Who’s THAT?

So you have a bunch of characters, and you want your readers to get to know them. How do you do that?

Well, how do you get to know people in real life? You find out about them based on what other people say about them (“”He’s a jerk!” Chris told her”), based on how other people react to them (“She scowled and stiffened as he came up…”), based on what you see them do (“On his way out the door, he casually kicked the dog.”), based on what they say and how they say it (“Move,” he snarled, and shoved past her.) and based on what you know (or think you know) about their past and their motives (“Don’t mind him,” Greg said. “He just found out that his daughter is in the hospital with rabies; got bit by some mutt that was running loose. She may not live, and he’s pretty upset.”)

Your readers find out about your characters in the same way: they draw conclusions about them based on what your narrator says about them, what your characters say about each other, how they react to each other, how they behave, and what their motives seem to be.

The catch is that most people are more inclined to believe their own judgement about a character than they are to believe someone else’s. Having your narrator tell me “He was incurably honest, responsible, and a little vain” isn’t terribly convincing. In fact, this kind of description always rolls right off the surface of my mind when I read it; I don’t believe it (or ever register it, usually), until I see it  in the character’s actions — watch the guy turn in $5,000 in small bills that he found in a parking lot, see him drive 50 miles in a blizzard to make sure the report gets delivered on time, and observe the way he automatically checks himself out when he walks past a plate glass store window.

In other words, it’s the old “show, don’t tell” thing again. If your narrator tells me Joe is a great guy, but I watch him insult people, rob orphans, and cheat at solitaire all through the story, I’m not only going to believe Joe isn’t so great; I’m also going to lose all trust in your narrator. (Sometimes you want that — that’s why the concept of an “unreliable narrator” exists — but usually, you don’t want the reader thinking your narrator is an idiot or a liar.)

One of the problems some folks run into is that showing the reader what a character is like takes a lot longer (and requires a lot more consistent attention) than doing a two-page infodump on the character’s personality and background. If you think that your readers have to know everythingabout your hero (or villain, or sidekick) the minute he walks onstage, the temptation to start with the infodump is likely to be well-nigh overwhelming…because that’s pretty much the only way you can get all that stuff out there before your character actually starts doing things.

But most of the time, your readers don’t need to know everything up front. You need to know a lot of it, in order to keep the character’s actions consistent, but the reader doesn’t need to know that your character is grumpy in the first scene because he has serious issues with his ex who called him right after breakfast about some other backstory blah blah. All the reader needs to know in order to understand the scene is that the guy is grumpy today, and a couple of lines of dialog will probably be enough to get that across. If the reason is actually plot-important, it’ll come out later in the story…and it will probably be more believable, not less, for having done so.