We all dream of the day our characters turn into beloved household names, or perhaps feared household names, in the case of villains. But before that can happen, we must introduce our characters to readers, and how are we even supposed to do that? There’s so much information that must be balanced, to say nothing of what happens if you need to introduce multiple characters at the same time. Fortunately, we have some tips.

Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music] 

Chris: Hello, I am Chris. I have blue eyes and brown hair, and that is all you need to know about me. Now you have a very clear picture of who I am and what I look like. 

Oren: (Intense voice) There is also… Podcaster 2. He is very tall and he has a very distinctive gravelly voice and many weapons. Don’t worry about why he has those. He’s not important. He’s just a background character. 

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: Normal guy, Podcaster 2. 

Chris: [Laughing] Is that like a video game NPC? Is that what that is? 

Oren: No. He’s got five paragraphs of description because he’s actually the secret villain or love interest or rival, or… 

Chris: [Laughs] That’s what I was gonna say, love interest. 

Oren: He’s a secret something or other. We don’t know exactly what. 

Chris: Both villain and love interest perhaps. 

Oren: Could be both of those things. But the important thing is that the author is trying to disguise him as a normal character in the scene, but obviously we can’t do that ’cause we need to say how cool he is.

Chris: [Chuckles]

Oren: It’s been a while since I’ve read something like that in a published manuscript, but I still see it in client works. You’re like, “There was a guard by the door and there was a courtier, and then there was a spooky figure in the shadows with the robe over his head and a jeweled staff. Anyway, moving on.” I’m like, “Okay, so that’s the villain that we just saw.” 

Chris: [Laughs] If it is a romance, I can see having, there’s a royal guard there, like, “Oh, that one guard is really hot.” And that is supposed to be the first time the protagonist notices the love interest. And then we’re gonna build on that later. But if we’re really trying to make a character blend in, adding a bunch of description is not gonna do that. 

Any case, this time we’re talking about introducing characters. For a storyteller, this is not usually the most challenging task, but there are still a bunch of different little things that can go wrong. And we often see this in manuscripts, so it’s worth kind of talking about how you do character introductions. 

Oren: You say it’s not hard, but I spent the last two weeks trying to revise a scene where I introduced two characters and it was too much. It was too confusing, and so I had to revise it to introduce one at a time, and that was really hard. 

Chris: That is one of the trickier things is getting the timing right. First thing I wanna mention, there are characters that don’t need an introduction. But they’re not important, so they’re only usually kind of barely characters. They also have a label that explains specifically why they are in the scene. If your character walks into the lobby and sees the receptionist, that’s a label. We know why that person is there. They’re called a receptionist. We don’t really need more than that if we’re just walking by them briefly or saying just a few words to them. Doesn’t really need much introduction there. 

The thing that we see in a lot of writers who don’t know how to do introductions, when we’re looking at manuscripts, we just drop a name. “I was going to the store and I stopped by home and George said, ‘Hi,’ and then I kept going.” And it’s like, “Who’s George?” I don’t know who George is. What is the relationship between the narrator or the protagonist and George? Why is George there? 

As opposed to like, “Oh, I saw my neighbor George” or “I saw my coworker, George,” tells you what the relationship George has to the other elements in the story. It can be really funny in speculative fiction works because a lot of times we’ll just get proper nouns and I don’t know whether this is a person, a place, or a vegetable.

Oren: It’s like a fantasy story, and they say, “I saw ‘Gula.’” What is Gula? Is that a person? Is that a soup? What is that? 

Chris: [Laughs] Oh, is that a strange monolith in the middle of the street? I don’t know. 

Oren: It could be. Anything’s possible. 

Chris: [Laughs] We literally have no idea what this thing is, whereas at least if it’s in a contemporary setting, I know George is a person. 

Oren: But it could also be a cat. If you don’t describe it at all, it’s like, “Is that a person or an animal?” 

Chris: It could be really jarring if George walks in and you assume it’s a man, and then the protagonist starts petting George. 

Oren: Hey, I don’t judge. Live their lives however they want. 

