Category: Character development

6 ways first person narrators can describe themselves

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Photo by Sodanie Chea

Photo by Sodanie Chea

If your main character is narrating the story, how do they describe themselves? You could just start in “I have long blonde hair and blue eyes,” but somehow it feels like the next part should be “and I like long walks on the beach.”

It’s awkward for a reason: normal people don’t walk around reminding themselves of their own hair color, eye color and height.

That’s why the mirror is such a bad cliché. I don’t know about you, but when I look in the mirror, I’m not thinking “I have brown hair and brown eyes,” I’m thinking “Man, my teeth are really starting to look coffee stained. I need to do a serious peroxide rinse.”

So unless your protagonist is surveying the results of his face transplant, try one of these alternatives.

1. Don’t describe him at all

Do your readers have to know what the protagonist looks like to understand the plot? If not, consider leaving it out altogether. After all, you want your reader to look through the hero’s eyes, not at them.

Especially if your character is only “average-looking.” Average-ness implies itself and need not be explained. That’s like saying water is wet.

2. Give it to your reader straight

This one is dependant on the style of narration. If you are actually telling the story to someone (with frequent quirky asides to your “dear reader”), rather than telling a story that someone else just happens to read, your hero can simply describe himself during introductions. But be warned: don’t try to force it if this isn’t your style.

3. Embarrass them

Make them self-conscious about a physical flaw. She only smiles close-mouthed because she’s embarrassed by the gap in her teeth. He wishes he had biceps like the head jock.

If you want to get all the important details in at once, have someone super good looking stare at them, to make them extra aware of all their flaws, like John Green does when The Fault in Our Stars protagonist Hazel notices hot boy Augustus is staring at her in their cancer support group, and she thinks about her jeans that sag in weird places, unbrushed pageboy haircut, and ridiculously fat chipmunked cheeks – a side effect of chemo. A laundry list, but the thought flow is logical and natural.

4. Compare and contrast with another character

“My daughter has my crooked smile, but her father’s blue eyes.” or, “We were the strangest pair you’ve ever seen. I was tall and stringy, he was short and pudgy. Standing next to each other, we looked like a lowercase ‘b.’ Or ‘d,’ depending on who was on which side.” These can even create a poetic effect, as you can simultaneously compare and contrast personality traits as well.

5. Use dialogue

Her best friend gently explains dark roots are out of fashion. His father remarks he really ought to cut his hair (he looks like a hippie). Her enemy asks if she’s a natural redhead. Use compliments (“I with I had your thighs!”) and nicknames (Shorty, Stringbean, Pineapple Head).

6. Show, don’t tell

Don’t try to describe the character all at once, but little by little, showing, not telling. If they are short, have them struggle to reach something most others could get. If tall, have them duck through doorways. If they are unattractive, make them self-conscious around people of the opposite sex. If attractive, have others flirt with them. This is a figurative mirror – your hero’s appearance is reflected in the way other characters react to it.

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How do you describe your narrator? Tell us in the comments!

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girl looking in mirror

Describe your main character without the tired old “looking in the mirror” cliche.

7 tips for naming your characters

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StanleyYelnats. Dreadful Spiller. The Artful Dodger. Lemony Snicket. Ebenezer Scrooge. Arwen Undomiel. Atreyu. Ender Wiggin. Their names are sealed in our hearts forever. So how do we find names for our own characters that have the same staying power?

Baby Name Books

Yes, people actually buy entire books to help them name the two or three children they will have. And then they give the books to used book stores where us hardcore namers can pick them up for half price. These books have lists of first names with meanings, and often etymology, associations in popular culture, and Most Popular lists. There are also several websites that do the same thing. This one, for instance. Or this one, which has popular names from a variety of countries.

Phone Books

Yes! Printed phone books still have a purpose! The residential white pages offer a plethora of options for last names. So if you don’t want all your characters named Smith or Jones or Garcia or Nguyen, pull a real phone book out of the paper recycling and stash it on your bookshelf. Any old edition will do (YellowPages.com isn’t exactly browse-able).

