Character Introductions: Making the Right Impression

writershelpingwriters.net/2020/06/character-introductions-making-the-right-impression

By ANGELA ACKERMAN June 9, 2020

Many aspects of writing can be hard to get right, especially in our first draft. For just
two examples:

With our story beginning, we might struggle to find a good balance between a
throat-clearing boring scene (before getting to the good stuff) and jumping into
the plot’s action too quickly (before readers care about our character hanging off a
cliff by their fingernails).
With our characters, even with all the prep work to make our character well-
rounded, we might struggle with how to show them to readers in a way that elicits
empathy and a desire to follow their story.

Put those two aspects together, and we have the double difficulty of introducing our
characters at the beginning of our story to create the right impression for readers. We all
know that first impressions can be important, so what should we keep in mind for
how we introduce our characters?

Step #1: Is Our Choice a “Good” Scene?

There are countless options for how to fulfill each idea of our story. Even once we have a
general premise, plot, and characters, we can reveal the story in dozens—if not
hundreds—of ways. So how can we know the right setup, scene, or situation to create
the right impression?

At any point in our story, a “good”

scene is one that:

moves the story forward, setting

up the next plot point or
milestone in the character’s
emotional journey
grows out of previous story events
reveals aspects of our character
that we want readers to
understand
increases reader interest in the
story and character
reinforces our story’s theme and/or our character’s emotional arc

Of course, at our story beginning, we don’t need to worry about the second bullet point
as much. But in exchange, our opening scene also needs to establish our story’s genre,
setting, mood, and tone.
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Step #2: What Impression Does Our Choice Create?
For the all-important early introduction to our character, we also want to consider
which scene and situation option would best:

allow our character to express their current personality (not act out of character)
kick off the right character emotional arc and story theme
establish our character as empathetic, likeable, and/or compelling to readers
reveal a hint of our character’s vulnerability, longing, or false belief (so readers get
a sense of their path of growth)
anchor readers in who our character is and the world they live in

“Boring” Is Never a Good Choice

Note that for the last point listed
above, we want to share context, not
backstory or explanation. We just
want to give readers a hook to connect
with our character and their goals and
struggles.

Contrary to what we might think,

beginnings aren’t about setting up the
character and their situation.
Beginnings are about setting up
elements of the story’s conflicts.
Readers will learn about the character and their situation along the way.

For example, to hint at a character’s longing or the obstacles in their way, we could:

show a choice the character makes that demonstrates how they’re sabotaging
themselves from reaching their potential
show a problem the character must deal with that gives readers our intended
impression of some character traits
show a problem that gives readers hints about the main conflict and how it relates
to the character

The point is to show conflict. Readers want to see characters in action, showing who
they are, their strengths and weaknesses, and what matters to them.

Revise to Get It Right

As I mentioned at the outset, we’re often not going to get all the pieces right in our first
draft, but feedback on our opening pages can help us fix issues in revisions. Our goal is
to make readers of our excerpts and “look inside” pages want to keep reading.

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Tweaking motivations, reactions, emotions, etc. can all help readers get on the same
page as our intentions. Thinking of how readers will interpret our words, story, and
characters can be difficult, and it’s often doubly hard to create the right impression of
our characters from the start. But with feedback and revision, we can make sure our
character’s introduction not only sets up the story and plot, but also gives
readers a reason to stick around for their journey. *smile*

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