In the previous two blogs, we looked at some basic advice and criteria for introducing characters—the lifeblood of any story. Now we’re going to go deeper and look at various examples of the ways in which you can bring your character to life the first time you introduce them to your reader. As you can imagine, this is a huge topic, so these examples will be broken into two blogs to finish out this series on character introductions. Now to begin…
Ways to introduce characters:
Through Voice
Voice is always a great way to introduce your main character. In most cases, your main character is voicing your narration. As such, that voice needs to be distinctive and intimate. Your readers needs to have an immediate sense of who they will be spending their time with as they read. They need to hear personality and receive clues to that character’s heart and mind. Here’s an example of voice from the first page of The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan:
Look, I didn’t want to be a half blood.
If you’re reading this because you think you might be one, my advice is: close the book right now. Believe whatever lie your mom or dad told you about your birth, and try to lead a normal life.
Being a half-blood is dangerous. It’s scary. Most of the time, it gets you killed in painful, nasty ways.
This voice sets up what is about to happen and gives us some clues to Percy’s personality. He’s not happy about being who he is or where. He cares enough about others to warn them and let’s us see his trepidation.
Through Action
Show who your characters are through their actions. Let what they do reveals what kind of person they are. How they react and handle situations will help define them. A killer will respond differently to death than a child would or a kindly old lady. A broken person will respond differently to kindness than a whole one. Action also lets you show a difference between a character’s appearance and how they act.
Here’s an example from The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls:
Mom stood fifteen feet away. She had tied rags around her shoulders to keep out the spring chill and was picking through the trash while her dog, a black-and-white terrier mix, played at her feet. Mom’s gestures were all familiar — the way she tilted her head and thrust out her lower lip when studying items of potential value that she’d hoisted out of the Dumpster, the way her eyes widened with childish glee when she found something she liked. Her long hair was streaked with gray, tangled and matted, and her eyes had sunk deep into their sockets, but still she reminded me of the mom she’d been when I was a kid, swan-diving off cliffs and painting in the desert and reading Shakespeare aloud. Her cheekbones were still high and strong, but the skin was parched and ruddy from all those winters and summers exposed to the elements. To the people walking by, she probably looked like any of the thousands of homeless people in New York City.
It had been months since I laid eyes on Mom, and when she looked up, I was overcome with panic that she’d see me and call out my name, and that someone on the way to the same party would spot us together and Mom would introduce herself and my secret would be out.
I slid down in the seat and asked the driver to turn around and take me home to Park Avenue.
Other examples from film include: John Doe from Seven arriving at the Police Station; Hellboy in Hellboy (particulary his act of saving the cats); Quint in Jaws with those fingernails down the chalkboard that sets up his personality in seconds. The point is to make their actions define them in a way that sets up character for the book or at least for the inciting incident and development later in the story.
Reaction Works Too
How a character reacts to a situation offers a glimpse of who they are. In the above example from The Glass Castle, the main character turning away from her mother reveals her character more than her mother’s and sets up the main story of her childhood and how she got to where the story begins.
Description
Description might feel basic, but it helps establish an image in your readers’ minds. Without knowing what a character look like, your reader can feel disconnected from them. Focus on character personality and actions. Trim details to the most memorable bits—habits, traits, wardrobe, striking details. Include a physical description, but go beyond how they look and describe how you want a reader to view a character. Use language to reveal the character and the role they will play in the story.
Kaz shook his head, dark hair glinting in the lamplight. He was a collection of hard lines and tailored edges—sharp jaw, lean build, wool coat snug across his shoulders. “Yes and no,” he said in his rock salt rasp. “It’s always good to have a country in debt to you. Makes for friendlier negotiations.”
Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo
Bailey didn’t look up from his reading so she wheeled around then and faced the children’s mother, a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit’s ears. She was sitting on the sofa, feeding the baby his apricots out of a jar.
A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.
Far from the Maddening Crowd by Thomas Hardy
Memorable Trait
If possible, use a memorable trait to define the character. This goes beyond the basic description by offering an understanding of a person through one trait or a series of related traits, like the description below that shows who Atticus really is beyond his blond hair and Irish face.
Thank the Goddess I don’t look like a guy who met Galileo—or who saw Shakespeare’s plays when they first debuted or rode with the hordes of Genghis Khan. When people ask how old I am, I just tell them twenty-one, and if they assume I mean years instead of decades or centuries, then that can’t be my fault, can it? I still get carded, in fact, which any senior citizen will tell you is immensely flattering.
