What's in a Label?: Creating First Impressions for Your Novel and Short Story Characters

In fiction, labeling is important for introducing your characters and for creating that first impression of your characters on the reader.  As Dwight Swain says in Creating Characters, there are four main labels you must use in the initial creation of story characters: sex, age, vocation, and manner.

The first thing you notice about someone you first meet is that person’s gender.  You never walk away from an initial encounter not remembering whether someone’s male or female.  Therefore sex is usually the first thing you will reveal about your character. 

The next label is that of age.  Even though we may not know a person’s exact age, we usually can make a pretty good guess about it.  Like sex, age is crucial part of a first impression.  It is one of the first things we notice about the people we meet.  So, age is something your reader is going to want to know about your character. 

After you know a person’s sex and age, you usually want to know their vocation, that is, what they do for a living.  Although a person should not be judged by their vocation, their chosen career says a great deal about them.  For instance, a person who decides to become a doctor is telling us something different than someone who decides to be a computer programmer.  Even the retired character can tell us who they are through the hobbies they engage in.  Of course, your character’s vocation will be largely defined by the plot of the story.

The last label that is critical for first impressions is that of manner.  Manner is a bit more complicated to 
achieve but must be achieved nonetheless. You can begin by thinking of manner as an adjective.  Is your character sweet, shy, pushy, calculating, indifferent, or mean?  A character’s manner is defined mainly by the part he or she is playing in the story. 

Once you have decided on the most accurate adjective to describe the manner of your character, Swain says you need to decide how you will reveal it.  As you know, the first rule of fiction writing is “Show, don’t tell.”  So don’t just tell us that X character is pushy, show us. 

Swain says manner can be revealed in one of four ways: appearance, action, dialogue, and introspection.  Sometimes a character’s appearance can say a lot about his or her manner.  Is the character wearing leather and chains?  Are the clothes they are wearing something out of the sixties?  Is the character wearing horn-rimmed glasses?  What about their hair? Appearance can say a great deal about a character.

Action is another sure way of revealing manner.  A shy character will avoid certain social situations.  A cruel character may kick the dog.  Look at the adjective you chose to describe the manner of your character and try to find an action that fits.

What we say and how we say it says a lot about who we are.  Dialogue is another good way of revealing manner.  For instance, a rude person is going to say things differently from a polite person, and an angry person is going to say things in a way a happy person never would.

Like dialogue, introspection can be an effective way to reveal a person’s manner.  Getting inside a person’s head is sure way of knowing who that character really is.  If your character is crazy, you can show the reader by creating interior monologue for your character that reveals irrational thought patterns.

Remember: You only have one chance to make a first impression.  Try to keep your character consistent with the first impression you create for him or her. But don’t worry if in the course of writing your story, you want your character to be different from what you originally intended.  You will just have to do a bit of rewriting.