit of a hypocrite? she repeated. Oh no – the most
sincere of men, the truest (here he was), the best; but, looking down, she thought, he
is absorbed in himself, he is tyrannical, he is unjust…’ (p. 52).

This is direct – Woolf describes Mr. Ramsay’s traits directly – his self-absorption and
so forth.

In contrast to direct characterization, ‘indirect characterization’ shows readers your

characters’ traits without explicitly describing them. What types of indirect
characterization are there? Any writing that helps us infer or deduce things about a
person’s personality. For example:

 Dialogue – (where a character’s bossy, kind, mean, or other qualities come

through)
 Actions – what a character does (for example jumping on a beetle to squash it)
reveals, incidentally, their character (in this case that a character is needlessly
unkind or violent)
 Description – although associations differ from country to country, culture to
culture, how a character looks often gives indirect characterization. We might
assume, for example, a pale-skinned character is antisocial and hides away
from the sun, like the recluse Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird

An example of indirect characterization

Here, John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath shows a character’s personality

indirectly. He doesn’t say that hitchhiker Joad is a down-and-out, blue-collar worker.
Instead, the indirect characterization uses the props a worker in the context would
have – whiskey, cigarettes, calloused hands – to show Joad’s character.
‘Joad took a quick drink from the flask. He dragged the last smoke from his raveling
cigarette and then, with callused thumb and forefinger, crushed out the glowing end.
He rubbed the butt to a pulp and put it out the window, letting the breeze suck it from
his fingers.’ (The Grapes of Wrath, p. 9)