Translation Dictionaries

If your story takes place in a fictional world that presumably speaks a different language, pick up a couple of translation dictionaries in some languages that strike your fancy. Then find a cool sounding word, and change the letters around until it sounds right for your made-up culture. This can work for first and last names.

The Thesaurus

If you want to get a little more whimsical, play around with some synonyms. This often works best for nicknames, but there are no rules.

Bible Names

There are tons of cool names in the Bible—and not just the obvious ones like Adam, Abraham, Sarah, and David. Ishmael is a Bible name. Or there’s Nimrod, Mor’decai, and Eleazar. Start in Genesis 4-5, 10-11 for some good lists, and flip around at your leisure for more.

Choose Different Initials

Characters named Mark and Matt and Mary and Molly can confuse your readers pretty quickly. Make sure to choose names with a variety of first letters to help your readers keep characters straight. Sometimes, however, giving siblings or other family members similar names helps readers to remember how they relate to each other (like Fili and Kili and Oin and Gloin and so on).

Choose for Phonaesthetics

Phonaesthetics refers to the beauty or ugliness of words based on the way they sound, not on their meaning (for instance, beauty and pulchritude are synonyms, but the former is far more phonaesthetically pleasing than the latter). Giving an evil villain an ugly name, or your hero a noble-sounding name, or your comic relief a name that’s fun to say can make those names stick in your readers’ heads.

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What are some of your favorite character names—read or written?

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Show Don’t Tell: If you must tell, have something to show for it

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Continuing the series on Show, Don’t Tell.

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I have this awful habit of writing little narrative “character sketches” devoid of dialogue or action; simply summarizing the personalities of my heroes. I was all set to write a post about how to avoid this—with the “actions speak louder than words” approach I touched on in this post—but Wednesday morning, Mark Twain changed my mind.

I had settled in to read a little Huck Finn for twenty minutes while I ate breakfast. And there—yes, really—was a character sketch.

This naturally gave me second thoughts on the contents of this blog post. But as I kept reading, I realized my initial thoughts weren’t wrong—just a bit simplistic. Because here’s the thing: to show, you have to tell.

After all, we’re not making picture books here. All we have are words. What can you do with words besides tell? The trick is to figure out what you want to show, and then use telling to do it.

Example!

Here’s a little of what Huck, our first person narrator, says in his character sketch:

Col. Grangerfield was a gentleman, you see. He was a gentleman all over; and so was his family. He was well born, as the saying is, and that’s worth as much in a man as it is in a horse, so the Widow Douglas said, and nobody ever denied that she was of the first aristocracy in our town; and pap he always said it, too, although he warn’t no more quality than a mud-cat, himself…

…There warn’t no frivolishness about him, not a bit, and he warn’t ever loud. He was as kind as he could be—you could feel that, you know, and so you had confidence. Sometimes he smiled, and it was good to see, but when he straightened himself up like a liberty-pole, and the lightning began to flicker out from under his eyebrows you wanted to climb a tree first, and find out what the matter was afterwards. He didn’t ever have to tell anybody to mind their manners—everybody was always good mannered where he was.

All telling. Telling in a perfectly charming way, but telling nonetheless. Note, however, that he’s not telling us anything important. This character doesn’t last more than a chapter or two. So why the time spent on him?

Because by telling about Grangerfield, Twain is showing much more:

Society of the time: Huck’s mention of “well born,” and of the opinions of his father and the Widow Douglas—characters on completely opposite ends of the personality and status spectrum—shows us something about the beliefs of the time.

Huck’s character: we learn what a kind, decent person Huck thinks Grangerfield is. We later discover the family is feuding (pointlessly, as you’d expect) with a neighbor family. When a Grangerfield girl runs away to marry a boy from the rival family, the feud escalates into a bloody battle. Rather than changing his mind about the family, Huck blames himself for their deaths, as he had unwittingly helped deliver a message between the two lovers.