Chris: That’s the first rule, is don’t just drop in names. Give “George, my neighbor.” That two words is everything. And if you’re writing in a really close, limited perspective, don’t overthink it. Somebody might normally not think to themselves, “Oh, there’s George, my neighbor.” But don’t overthink it. Just put it in. 

Oren: You’re already editing what the person’s train of thought is. When you see another person, you don’t just register their name. You almost certainly have other associations with them that if you tried to write them all out, would overwhelm the narration. We can abstract that down to “my neighbor.” 

The one that I struggle with is when we introduce a character once and then they show back up again several hours, or hundreds of pages later, like I’m supposed to know who that is. Yeah, technically we did mention them, but I don’t remember who that is. It’s been too long. My memory is not that good. 

Chris: Definitely if we’re doing a reintroduction, and it’s been a while, sometimes what actually needs to happen is we need to consolidate the characters. If we have lots of characters who only perform very small roles and there’s no logistical reason they have to be different. For instance, if your character is traveling, that’s a reason why people need to be different. ‘Cause otherwise you get the Kazons. It’s like, “How are they following us?” 

Oren: There’s that one Kazon guide. He’s always there. Well actually we know how he’s keeping up. It’s ’cause Voyager keeps stopping to do side quests.

Chris: [Laughs] If you have the same character show up in different places as your protagonist travels, that will require explanation. But otherwise, if you have lots of little characters with tiny bit roles and they’re actually named people, not “the receptionist,” a lot of times you wanna merge those together and make it one person who reappears more times. So that helps. 

Even so, there may be reasons to have one person who pops up early and then disappears for a while and pops in again. In some of those cases, your readers may kind of generally remember the incident and that there was somebody there, but pretty unlikely to remember exactly what their name was. 

Names especially are very hard to remember. In that case, your kind of reintroduction needs to include some kind of reminder. Unless your protagonist sees this person all the time, this can often be framed as like, “Oh, who is that again? Oh yeah, that person.” 

Oren: Assuming this is a significant character we’re introducing, I’m never sure, how much descriptive information do I need? I tend to go with a lot because I like describing characters and theoretically I put work into figuring out what this character should look like. But I always feel like I’m overdescribing them. Do we need to know all that? Who knows? 

Chris: People definitely have different preferences here for how much description they like to put in. Some people do like to do a lot and some people don’t like to do very much. So there’s definitely some subjectivity. Probably one of the biggest signals for how important the character is going to be is how much description you have. And so what that means is if they’re important, you have some description. If they’re gonna be hanging out for the whole story, usually you want some description of them. 

Whereas if they’re a bit character like the receptionist, you can say a few things about how the receptionist in the lobby looks if you want to, but you really don’t have to. The other thing is how long is this story? Makes a lot more sense to spend more time on description if the story is longer and you’re gonna be spending more time with those characters.

That leads into the question of, should you give away that a character is important? There’s multiple options. Usually, yes. Particularly if this is a protagonist. If the reader knows a character as a protagonist, I do think that they will kind of give that character a little bit more of the benefit of doubt, and they’re more willingly, emotionally invest in them.

If the reader doesn’t think the character’s important, that can be fine. If they have a bit role, it can be fun to have a character that seems like a minor character, and then for their role to grow and then to discover they’re important. So that’s not necessarily bad, and in fact that works better than the reverse where we think a character is important and then suddenly they’re not important. ‘Cause that could disappoint somebody who liked the character. 

Oren: What gets me, this happens occasionally when you have a main character who is an ambassador or some kind of politician or other social character. And they have a bodyguard and they get attacked and the bodyguard has a fight scene, and I’m like, “Oh heck, that unnamed bodyguard seems cool. Tell me about them.” And then that bodyguard dies at the end of the scene. I’m like, “No, what? I wanted to know about that character. That seemed cool.” 

Chris: [Laughs] It was better that you did not get attached. 

Oren: That happened in one of The Bad Batch episodes. Some senator who was trying to do some behind the scenes politicking had a random guard who had this whole badass fight scene. And at the end of that he just dies. 

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: I guess he’s done now. 

