The Appearance Of Character
Joseph Devon was born in New Jersey and currently lives in NewYork. He’s been a student, a nanny, worked at the Ground Zero recovery project after 9/11, and of all the things he’s created he is probably most proud of the character Kyo.
He writes a blog at josephdevon.com and also enjoys photography, so he’s also at flickr, and tumblr, and twitter too, and sometimes he thinks maybe he has too many social networking outlets.
There’s an old Zen saying, “It’s a truly shallow man who does not judge by appearance.” This wonderfully backwards sounding advice should be taken to heart by all writers when it comes to introducing new characters.
One of the most powerful tools you have to get your character across is their opening description. And, yet, all too often I see authors just throwing out superficial details or an overly written description of a nose. Never do that. You only have a set number of words to use to tell your story; put them all to work.
Who a character is, what a character is made of, mystery about a character’s past, all of these can be deliciously served up with the right words during a good opening description.
Think about Ahab’s peg leg, Madame Defarge’s knitting needles, the numerous stages of security required just to get within sight of Hannibal Lector.
The first, Ahab’s leg, is about as powerful a symbol of the man’s obsession with Moby Dick as you can get. Not only has he met this creature before but it TOOK HIS LEG OFF, and yet he still hunts him undeterred. Talk about obsession. And we learn all of this before we even see the fabled leg because Melville allows the whispers and rumors floating around the boat to build this leg up before it’s even seen.
Madame Defarge, sitting in the wine shop in A Tale of Two Cities, speaks maybe six times in the whole book (possible exaggeration…it’s been awhile since I’ve read my Dickens). But I am sure that she is a largely mute character and mainly in the background…except for those needles. 
She sits quietly knitting and knitting at the center of the French revolution. They could be just color, “Oh, this woman likes to knit, how interesting.” But instead they are the names, coded into her fabric, stitch by stitch, of those who have betrayed her cause and who must die for that betrayal. The seemingly peaceful woman turns out to be one of the more bloodthirsty characters in literature, and Dickens manages to hide this side of her character in plain sight by giving her a simple hobby.
In my final example, we don’t even need to see Doctor Lector before we’ve become thoroughly terrified of the man. And how is this achieved? We are simply walked down to his cell alongside Clarice Starling. The mood of the asylum adds a lot but the use of well chosen details in the description of security do far more. We don’t just get a prisoner being visited in his cell, we get an entire prison that seems to be built just to contain this one man. Constant warnings, multiple levels, descriptions of the protocol needed merely to hand him his food, and then, upon arrival, we see that he isn’t contained only by bars but also with a mesh net (or glass paneling in the movie). This is one dangerous man.
Now, I’m not saying that every character you introduce needs a huge, all defining detail attached to them, nor am I suggesting that your main characters get overwritten descriptions; overwriting is a sin in my eyes.
What I’m saying is that you can make every word count. Every descriptor added, every little nuance you put in, it all can work towards building your character instead of being mere painted scenery.
Put every word to work, take every chance you get to build character.
December 16, 2011
Posted in: Guest Blogs
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3 Responses
This is a good, thought-provoking post. It makes me want to go back and see how I’m introducing my characters and whether I can show more interesting things about them. Thanks, Joseph and Lelia.
Joseph, Great advice. Thanks for sharing.
Joseph, you are so on the mark with this and I have to admit I never thought about character introduction this way. You make me want to go back and re-read a few of my favorites to see if this is one of the reasons they ARE my favorites. Thanks for opening my eyes to those first few words about characters
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