So this little bit of telling about a minor character actually serves to show us a lot about our main character.

The takeaway? If you find you must “tell” something, stop and ask yourself what that telling shows. What are your words indirectly illustrating? If it shows only what it tells, rewrite.

But if by telling a little, you show a lot—you’re good!

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5 Ways to Make Your Characters Believable

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Characters are the soul of a story, and the more clearly you can paint those characters, the more believable they (and your story) will be. So how do you do that?

1. How they talk

The more character you can convey through dialogue, the better. Make sure your characters don’t all talk the same way. Teach yourself to write unique speech for each character by listening to real people around you. How do your friends talk, in contrast with your parents? How does your boss talk as opposed to the guy in the next cubicle? Do they have an accent? Do they use certain phrases a lot? Do they tend to focus more on the technical side of things, or the emotional side? Are they sarcastic? Passive-aggressive? Non-confrontational?

2. How they move

Body language is a great way to Show, Don’t Tell. She stared at him as he struggled to find words. His eyes darted around the room as he looked for an escape. She push her hair behind her ear as she blushed. He folded his arms and shook his head as he surveyed the damage.

3. How they act

Actions speak louder than words, even when you’re using words to describe those actions. I’m always tempted to write things like; “He was a generous man,” but that’s telling, not showing. Show he’s kind by describing a specific act of generosity, like paying for the groceries of the woman behind him at the checkout.

4. What they think and feel

Use your character’s thoughts to convey their deepest desires, and what they learn throughout the story. Thoughts can greatly enhance any of the above three methods:

Your character might be furious her father, and might think out a whole paragraph of passionate things she’d like to say to him. But maybe she’s intimidated by her father, so all she gets out is one weak sentence.

If their words are the opposite of their thoughts, make their body language match their thoughts. The child says he didn’t steal the cookie, but drops his eyes in shame.

And third, of course, thoughts convey motives. Maybe by reading the thoughts of our generous man, we find out that he is generous now because he feels guilty about someone he hurt in his past.

5. What they look like

I listed appearance last, because many writers rely on it too much. Avoid the laundry list description; “He had blue eyes, blonde hair, and a medium build.” Instead, think about the things you notice the first time you meet someone; you really just get a general idea of what they look like. Convey a sense of appearance, rather than a list of details; “Scraggly yellow hair and a grin that seemed almost too wide for his face.”

A Made-up Word That Will Add Depth to Your Characters

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Kramer bursting through Jerry’s door. Garfield kicking Odie off the table. Michael Scott turning an innocent statement into an innuendo by adding “that’s what she said!”

What do all these things have in common?

They are all arsidities!

What the heck is an arsidity?

  1. A word I made up.
  2. The phonetic spelling for the pronunciation of the acronym RCDT: Recurring Character Development Theme. This is a phrase, object, or quirk that bears significance to a certain character or characters, and appears more than once in a single piece of work.

Wait a second, isn’t that called a “motif”?

Yes and no. A motif is a type of arsidity. A motif represents something – for instance, the sound of footsteps in A Tale of Two Cities represents the oncoming troubles of the characters, particularly Carton’s fate. An arsidity doesn’t always represent something, and is not always “important” – it is just a detail that adds depth to your characters and soul to your story. Arsidities help make a story and its characters more lovable, meaningful, charming, or funny.

More examples of arsidities:

The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien) – “my precious”     

The Outsiders (Hinton) – “gallant” and “stay gold”

Ocean’s Eleven – Rusty, Brad Pitt’s character, is eating in almost every scene

Silence of the Lambs – Hannibal Lector never blinks

Star Trek – Spock’s famous “Live long and prosper” gesture; Bones’ “Damn it, Jim, I’m a doctor not a [fill in the blank]”

None of these arsidities are vital to the plots of these books, movies, and TV shows, but can you imagine them without their arsidities? What a dull world it would be!

Do you use arsidities in your novel? How have they enhanced your character development, world building, and voice?

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