Chris: Bodyguards are for redshirting. 

Oren: If they get redshirted, whatever. But it was just weird how long and drawn out that fight was. And it feels like we were treating this as though it was her fight. But she’s not fighting ’cause she’s not a fighting character. So it’s just her unnamed bodyguard.

Chris: I wonder if it’s because of all the stories where bodyguards are important characters. If the person who was depicting that, that rubbed off a little bit and is like, “Oh, well it’s her bodyguard, so this person must be really important to her and somebody she knows well and must be badass to be a scientist or bodyguard,” but that doesn’t actually change their role in the story. [Chuckles]

Oren: That could be. 

Chris: That kind of thing where you set up that expectation. If you describe them and they’re really cool and unique, it definitely makes it feel like they’re gonna be important and it could get audiences interested in them. So after that, if it turns out they’re just not important, that could be disappointing.

Whereas if you have a really important character and they have a bit role at first, you can do that and then expand. But you just have to be conscious of the fact that if you don’t make them look important, readers will likely to forget them or not gonna get attached to them yet. When they bring them in the second time, you might need to be like, “Oh yeah, that was Guard #5. Oh yeah you were one of the guards over there.” 

Oren: I’ll never forget you, Guard #5. 

Chris: Just reintroduce them. Remind readers what they were doing and then build off of that. I don’t want them to be a jerk if they don’t seem like they’re gonna be an important protagonist. In general though, it works fine if you completely give away a character is important and do that by giving them a budget description. 

As for what description to give, that’s another important question. I was joking in the intro about just hair and eye color, which is a thing that people tend to default to just ’cause that’s the fun description, I guess. 

Oren: Hair color, sure. That’s something you would generally notice. I’m not sure how many people notice eye color most of the time. 

Chris: Authors of course make the eye colors, like, violet.

Oren: I’ve occasionally met someone with really bright blue or green eyes and been like, “Wow, okay. Pretty intense.” But it’s not common. Most of the time I would never be able to tell you what color someone’s eyes are. 

Chris: That’s an interesting one. It can have a surprisingly strong effect on somebody’s appearance, but you wouldn’t consciously remember exactly what their color of eyes are. But no, it’s very popular to be like, “Oh, and they were bound with flecks of gold and black.” Flecks are all the rage right now.

Oren: People love flecks. 

Chris: Instead, what you really want is to give the big noticeable things first so that if the reader fills in the rest with their imagination, and then you describe more, it’s not jarring later. If you don’t specify a character’s age and then their age is not what the reader expected, that’s very jarring.

That’s the experience I had at the beginning of Sword of Shannara. I don’t know that anybody had the same experience that I did because when I looked at it, there’s just a few lines in here where his face is “weathered” and then he’s also got a whole “calm but alert.” Any person’s face can be weathered, but without any other context, that kind of worn downness. The things about it seemed to make him feel like he was like a really seasoned traveler that was used to the road. That was the impression that the first paragraph about him created. 

So then we find out he’s really young. The associations we have with youth are more fresh faced and excitable and impulsive and energetic. Not all young people are that way, but when you don’t have that information, readers just fill in whatever feels natural. 

Oren: I had the opposite experience. I was reading the beginning of a fantasy book, and it starts with the protagonist and she’s whimsically laying down in a field and looking at the clouds and skipping her chores and thinking very rose-colored lenses about traveling and how wonderful it would be to see the world. She would love to visit new things with her aunt and talking to her imaginary friend, and I’m like, “Okay, so this character is like, 12?” 19. 

Chris: [Laughs] I’ve met some like less mature 19 year olds that would do those kinds of things. 

Oren: It’s not like a 19-year-old can’t do any of those things. If they are mature, maybe you just enjoy being in a field and thinking about traveling.

Chris: And you still skip your chores. 

Oren: And you still skip your chores, lots of people do that. But it was just a combination of things made me think this was a fairly young character, especially since they seemed to have very little concept of social relationships. I would expect a 19-year-old to care more about what their peers might think. 

Granted, young kids care that way too. But that’s the thing I associate with late teenagers, is that they think about their peers a lot, and this character doesn’t seem to do that at all. Could be that’s just a trait of theirs, but wasn’t specified.

