Taking a break from the S&W train of instruction, the next five weeks will focus on character introduction. Each week will deal with one method that can be used to introduce a character into the narrative you are writing.
Method One: The Straightforward Description
Here is the introductory piece introducing the main character of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim.
“He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, appareled in immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got his living as a ship-chandler’s water-clerk he was very popular. (p. 1)
Notice that this character is being introduced to us from the outside in. We’re seeing how he appears to other people, not how he seems to himself.
Now its your turn to use this method. You can either go back to your original work, developing one of the characters from it, or come up with a completely new one for a different story altogether. Just make sure you stick to the above method of straightforward description from the outside in and be economical with your words as Conrad shows above.
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"The student ambled slowly toward the Wheeler building along Campanile Way between Bancroft Library and South Hall. Directly behind him the stone grey Sather Tower jut skyward.He was of average height, perhaps five-nine, certainly average for his people of the hundredth meridian where the Great Plains began. He was lean and muscular with a stone chiselled jaw and a prominent roman nose. He wore a floppy beige bohemian hat from under which spilt long shoulder length raven hair. His clean bright white shirt reminded one of an old pirate tunic and over top it he wore a dark brown suede vest. A loose leather necklace hung and swung from his neck, adorned with wooden beads and weighted down by a coral pendent given to him from Sebastian, a classmate in his sophomore Art History class. His blue jeans were tidy and clean yet worn and frayed. Because his roommate Sharon bought and clothed him in the way she thought a student should dress, he was unconscious of his fashionable appearance within the counter-culture social circle– in his mind fashion was a waist of mental energy.
If you were to meet him for the first time, you would be struck by his calm and confident yet casual and easy-going demeanour. You could feel an inner tranquility, like a placid mountain lake, just below the surface which was an enigma for many who met him."
From the other side of Kerouac Way fifty yards away and intermittently concealed by passing cars and students, he could see Sharon, one of his roommates, approach. As usual a male admirer hovered and bobbed around her; it made him think of a honeybee buzzing and swirling about a white sunlit garden dahlia . This particular bee was a senior drama student from her upcoming Antigone play and who was now spellbound from the manifest obsessions Sharon had a tendency to ignite. She laughed and flirted in her etherial way and pushed her long auburn hair back from her faintly flushed smooth alabaster face and striking celadon eyes . She was tall and walked in languid laze, meandering down the sidewalk, often looking down and in front of her as she smiled and laughed at what the bubble-bee beside her said. She was never in a rush and when not being pestered by dotting young men she would spend her days alone, reading on a university lawn or lie solitary within the yellow heat of dandelions and look skyward to watch the clouds and sea birds float high above. She was fond of long summer dresses and today wore one of pure white that clung to her female form, it complementing her modest curves and accentuated her round Junoesque-shoulders, her long thin arms and her colt-like legs. When she spoke her voice had the raspy calm common in the whispering voices of mothers speaking to their children at bedtime and yet it was not patronizing; her voice conveyed undercurrents of love, understanding and the quiet of dreams.
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