584 – Introducing Characters

We all dream of the day our characters turn into beloved household names, or perhaps feared household names, in the case of villains. But before that can happen, we must introduce our characters to readers, and how are we even supposed to do that? There’s so much information that must be balanced, to say nothing of what happens if you need to introduce multiple characters at the same time. Fortunately, we have some tips.

Show Notes

• Travel Stories
• Kazon
• The Bad Batch 
• Love Interest 
• Description 
• Character Appearance 
• Character Chemistry 
• Candy and Spinach

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music]

Chris: Hello, I am Chris. I have blue eyes and brown hair, and that is all you need to know about me. Now you have a very clear picture of who I am and what I look like. 

Oren: (Intense voice) There is also… Podcaster 2. He is very tall and he has a very distinctive gravelly voice and many weapons. Don’t worry about why he has those. He’s not important. He’s just a background character. 

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: Normal guy, Podcaster 2. 

Chris: [Laughing] Is that like a video game NPC? Is that what that is? 

Oren: No. He’s got five paragraphs of description because he’s actually the secret villain or love interest or rival, or… 

Chris: [Laughs] That’s what I was gonna say, love interest. 

Oren: He’s a secret something or other. We don’t know exactly what. 

Chris: Both villain and love interest perhaps. 

Oren: Could be both of those things. But the important thing is that the author is trying to disguise him as a normal character in the scene, but obviously we can’t do that ’cause we need to say how cool he is.

Chris: [Chuckles]

Oren: It’s been a while since I’ve read something like that in a published manuscript, but I still see it in client works. You’re like, “There was a guard by the door and there was a courtier, and then there was a spooky figure in the shadows with the robe over his head and a jeweled staff. Anyway, moving on.” I’m like, “Okay, so that’s the villain that we just saw.” 

Chris: [Laughs] If it is a romance, I can see having, there’s a royal guard there, like, “Oh, that one guard is really hot.” And that is supposed to be the first time the protagonist notices the love interest. And then we’re gonna build on that later. But if we’re really trying to make a character blend in, adding a bunch of description is not gonna do that. 

Any case, this time we’re talking about introducing characters. For a storyteller, this is not usually the most challenging task, but there are still a bunch of different little things that can go wrong. And we often see this in manuscripts, so it’s worth kind of talking about how you do character introductions. 

Oren: You say it’s not hard, but I spent the last two weeks trying to revise a scene where I introduced two characters and it was too much. It was too confusing, and so I had to revise it to introduce one at a time, and that was really hard. 

Chris: That is one of the trickier things is getting the timing right. First thing I wanna mention, there are characters that don’t need an introduction. But they’re not important, so they’re only usually kind of barely characters. They also have a label that explains specifically why they are in the scene. If your character walks into the lobby and sees the receptionist, that’s a label. We know why that person is there. They’re called a receptionist. We don’t really need more than that if we’re just walking by them briefly or saying just a few words to them. Doesn’t really need much introduction there. 

The thing that we see in a lot of writers who don’t know how to do introductions, when we’re looking at manuscripts, we just drop a name. “I was going to the store and I stopped by home and George said, ‘Hi,’ and then I kept going.” And it’s like, “Who’s George?” I don’t know who George is. What is the relationship between the narrator or the protagonist and George? Why is George there? 

As opposed to like, “Oh, I saw my neighbor George” or “I saw my coworker, George,” tells you what the relationship George has to the other elements in the story. It can be really funny in speculative fiction works because a lot of times we’ll just get proper nouns and I don’t know whether this is a person, a place, or a vegetable.

Oren: It’s like a fantasy story, and they say, “I saw ‘Gula.’” What is Gula? Is that a person? Is that a soup? What is that? 

Chris: [Laughs] Oh, is that a strange monolith in the middle of the street? I don’t know. 

Oren: It could be. Anything’s possible. 

Chris: [Laughs] We literally have no idea what this thing is, whereas at least if it’s in a contemporary setting, I know George is a person. 

Oren: But it could also be a cat. If you don’t describe it at all, it’s like, “Is that a person or an animal?” 

Chris: It could be really jarring if George walks in and you assume it’s a man, and then the protagonist starts petting George. 

Oren: Hey, I don’t judge. Live their lives however they want. 

Chris: That’s the first rule, is don’t just drop in names. Give “George, my neighbor.” That two words is everything. And if you’re writing in a really close, limited perspective, don’t overthink it. Somebody might normally not think to themselves, “Oh, there’s George, my neighbor.” But don’t overthink it. Just put it in. 