Chris: And of course, your character doesn’t have to be a stereotypical whatever. The point is that you wanna give that information early so that it feeds into that first impression. Instead of them forming a first impression without context and then finding it really jarring when you introduce information that contradicts what they imagined. Age is one, race is another one. And again, we want to specify race for everybody. Including white people. So finding some time to specify people have pale skin is a good thing to do. 

Oren: It is weird to me when second-world fantasy settings use modern racial categories. That’s a little strange to me. It’s like describing someone as white or black. That’s such a context-specific term. Obviously all English words are context specific and everything’s being translated anyway, but it’s still just strange to me. It feels almost like calling someone Asian in a continent that doesn’t have Asia. 

Chris: Oh man. Let’s not even go there. Because race is a social construct, there are some races that you can only communicate via cultural signals. That’s something that’s especially hard for somebody with no expertise in the culture, to then not only communicate those cultural signals, but translate them to a fantasy setting and make it feel right. That’s a difficult thing. 

But if you want an Asian character, that’s kinda what you have to do. You have to have some cultural signals. ‘Cause otherwise, if you try to describe them physically and you say more than the fact that they have, for instance, black hair, it’s just gonna come off as racist. So be careful about those things. 

So basic demographics or anything else that would really stand out. So if they have scars all over their face, that’s probably something a protagonist would notice first thing. If you don’t mention it and then it comes up later, the readers would be like, “What? Oh, there were scars all over their face? Been imagining this person for three chapters, I didn’t know about these scars all over their face.” That’s a big enough impression that would kind of change. 

Oren: One that I see strangely often is if they have a weapon, that should probably be described pretty early. People notice weapons if nothing else, because they’re dangerous. Very weird to have a character who you’ve known for several pages to a chapter or so, and they suddenly talk about drawing their sword, like, “Whoa, they have a sword? They’ve had a sword this whole time?” 

Chris: And if you introduced a character as a guard, that would probably be less necessary. If they’re a guard, we assume they have a weapon of some kind, but if we don’t have the context to foreshadow or make that fit into place, that might be something important. This is a setting where everybody just walks around with longswords. 

Oren: If you establish a setting where everyone is armed as a matter of course, you wouldn’t have to describe it every time.

Chris: Should we talk more about timing? 

Oren: Yeah, as in when to introduce? 

Chris: Yeah, about the timing of introducing characters. 

Oren: So it’s basically in the first third of the book. Or if you’re introducing characters as a teaser for next time, in the epilogue, and nothing in between. 

Chris: [Laughs] If you have a traveling story, I think that you can get away with having characters that are at a stop along the way that are named from that one place because expectations are different then. But then that character wouldn’t show up and be a big help with the climax.

We would assume that we would say goodbye to them as opposed to, 2/3 of the way through, we stopped in a town during our travels and we met a named character, and then that character decided, “Oh, I’m coming with you now.” That would be too late. It can feel weird and lopsided. Or it can feel in the worst case scenario, like they’re an interloper and they’re stealing the spotlight from the characters that we have grown to care about.

Oren: There are some exceptions. The most obvious is for the villain. Very often it won’t really make sense for your characters to come face to face with the villain before the 1/3 mark. Usually in that case, what you wanna do is you want to establish this character by the effect they have on the world, not necessarily by their name or what they look like, although that might also be part of it. Depends on the specifics. 

But especially if you have a secret murderer who’s killing people spookily at night, we might not actually meet them or know that we’ve met them until much later. But you show the murder scenes. You plant the image that this villain exists. 

Chris: There is foreshadowing. We can foreshadow characters exist instead of introducing them early. 

Oren: And that tends to work best for villains. It would be kind of weird to do that for the love interest. 

Chris: [Laughs] Maybe in a series. And the romance is really mostly for book 2. 

Oren: We spend the book foreshadowing, “There’s this really hot person people sometimes see in the middle of the night,” and then they show up at the 2/3 mark.

