How to Introduce a Character Quickly and Efficiently–Walker Percy and The Art of Character Development

Character Description Short Course with Help from Walker Percy

Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at The Time Near the End of the World.  Walker Percy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971

               When I introduce a character in a story, I’m often stumped how to best describe them. What should I focus on? Should I be neutral and stay with their physical appearance? Should I give a quick take on their history? If I focus on their face, what features should I highlight? Should I allow the narrator to make judgments about the person being described?

               Recently, I went back to the novelist Walker Percy who like my other favorite southern writer James Agee—and, as I think of it, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Conner, and William Styron—was adept in describing a character, and, by doing so, not only elaborated on their appearance but also revealed much about their quirks and traits that added dramatic interest to the story. Percy does this without wasting words. He gets into a description and gets out, letting the narrative move. In fact, if you don’t pay attention, he does it so seamlessly you hardly notice that he introduced a new character and feel as if you’d known the person for years. He also embeds in the description itself drama by contrasting different, often paradoxical aspects of the character. Instead of paying attention to one physical trait of a character, he delves into how the different traits conflict with one another or with some aspect of his life and reveal a hidden quality that, later, can be incorporated into the plot.  

               This ability to do a quick take of a character is something any writer, even poets, can benefit from knowing how to do. The best way to learn how to do it is to pull out examples of it when it’s well done and notice how Percy presents characters quickly and efficiently, wasting no words, while, at the same time, making the descriptions interesting.  

               From one of his earlier novels, Love in the Ruins, I’ve culled some samples of his character development by using quick snapshots of them. The examples are in italics. My comments are indented and follow each example. I won’t get into the plot or story-line of the novel, although it’s fascinating. I want to focus on technique. Here they samples of how to do descriptions:

Ramona is a stork-legged, high-hipped, lacquer-headed garden-clubber from Spartanbury. Charley is a pocked-nosed, beat-up, mashed-down Gene Sarazen. And here is golden-haired golden-limbed Chuck looking like Phoebus Apollo or Sir Lancelot in hip-huggers. (48)

               Here he uses compound adjectives, spilling them out along with comparisons to golf legends and mythic heroes. His humor is evident. He makes Ramona and Charley almost larger than life, while also making them hopelessly conventional.

Ruby’s face went inscrutable like an Oriental’s. He expected, rightly, a higher tip at Christmas. The dollar was received as an insult. We disliked each other. He sucked his teeth. (89)

               Here one gesture—the sucking of teeth—tells all.

She looks like her father, but the resemblance is a lovely joke, a droll commentary on him. His colorlessness, straw hair, straw skin, becomes in her healthy pallor, milkiness over rose, lymph over blood. Her hair is black-auburn with not enough red to ruin her skin, which has more green chloral undertones of some redheads. Her glance is mild and unguarded. It is the same to her whether she drinks or does not drink, talks or does not talk, looks one in the eyes or does not look. (89)

               Here he makes a comparison between a father and a daughter, and, thereby, describes two at once, while elaborating on one detail, the skin tone. Then, in the next sentence, using parallelism, he gets into her personality.

He (Colley, a black man) is a chief encephalographer, electronic wizard, ornithologist, holds a Back Belt in karate, does the crossword puzzle in the Sunday Times. A native of Dothan, