From the Margins: #01
How to Introduce A Character in One Paragraph
How do you introduce a new character?
How do you introduce a new character? Or better yet, how do you thrust the reader directly into the world of your character, making them feel like they understand the character in a deep and unique way?
Introducing a character is your first opportunity to link the world in your head with the world in the head of your reader. Do it well, and people will fall right into your story as if they’re wearing your character’s skin. Do it poorly, and people may not connect. They’ll feel distant, awkward, and removed.
So how do you do it? Of course, there are any number of ways to skin this cat. Here’s one way that I’ve seen used a lot, by a lot of authors, and I nearly always like it.
In this passage from the writer Ludmilla Ulitskaya and her novel Jacob’s Ladder she achieves a fast, clear, and intriguing character introduction in 9 sentences. And, she does so with style, grace, and a healthy dose of aplomb! The paragraph unfolds sentence by sentence before your very eyes, like a flower in the morning sun (a very depressing flower I might add).
For the sake of this article, I’ll offer some bare minimum context. A son is writing a letter to his mother in 1942. They’re Russian and Jewish. It’s World War II. Everything else, at least for the purpose of this article, you can get from the passage itself as it introduces the son Genrikh and his world via his letter:
I’m not eating very well. This is what they feed us: I try to get up as late as I can. After that I eat three and a half ounces of bread and drink boiled water. At one in the afternoon, I go to the dining hall, where I have the mid-day meal and seven ounces of bread. Before, we used to get commercial bread, but now it has become hard to find, and you have to stand in line for it just to get eighteen ounces. But what is eighteen ounces for me? Still, I try to keep my spirits up. I received news from Tomsk. Students from my Institute who were evacuated to Tomsk are going to Moscow soon. How we envy them!
…from Jacob’s Ladder by Ludmilla Ulitskaya
This passage mixes two things to get us straight into the heart, mind, and world of Genrikh:
Introducing character through daily routine. His daily routine makes the paragraph expand across time. Genrikh’s world unfolds through word choice. The word “they” immediately separates the boy from his routine. “They” makes it clear that Genrikh is not the one choosing his routine. Then there’s the brilliant switch of language at the end: “How we envy them!” he signs off. The sudden introduction of “us,” shows the reader the “us” vs. “them” mentality of Genrikh’s world—those receiving food and those giving it. More generally speaking, the paragraph shows us his fixation on the meager servings of bread. It also gives us a sense for how they’re scheduled through the day. This creates a feeling of the flow of time, how tiring it must be to live like that. This is the underlying “trick” to establishing a character through their routines. Simply by making it clear that what’s happening, happens daily, you stretch the scene out through time. What you’re reading is simultaneously the action of the moment and indicative of time stretched out over this character’s life.
Introducing character through emotions. From “I’m not eating very well” to “How we envy them!” this passage soaks up the emotions of Genrikh and squeezes them right out, dirt and all, onto the page. There’s of course also the element of this taking the form of a letter, but we’ll save that for another post. His emotions have driven him to not be able to eat. He’s not getting enough food. He is desperate to get out and envious of those who have. The routine itself tells us a lot about him, but it’s his emotions that bring it to life, make his world glow with life.
You might even say it’s the interplay between Genrikh’s emotions and his routine that create that really massive feeling of his whole life being stretched out before your eyes.
So there you have it; one clean approach to consider as you introduce a character. Of course, there are many and you want to find the one that really works with your story and your style. Let me know what other tactics you use to introduce characters in the comments section below.
A couple notes on this series
*A NOTE ON THIS “FROM THE MARGINS” SERIES: This is the first post of my ongoing series, “From the Margins.” Everyone talks so much about “reading to get better at writing,” but all they do is write the word “read” one-hundred times and hope it sticks — “read widely, read deeply, read everything you can get your hands on.” This series will be devoted to thinking critically about writing. I’m going to pull passages that taught me something about writing and talk about what I learned. I’ll pull in research, examples, and theory as needed. My dream is for this series to become an online community of writers discussing passages, sentences, chapters, and books.
**ANOTHER NOTE ON DELIBERATE PRACTICE VS. HOURS: By the way, without getting too ranty, I also wanted to say that I see this series as a kind of foil to online mindlessness. There’s so much emphasis on “putting in the time” and “putting in the 10,000 hours.” I agree that time is important, but I believe more strongly in deliberate practice, about thinking a lot about your process, trying things out, failing, adjusting, and then growing. What better way to do this with writing than to look slowly and carefully at other people who have already mastered writing.
