Hi, it's Gabrielle! Welcome back to our Beginnings series!
You’ve set the scene, you’ve got your plot outlined to perfection, and you have every detail about your characters mapped out. Now all you have to do is start. But your characters are complicated. They have so many fun personality traits, complexities, secrets, and quirks you know that the audience will love. It feels like you’re drowning in character lore. So you have no idea where to begin. But the story can’t start without them, so what do you do? How do you discern what information is the most relevant for your audience? While starting a story is one of the most difficult tasks, I’ve come up with a list of things to help you successfully introduce your characters.
Character Motivation
One of the first things you’ll need to establish is what your main characters want. Even if you start in the middle of the action, there needs to be an indication of what the character wants because character motivation drives character action. If your audience doesn’t understand why your character is acting, they will have a hard time getting invested in the action. However, if you don’t want to reveal a character’s overall motivation right away (because maybe even they don’t know it yet) you should still introduce a motivation of some kind, even if it starts small. But whatever you decide, show something they want early on; whether it’s a dinner, a good grade on a test, or a love potion, because what your character wants, even on a small scale, will help demonstrate what they value, which will contribute to their overall motivation.
Character Values
And that wonderful transition leads us to the importance of introducing character values. Your audience also has to know what’s important to your characters. This relates to character motivation, but will likely be presented less obviously. Your characters’ values will influence what they want and how they attempt to achieve their goal. There likely won’t be an opportunity for you to explicitly say “this character values x” without it feeling like an info dump, but the way a character behaves or reacts to events or other characters indicates what they value. For example, if your protagonist notices another character stealing something, their reaction will demonstrate what they value. Will the character immediately call them out, will they take them aside afterward to gently confront them, will they not care very much at all, or will they kick themselves for not thinking to steal the item first? Both what your character decides to do and how they decide to accomplish it will tell your audience a lot about the different things they value. By considering how your characters react to different situations, you can seamlessly show off what they value.
Character Promises
Another very important thing to include is character promises. This is a term I’m borrowing from Brandon Sanderson, and what I mean by this is, what are you setting up for your character to do or learn? It’s the same principle behind Chekhov’s Gun; if you present a compelling character flaw or complexity early in the story, your audience is going to expect to see that explored before the story ends. For example, if you point out that a character has an intense fear of heights in the first chapter, your audience will guess that at some point during the conflict, the character will have to eventually go somewhere high to get what they want. You want to plant the seeds of your characters’ arcs early on so your audience can easily follow their development and not be shocked by the ways your characters change.
Important Character Traits
This is perhaps the most obvious one, but it’s important to be mindful of which traits you want to highlight. Your characters are your wonderful, complex children and they have a lot to offer, but you can’t show every facet of your character right away. So what are the most important things your audience needs to know about your character? How can you use their character traits to express what they value? How can you use their character traits to express what they want? How can you use their character traits to set up their arcs? For an example from my own work in progress, I decided it was very important to demonstrate that one of my main characters really cares about his family. So, he shares his first scene with his younger brother and there are multiple instances where he’s shown protecting his brother—whether it's from a physical threat or emotional strain. This not only demonstrates an important character trait, but it clues the audience into one of his key values being family, and this value directly relates to his main goal in the story. Both of these things relate to the promise that he will undergo an arc where his value of family is pushed to its breaking point. As you can see, the character traits you decide to demonstrate in your character’s introduction can do a lot to set up what your character wants and where they are going.
Important Character Skills
It’s also important to introduce what your character can do. While it’s less important than things like motivation and values, since these skills are less likely to be solely unique to your character, it’s important to establish how your character will be contributing to the plot. This also plays into character promises because if the audience sees a character demonstrating a skill early in the story, they won’t be surprised if that skill comes into play later in the story. To borrow another concept from Brandon Sanderson, consider your character’s competence and proactivity. Sanderson visualizes these as being on a spectrum. These two factors will tell your audience how much your character can be expected to do and how active your character will be in the plot. If one of these is low, your audience can expect that this will either be a complication in the plot or a place your character will grow throughout the story. What your character can do and how they will go about doing those things will tell your audience what they can expect from your character.
Quick Example
Let’s look at an example from one of my favorite shows, Avatar: the Last Airbender. If it’s been awhile since you’ve seen the show’s opening scene, or you’re unfamiliar with the show, you can check it out here.