Oren: You’re already editing what the person’s train of thought is. When you see another person, you don’t just register their name. You almost certainly have other associations with them that if you tried to write them all out, would overwhelm the narration. We can abstract that down to “my neighbor.” 

The one that I struggle with is when we introduce a character once and then they show back up again several hours, or hundreds of pages later, like I’m supposed to know who that is. Yeah, technically we did mention them, but I don’t remember who that is. It’s been too long. My memory is not that good. 

Chris: Definitely if we’re doing a reintroduction, and it’s been a while, sometimes what actually needs to happen is we need to consolidate the characters. If we have lots of characters who only perform very small roles and there’s no logistical reason they have to be different. For instance, if your character is traveling, that’s a reason why people need to be different. ‘Cause otherwise you get the Kazons. It’s like, “How are they following us?” 

Oren: There’s that one Kazon guide. He’s always there. Well actually we know how he’s keeping up. It’s ’cause Voyager keeps stopping to do side quests.

Chris: [Laughs] If you have the same character show up in different places as your protagonist travels, that will require explanation. But otherwise, if you have lots of little characters with tiny bit roles and they’re actually named people, not “the receptionist,” a lot of times you wanna merge those together and make it one person who reappears more times. So that helps. 

Even so, there may be reasons to have one person who pops up early and then disappears for a while and pops in again. In some of those cases, your readers may kind of generally remember the incident and that there was somebody there, but pretty unlikely to remember exactly what their name was. 

Names especially are very hard to remember. In that case, your kind of reintroduction needs to include some kind of reminder. Unless your protagonist sees this person all the time, this can often be framed as like, “Oh, who is that again? Oh yeah, that person.” 

Oren: Assuming this is a significant character we’re introducing, I’m never sure, how much descriptive information do I need? I tend to go with a lot because I like describing characters and theoretically I put work into figuring out what this character should look like. But I always feel like I’m overdescribing them. Do we need to know all that? Who knows? 

Chris: People definitely have different preferences here for how much description they like to put in. Some people do like to do a lot and some people don’t like to do very much. So there’s definitely some subjectivity. Probably one of the biggest signals for how important the character is going to be is how much description you have. And so what that means is if they’re important, you have some description. If they’re gonna be hanging out for the whole story, usually you want some description of them. 

Whereas if they’re a bit character like the receptionist, you can say a few things about how the receptionist in the lobby looks if you want to, but you really don’t have to. The other thing is how long is this story? Makes a lot more sense to spend more time on description if the story is longer and you’re gonna be spending more time with those characters.

That leads into the question of, should you give away that a character is important? There’s multiple options. Usually, yes. Particularly if this is a protagonist. If the reader knows a character as a protagonist, I do think that they will kind of give that character a little bit more of the benefit of doubt, and they’re more willingly, emotionally invest in them.

If the reader doesn’t think the character’s important, that can be fine. If they have a bit role, it can be fun to have a character that seems like a minor character, and then for their role to grow and then to discover they’re important. So that’s not necessarily bad, and in fact that works better than the reverse where we think a character is important and then suddenly they’re not important. ‘Cause that could disappoint somebody who liked the character. 

Oren: What gets me, this happens occasionally when you have a main character who is an ambassador or some kind of politician or other social character. And they have a bodyguard and they get attacked and the bodyguard has a fight scene, and I’m like, “Oh heck, that unnamed bodyguard seems cool. Tell me about them.” And then that bodyguard dies at the end of the scene. I’m like, “No, what? I wanted to know about that character. That seemed cool.” 

Chris: [Laughs] It was better that you did not get attached. 

Oren: That happened in one of The Bad Batch episodes. Some senator who was trying to do some behind the scenes politicking had a random guard who had this whole badass fight scene. And at the end of that he just dies. 

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: I guess he’s done now. 

Chris: Bodyguards are for redshirting. 

Oren: If they get redshirted, whatever. But it was just weird how long and drawn out that fight was. And it feels like we were treating this as though it was her fight. But she’s not fighting ’cause she’s not a fighting character. So it’s just her unnamed bodyguard.

Chris: I wonder if it’s because of all the stories where bodyguards are important characters. If the person who was depicting that, that rubbed off a little bit and is like, “Oh, well it’s her bodyguard, so this person must be really important to her and somebody she knows well and must be badass to be a scientist or bodyguard,” but that doesn’t actually change their role in the story. [Chuckles]

Oren: That could be. 

