(Part One)

Think of the last really good novel you read. For me, I’m nearing the end of my third or fourth read-through of That Hideous Strength. Think about how different characters are introduced and described. It varies, does it not? Some characters get a longer introduction; some get almost nothing. Some have vivid descriptions attached immediately; some are mentioned long before you ever get more than their name and role; some don’t ever get past said name and role (the bit characters¹). Then, too, consider how different treatments gave you a different impression of their role, even aside from the content of the description, particularly how you first met them. All these elements of character description are worth our time to consider.

To Each According to His Need²

Different characters need different treatment. That’s an easy pill to swallow; if you haven’t consciously realized it yourself, you’ve definitely done it without thinking. Protagonists get more description than unimportant side characters; major antagonists matter more than minor ones. All but the most amateur writers intuitively recognize that not every character needs the exact same amount of description. The basic principle, then, is short and simple: gives each character the description he needs (and not more). Then we expand that principle by asking ‘what kind of description does that character need?’ and the answer goes from one line to several volumes filled with ‘this is mostly dependent on individual circumstance.’ So instead of trying to exhaustively describe the possibilities, let’s consider an individual case and get a feel for the process, remembering all the while that stylistic concerns will make your answer at least subtly different from mine when it gets down to the specifics.

Our first example is a short-term character, somebody who needs to be memorable but is important only for a time. She (we’ll say it’s a she) provides lodging and information to the main character as he works to spy out the city he’s in. Her basic appearance, her general diction, a sense of her character, these are all important. It’s a bit of a spy thriller section of the story, too, so we want to give the reader an idea of how trustworthy she is. Possibly, though, that information is a misdirection; the reader is led to think her trustworthy when she isn’t. That’s one direction we can take this, and all the difference lies in how we present details and where we put them.

For this character, probably, we need a short but pithy introductory description. I write from a third-person-near POV, so the description will focus on certain details my current POV character notices; I choose these to be enough to set the idea of her in the reader’s mind. Is she trustworthy? What does the POV character get off of her? What’s her place in the setting?

Here’s a question worth looking a little deeper into: what details are we going to use to remember her? In this case, perhaps the character notes she has long, black hair and a sharp-ridged nose, with eyes to match; she seems a hard bargainer, though not malicious. These details give the reader something to grasp on to. If we later meet a mysterious cloaked figure with long, black hair, one seemingly engaged in haggling (though too far off to be heard), these are the details which, whether rightly or wrongly, will bring her back into mind. Notice that I didn’t need more than a point or two of description, that I didn’t find something actually uncommon. I didn’t need a characteristic nobody else shared; I needed a characteristic that the reader could associate with the character to distinguish her from the other characters in the story. That nearly every other woman in the city has black hair doesn’t matter unless they become characters (though setting that fact up may be part of preparing a red herring).

As we see, the rule of thumbs are as following: the more important a character is, the more time you need to put into him; include those specific details which are necessary to the character’s role; provide something for the reader to remember. Consider always the specific needs of the character’s role. An antagonist may need to remain hidden despite his importance, whether in whole or in some detail. Perhaps only his appearance need stay hidden, so that a sense of his character can be communicated. Always remember that no matter how well you know him, the reader does not. It’s a concern for all of us.

Timing matters, here. When I introduce my protagonists, I tend to frontload two bits of information: their name and the bare basics of the immediate situation. Their appearance, their temperament, that comes later; that is a matter for development. I sprinkle in how the character looks as time passes, particularly with other POVs; I characterize him from his first moments but not through immediate direct description. A part of this is my third-person near POV, which makes it awkward and illusion-breaking to frontload the character’s own description.

This path is mine, but it is not the only path by any means, being a confluence of my stylistic concerns. In Beowulf, the eponymous character is introduced with the following words: “There was no one else like him alive. In his day, he was the mightiest man on earth, highborn and powerful.”³ This description takes a very different path from mine, but I’d be arrogant indeed to call it a mistake. Take care, then, not merely to imitate another’s choice but to find the method which works best for your story and style, bearing all your priorities in mine.

Manage Expectations

Character description sets up expectations in the reader; our goal, therefore, is to understand and control these expectations. Specifically here I refer to how long you spend on a character description (though other elements affect the calculus). As a rule, the more time is spent on describing a character, the more important that character is. This truth holds for the writer, you, but your reader has at least an intuitive understanding of it. If you spend a long time on one character and very little on another, all else being equal, he’s going to assume the first character much more important than the second. We can use that.

On the one hand, be careful not to lie to your reader. If you provide long, pain-staking, exceptional description for a character and he disappears from the story without fanfare or significance, the reader will not be happy. Such would be committing the cardinal sin of story-telling: wasting your audience’s time. Don’t ever give the reader reason to think he’s wasting his time. The description’s length, however, doesn’t need to have a precise correlation to the character’s importance.

Generally speaking, the effort you put into making the character clear to the reader will correlate to that character’s importance and how much time he spends around the story (which are usually themselves related). Reasons to change this do exist, however. In a comedic work, for instance, I might grant a very unceremonious and unexpected end to a character whose description had indicated his importance; the reader sees this and recontextualizes the message of the description’s length and depth. He stops viewing it as preparation for a large role in the story and starts seeing it instead as preparation for a joke- a good joke, hopefully.

I can justify this in other ways. If I want to make sure the reader believes nobody is safe (which is rarely true), I might quickly kill a character whose just-finished description had indicated importance. This character, you see, remains important despite how short his time in the story was. He bears a message: no matter how important a character feels, he is only one dagger’s length from death.  I could also use the long description for misdirection, though this is tricky. Here I must take care that the reader does not feel cheated by the bait-and-switch. What I give him must be as good as what I promised, hopefully better, and preferably any second read-through of the story would lead to him noting all the reasons he should have known something was coming, if not precisely what.

In the final analysis, this rule too is a matter of individual judgement and circumstance. Some styles will lend themselves to discursive description better than others. Sometimes, the description will be so much fun that you can get away with significantly more length than other authors will be able to. Overall story tone, how interesting the individual character is, style, all these change how much time you spend on introducing a character or on later description of him. Bear in mind always what your reader perceives, what expectations you plant the seeds of.

First Impressions

First impressions matter in a story. How your story’s character appear to the reader is going to be filtered through that first impression, no matter what you do. It’s just a matter of human psychology: people come to conclusions and then build rationales to explain those conclusions. In a story, this means that the conclusion they reach during that first impression will often overshadow later portrayals, at least until they receive an indication that something has changed. They will trust that first impression implicitly, at least until you give them a really good reason to change. We must remember this, both defensively- to ensure we don’t make an unwanted impression- and as a tool.

We must take care, too, that the reader is given enough to hang his hat on, is given the type of details that he will remember. Unless the character is intended to be vague and unmemorable (unusual), the initial introduction must suffice to form the desired impression- often, but not always, one accurate to the character- and preserve him in the reader’s memory till he is again relevant.

Conclusion

When we write characters, we have to take care of the inside and the outside of the process. We need to figure out what the story needs from the character, what the character needs from the story to do that, and how these factor appear to the reader. What expectations are we creating with each word and sentences and scene? In the end, art is in large part the communication of beauty; we must attend not only to the beauty we wish to convey but to how we convey it.

God bless.

Read Part Three Here!

Footnotes

1 – See this article for the terminology.

2 – Look, I have to get my historical allusions in somewhere.

3 – Lines 196-198. Seamus Heaney’s translation, published by W.W. Norton & Company