(Photo: Avatar Wiki)
The show’s first episode, “The Boy in the Iceberg,” opens with siblings Katara and Sokka on a boat. Sokka brags about his ability to fish while Katara hesitantly waterbends a ball of water with a fish inside out of the air. Katara attempts to get Sokka’s attention, but he ignores her and ends up popping the bubble of water which soaks him and frees the fish. Sokka dismisses Katara’s waterbending as weird magic, and continues to dismiss Katara as she attempts to stick up for herself. The two of them get caught in a rapid and their boat crashes, at which point Sokka blames Katara for things going wrong since she’s a girl. Katara snaps and yells at Sokka for being sexist and immature, and while she’s yelling at him she accidentally breaks an iceberg with her waterbending. Katara expresses shock and almost awe over the fact that she produced such a large display of bending, then the iceberg starts glowing. They notice a boy inside, and Katara rushes to help while Sokka runs after her to stop her because they don’t know what it is.
(Photo: Avatar Wiki)
Okay, with just this one scene the audience already knows a lot about Katara and Sokka. Sokka is first motivated to catch a fish, then once they get caught in the rapids his goal shifts to not crashing, and at the end of the scene his goal becomes protecting his sister from the strange glowing boy in the iceberg. While these are small goals, they point to a few of his values. By the way he talks about catching a fish it’s clear he values intelligence, since that’s a trait he tries to emphasize in himself. He also values masculinity, indicated by his blaming of Katara’s femininity for their misfortunes. And significantly, his jumping to protect Katara from the unknown shows how he does ultimately value her and her safety. These values show an interesting contradiction in Sokka by showing that he’s cocky and sometimes overconfident, but he’s also cautious and doesn’t trust the unknown. In this scene, his lack of ability to catch a fish or stop them from crashing and his dismissal of Katara’s skills shows a relatively low competence and his desire to stay away from the iceberg demonstrates a lower proactivity. These traits can lead the audience to expect that his lack of competence and lack of proactivity will cause a problem or be challenged as the story progresses. And on the subject of promises, Katara calling him out on his sexism and immaturity hints to the audience that these will be flaws he has to deal with as the story progresses.
Now onto Katara. At the beginning of the scene she has the same goal of catching a fish, but she also wants to prove her abilities. After this fails, her goal becomes avoiding crashing, and once this fails, her goal becomes saving the strange, glowing boy in the iceberg. The most important value that her progression of goals highlights, especially the last one, is that she wants to protect people and do the right thing. Even though the boy is a stranger, strange in general, and potentially dangerous, she jumps to help him at the first sign that he’s in trouble. This highlights her compassion, which is one of her most important traits in the series. Her outburst with Sokka also demonstrates her passion and how she’s, for better or worse, a very emotionally driven character. This introduction also shows off that she can waterbend, which is a unique skill for this world and also her setting indicated by Sokka’s reaction to it, but she isn’t very skilled with it despite showing a lot of raw power. So this shows the audience that one of the things she’ll be learning throughout the series. However, she shows a very high level of proactivity. She immediately jumps to help the boy in the iceberg, which demonstrates that as the series goes on the audience can expect her to jump into action as the series continues.
That’s a lot of information just from a few minutes! Hopefully this example shows that it’s completely obtainable to include all of these things in your opening scene. And while this doesn’t give us a complete picture of Sokka and Katara, this does give us enough to understand the two of them and get an idea of where they might be going.
Putting It All Together
This may seem like a lot, but like our example indicates this is very doable. The trick is making your actions be as efficient as possible by having them accomplish more than one thing. Like in the example above, single actions can show off multiple things. Sokka trying and failing to catch a fish shows one of his key personality traits, keys the audience into one of his values, and shows his level of competence. Katara’s freak out shows one of her personality traits, demonstrates her strength, and sets up a character promise for Sokka (and it even introduces an early conflict for her with the reference to her mother’s death). One of my favorite tricks in writing, across many topics, is finding ways to make my writing as efficient as possible.
All the work you do to flesh out and develop your characters is important. However, as writers we need to figure out what information is most relevant for each scene. So hopefully, these tips will help you sort out what parts of your character are the most relevant to highlight at the beginning of your story.
Hope you stop by next week, and in the meantime bee brilliant!
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