The young-Irish-lad façade does not stand me in good stead when I’m trying to appear scholarly at my place of business—I run an occult bookshop with an apothecary’s counter squeezed in the corner—but it has one outstanding advantage. When I go to the grocery store, for example, and people see my curly red hair, fair skin, and long goatee, they suspect that I play soccer and drink lots of Guinness. If I’m going sleeveless and they see the tattoos all up and down my right arm, they assume I’m in a rock band and smoke lots of weed. It never enters their mind for a moment that I could be an ancient Druid—and that’s the main reason why I like this look. If I grew a white beard and got myself a pointy hat, oozed dignity and sagacity and glowed with beatitude, people might start to get the wrong—or the right—idea.Hounded by Kevin Hearne
Metaphor
Using a metaphor to define a character works well. It is similar to using a filter to capture someone’s role in the story. In the example below, the student views the adult who enters his class as an agent come to arrest him for a crime he cannot fathom. This filter he uses to describe the character affects how we see both him and the adult. The metaphor of law enforcement reveals his state of mind and how he views this person’s role in his life. From Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris:
The agent came for me during a geography lesson. She entered the room and nodded at my fifth-grade teacher, who stood frowning at a map of Europe. What would needle me later was the realization that this had all been prearranged. My capture had been scheduled to go down at exactly 2:30 on a Thursday afternoon. The agent would be wearing a dung-colored blazer over a red knit turtleneck, her heels sensibly low in case the suspect should attempt a quick getaway.
“David,” the teacher said, “this is Miss Samson, and she’d like you to go with her now.”
No one else had been called, so why me? I ran down a list of recent crimes, looking for a conviction that might stick. Setting fire to a reportedly flameproof Halloween costume, stealing a set of barbecue tongs from an unguarded patio, altering the word hit on a list of rules posted on the gymnasium door; never did it occur to me that I might be innocent.
The author uses the term “agent” to establish a punishment and retribution, but it doesn’t take long to discover the “agent” is a speech therapist—another form of torture and torment for the young David.
In the next example, we see how family defined a sister and how her nickname ultimately affected who she was and became, as well as her role in the family:
I was not a cute baby. When I was born, my older brother, Carlton, looked at me and declared to the hospital room, “It’s not a baby, it’s a skeeter!” and from there the name stuck. I was long and leggy and mosquito-thin, a record-breaking twenty-five inches at Baptist Hospital. The name grew even more accurate with my pointy, beak-like nose when I was a child. Mother’s spent my entire life trying to convince people to call me by my given name, Eugenia.
Mrs. Charlotte Boudreau Cantrelle Phelan does not like nicknames.
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
A Memorable Moment
Another way to introduce a character is to use a single moment or image to establish who they are. Think Jack Sparrow coming into port on a sinking ship in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl; Holly Golightly standing outside of Tiffanys in her little black dress in Breakfast at Tiffanys; or Marge Gunderson rolling out of bed and going to the crime scene in Fargo.
A memorable moment is an image that defines who the character is and what we should expect moving forward. Here is how Rebecca Skloot introduces Henrietta Lacks from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks:
On January 29, 1951, David Lacks sat behind the wheel of his old Buick, watching the rain fall. He was parked under a towering oak tree outside Johns Hopkins Hospital with three of his children—two still in diapers—waiting for their mother, Henrietta. A few minutes earlier she’d jumped out of the car, pulled her jacket over her head, and scurried into the hospital, past the “colored” bathroom, the only one she was allowed to use. In the next building, under an elegant domed copper roof, a ten-and-a-half-foot marble statue of Jesus stood, arms spread wide, holding court over what was once the main entrance of Hopkins. No one in Henrietta’s family ever saw a Hopkins doctor without visiting the Jesus statue, laying flowers at his feet, saying a prayer, and rubbing his big toe for good luck. But that day Henrietta didn’t stop.
She went straight to the waiting room of the gynecology clinic, a wide-open space, empty but for rows of long, straight-backed benches that looked like church pews.
“I got a knot on my womb,” she told the receptionist. “The doctor need to have a look.”
The setting defines Henrietta as much as her actions. This moment of her confronting the doctors without pausing to pay tribute to the Jesus statue clearly shows her current state and personality.
Or consider this moment from The Help by Kathryn Stockett when Minny meets a client for the first time, offering us a better understanding of Minny and a great introduction to Celia Ray Foote:
Standing on that white lady’s back porch, I tell myself, Tuck it in, Minny. Tuck in whatever might fly out my mouth and tuck in my behind too. Look like a maid who does what she’s told. Truth is, I’m so nervous right now, I’d never backtalk again if it meant I’d get this job.
