first task shows what trees are like, the second shows the possibilities of the medium. Likewise, as a writer, it is by reading that you learn how, in language, a character can be presented -- through dialogue, through action, through physical attributes, interior monologue etc -- a process that continues until you have absorbed these methods, and they have become a reflex so embedded in your apprehending of the world that you will never notice anything about anybody without secretly assessing its potential for fiction writing. And this, indeed, we could call "technique", though we should not confuse the method with the task. At its simplest, its barest, characterisation is about a writer's grasp of what a human being is. When we set out to write, we do not do so out of a sense of certainty but out of a kind of radical uncertainty. We do not set out saying: "The world is like this." But asking: "How is the world?" In creating characters we are posing to ourselves large, honest questions about our nature and the nature of those about us. Our answers are the characters themselves, those talking spirits we conjure up by a kind of organised dreaming. And when we finish, we are immediately dissatisfied with them, these "answers", and we set out again, bemused, frustrated, excited. An odd use of time! An odd use of a life. But there's a courage to it. Even, perhaps, a type of beauty.  Andrew Miller is the author