Chris: [Laughs] The more I look at villains, the more I feel like they’re less like protagonists in their story role and more like plot hooks or plot problems in the way that they kind of behave in the rules. They feel more like story hooks, whereas a protagonist is somebody that the reader is supposed to be rooting for and has attachment, and so you would have to handle that.

You have to think about the fact that somebody could really care about this character if you’re gonna do something horrible to them. Maybe try to prevent people from getting too attached to them. All of those rules, they can apply to villains if your readers get attached to your villain, but that’s less likely, especially if your villain is powerful enough. If your villain is underpowered, it’s more likely to happen. 

Oren mentioned this earlier, but having lots of characters introduced at the same time. I can’t give any hard and fast rule about how many characters you can introduce at once. It’s about the total complexity. How many details do you need to communicate about them? How easy are their names and other details to remember? 

And sometimes if two characters play off of each other really well, they’re best introduced together because they’re kind of conceptually linked. So if you introduce two twins, it might make sense, if you have a way to clearly contrast them with each other to introduce them together. Because that association between the two of them almost makes them easier to remember.

Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe does get away with introducing the four kids, the four protagonists, right in the beginning, but there’s just not much else going on. Otherwise, it’s extremely simple. So we have to learn four first names for characters that are all in the scene, but we don’t have to learn anything else. Because everything is just focused on them and that’s the only thing you have to learn, it actually works to have four new people together. 

But in many other times, especially in a speculative fiction story where you have to introduce the world at the beginning, that’s gonna be too many. So you kind of have to find ways to put one character, make an appearance first, give people time to get to know them, and then wait the next scene for the new character. Or just push people back, delay them, take them out of scenes, that kind of thing. 

Oren: You do have a fair amount of runway. You don’t wanna wait too long, but the first third is a lot of book. They don’t all have to be introduced in the first couple pages. 

Chris: The thing that I see that really doesn’t work is when somebody tries to put in a big meeting scene early in the story and then tries to introduce everybody in the meeting. Don’t do that, that’s not gonna work out. People cannot remember that much information. 

And also you don’t have time if you’re introducing that many characters at once to have them have a significant role in the scene because it’s more than the introduction. You also have to reinforce that new knowledge by making that character matter in some way. If you introduce 10 people in a meeting, not only can people not absorb all of that information right away, but how much can you make all 10 of these people matter in that one scene so that readers retain that information? 

Oren: Before we go, there is one thing that I think is important to consider. The appropriateness of making a character seem cool when you introduce them. If you’re introducing any character, it is a good chance you want them to be at least a little cool, depending on the type of story you’re telling. If you’re telling a story that has a reasonable amount of action, you probably want them to seem a little cool, especially since it might make your protagonist seem a little more sympathetic if they’re meeting these people who seem all cool and put together.

But, A, if you make them too cool, they’re gonna be annoying, especially if they’re an ally. They might steal your protagonist’s thunder. If they are a rival, you can lean harder on making them seem cooler because they’re gonna be messing with your protagonist and that’s fine. If they’re a love interest, you have to strike a really careful balance ’cause you want them to be cool and desirable, but not make them seem like they’re gonna take over the story. As often happens with heteromances. 

Chris: That’s hard. And definitely the trend we see is writers often fall in love with their new characters and really wanna make them cool. Usually when we’re writing, we use our own feelings as a proxy for what the readers will feel. But sometimes they’re just not on the same page with us.

And when we come with a cool new character that we’re attached to, it takes them time to also become attached to that character. Isn’t the raccoon who is pulling everybody’s strings so funny? Who is really behind it all along? So cute. It’s so funny, so devious. 

Oren: I hate it. 

Chris: [Laughs] That can be something that just seems cute, funny to us, or we really like that. “Oh, it’s so cool,” to us, but the reader has gotten attached to the characters that are important that we’ve already introduced. And so often, these cool characters can come and show them up in a way that builds a lot of resentment from the reader. 

Oren: Well, with that, I think we will have to introduce the ending of this podcast.

Chris: Consider introducing yourself to us by becoming our patron. That way you can chat with us on Discord and everything. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [Outro Music]

Outro: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.