Chris: That kind of thing where you set up that expectation. If you describe them and they’re really cool and unique, it definitely makes it feel like they’re gonna be important and it could get audiences interested in them. So after that, if it turns out they’re just not important, that could be disappointing.

Whereas if you have a really important character and they have a bit role at first, you can do that and then expand. But you just have to be conscious of the fact that if you don’t make them look important, readers will likely to forget them or not gonna get attached to them yet. When they bring them in the second time, you might need to be like, “Oh yeah, that was Guard #5. Oh yeah you were one of the guards over there.” 

Oren: I’ll never forget you, Guard #5. 

Chris: Just reintroduce them. Remind readers what they were doing and then build off of that. I don’t want them to be a jerk if they don’t seem like they’re gonna be an important protagonist. In general though, it works fine if you completely give away a character is important and do that by giving them a budget description. 

As for what description to give, that’s another important question. I was joking in the intro about just hair and eye color, which is a thing that people tend to default to just ’cause that’s the fun description, I guess. 

Oren: Hair color, sure. That’s something you would generally notice. I’m not sure how many people notice eye color most of the time. 

Chris: Authors of course make the eye colors, like, violet.

Oren: I’ve occasionally met someone with really bright blue or green eyes and been like, “Wow, okay. Pretty intense.” But it’s not common. Most of the time I would never be able to tell you what color someone’s eyes are. 

Chris: That’s an interesting one. It can have a surprisingly strong effect on somebody’s appearance, but you wouldn’t consciously remember exactly what their color of eyes are. But no, it’s very popular to be like, “Oh, and they were bound with flecks of gold and black.” Flecks are all the rage right now.

Oren: People love flecks. 

Chris: Instead, what you really want is to give the big noticeable things first so that if the reader fills in the rest with their imagination, and then you describe more, it’s not jarring later. If you don’t specify a character’s age and then their age is not what the reader expected, that’s very jarring.

That’s the experience I had at the beginning of Sword of Shannara. I don’t know that anybody had the same experience that I did because when I looked at it, there’s just a few lines in here where his face is “weathered” and then he’s also got a whole “calm but alert.” Any person’s face can be weathered, but without any other context, that kind of worn downness. The things about it seemed to make him feel like he was like a really seasoned traveler that was used to the road. That was the impression that the first paragraph about him created. 

So then we find out he’s really young. The associations we have with youth are more fresh faced and excitable and impulsive and energetic. Not all young people are that way, but when you don’t have that information, readers just fill in whatever feels natural. 

Oren: I had the opposite experience. I was reading the beginning of a fantasy book, and it starts with the protagonist and she’s whimsically laying down in a field and looking at the clouds and skipping her chores and thinking very rose-colored lenses about traveling and how wonderful it would be to see the world. She would love to visit new things with her aunt and talking to her imaginary friend, and I’m like, “Okay, so this character is like, 12?” 19. 

Chris: [Laughs] I’ve met some like less mature 19 year olds that would do those kinds of things. 

Oren: It’s not like a 19-year-old can’t do any of those things. If they are mature, maybe you just enjoy being in a field and thinking about traveling.

Chris: And you still skip your chores. 

Oren: And you still skip your chores, lots of people do that. But it was just a combination of things made me think this was a fairly young character, especially since they seemed to have very little concept of social relationships. I would expect a 19-year-old to care more about what their peers might think. 

Granted, young kids care that way too. But that’s the thing I associate with late teenagers, is that they think about their peers a lot, and this character doesn’t seem to do that at all. Could be that’s just a trait of theirs, but wasn’t specified.

Chris: And of course, your character doesn’t have to be a stereotypical whatever. The point is that you wanna give that information early so that it feeds into that first impression. Instead of them forming a first impression without context and then finding it really jarring when you introduce information that contradicts what they imagined. Age is one, race is another one. And again, we want to specify race for everybody. Including white people. So finding some time to specify people have pale skin is a good thing to do. 

Oren: It is weird to me when second-world fantasy settings use modern racial categories. That’s a little strange to me. It’s like describing someone as white or black. That’s such a context-specific term. Obviously all English words are context specific and everything’s being translated anyway, but it’s still just strange to me. It feels almost like calling someone Asian in a continent that doesn’t have Asia. 

C