: Re: How can I establish the nature of a person/group without action? How can one establish the nature of a person/group to the reader without relying on actions to 'show' it? For example, if I

@Nimeshi163

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I believe an earlier reply offered a way to define the group without having to re-tell some historic event. You can describe the motivations of the group. Along with their motivations you can use their emotional response to either events or even concepts. How you actually achieve this is dependent on how the group or group members are used in your writing. If a member of the group is a main character at some point in the story you can introduce them and portray their emotional/mental state by describing their thoughts and possibly plans (these could be an indication of where in your story this character will be active). The main example of this I can think of is "The Walking Dude" from The Stand (Stephen King). He was introduced as an ominous presence without a real description of his actions until later in the novel:

"There was a dark hilarity in his face, and perhaps in his heart, too, you would think—and you would be right. It was the face of a hatefully happy man, a face that radiated a horrible handsome warmth, a face to make water glasses shatter in the hands of tired truck-stop waitresses, to make small children crash their trikes into board fences and then run wailing to their mommies with stake-shaped splinters sticking out of their knees. It was a face guaranteed to make barroom arguments over batting averages turn bloody."
King, Stephen (1990). The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition. New York: Doubleday. pp. 214–215. ISBN 0-385-19957-0.
Taken from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randall_Flagg
If the group is an anonymous force of unnamed individuals you could do the same by introducing the group and interactions between group members that establish the group's motivations; I do think it will be harder to integrate this into your story seamlessly though. The other alternative is given in another answer; use either the main characters or a third party character to establish the group's motivations/emotional/mental state. If you do this early and clearly enough within the story there should be no need to have to re-establish this later on outside of the group's interactions with your main characters.

The only other, practical, alternative I can think of is to compare and contrast the main character from the characteristics of the group where the focus is building out the main character. Again I feel this would be difficult to integrate into the story seamlessly.

Hope these thoughts help.

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