I yank my hose up from the sagging around my feet—the trouble of all fat, short women around the world. Then I rehearse what to say, what to keep to myself. I go ahead and punch the bell.
The doorbell rings a long bing-bong, fine and fancy for this big mansion out in the country. It looks like a castle, grey brick rising high in the sky and left and right too. Woods surround the lawn on every side. If this place was in a story book, there’d be witches in those woods. The kind that eat kids.
The back door opens and there stands Miss Marilyn Monroe. Or something kin to her.
“Hey there, you’re right on time. I’m Celia. Celia Ray Foote.”
The white lady sticks her hand out to me and I study her. She might be built like Marilyn, but she ain’t ready for no screen test. She’s got flour in her yellow hairdo. Flour in her glue-on eyelashes. And flour all over that tacky pink pantsuit. Her standing in a cloud of dust and that pantsuit being so tight, I wonder how she can breathe.
“Yes ma’am. I’m Minny Jackson.” I smooth down my white uniform instead of shaking her hand. I don’t want that mess on me. “You cooking something?”
“One of those upside-down cakes from the magazine?” She sighs. “It ain’t working out too good.”
I follow her inside and that’s when I see Miss Celia Rae Foote’s suffered only a minor injury in the flour fiasco. The rest of the kitchen took the real hit. The countertops, the double-door refrigerator, the Kitchen-Aid mixer are all sitting in about a quarter-inch of snow flour. It’s enough mess to drive me crazy. I ain’t even got the job yet, and I’m already looking over at the sink for a sponge.
Miss Celia says, “I guess I have some learning to do.”
“You sure do,” I say. But I bite down hard on my tongue. Don’t you go sassing this white lady like you done the other. Sassed her all the way to the nursing home.
A Fully Formed Introduction
Let your character blast onto the page, fully formed and full of personality. Show who they are who as they are. This means revealing characters who won’t change much as the story progresses. These are flat characters, like detectives, James Bond, and Hans Solo in Star Wars: A New Hope. They are who they are. Sherlock is always Sherlock. Bond is always Bond. Their character arcs don’t change much from beginning to end. In the examples below, from nonfiction, the stories are about idealistic men who grow and change through their experiences, but who never lose the hope that defines them.
Since he could remember, Abu Laith had loved animals, and devoted himself to them at the near-absolute expense of humans. He had raised dogs, pigeons, rabbits, cats and beetles and held them in his hands when they died. For his third-eldest daughter’s birthday, he had driven a herd of sheep into the family home. He had once given a baby monkey a shower in his garden.
He had one ultimate, lifelong ambition: to live on a farm with large predators roaming free around him. In Mosul, this was considered a suspect ambition. It had, possibly, something to do with the restrictions on animals in the Quran. In the holy book, dogs were listed as haram—unclean—along with pigs, donkeys, bandicoots, parrots, glow-worms (and all such bloodless animals), snakes and forest lizards (animals that have blood, but whose blood does not flow).
Most people, even if they weren’t religious, thought that dogs were dirty, and somehow unsavoury, in the way that people in Europe felt about rats: plague carriers and unclean beasts that defiled their surroundings. Though some families kept pets, it was considered disreputable to own a lot of animals. Among the people of the great city by the Tigris, animal lovers had a shady reputation as hustlers, fighters and panhandlers. Pigeon breeders, a fraternity to which Abu Laith also belonged, were especially dodgy.
Under the Iraqi legal system, pigeon owners were not considered trustworthy enough to testify in court. They had a reputation for always getting into fights and drinking too much whisky. Abu Laith fitted the stereotype all too well. He was a shaqawa—a kind of good-hearted neighbourhood thug. The sort of man you might call if you needed an extra pair of fists in a fight, or if someone was harassing your daughter, and needed to be scared off. He would never let anyone else pay for lunch, and always lent money to his relatives, grasping as he thought they were.
Father of Lions by Louise Callaghan
The southern school superintendent is a kind of remote deity who breathes the purer air of Mount Parnassus. The teachers see him only on those august occasions when they need to be reminded of the nobility of their calling. The powers of a superintendent are considerable. He hires and fires, manipulates the board of education, handles a staggering amount of money, and maintains the precarious existence of the status quo. Beaufort, South Carolina’s superintendent, Dr. Henry Piedmont, had been in Beaufort for only a year when I went to see him. He had a reputation of being tough, capable, and honest. A friend told me that Piedmont took crap from no man.
The Water is Wide by Pat Conroy
We will continue with character introductions in the next blog. Until then, share examples of how you introduce characters and what category you think it falls under.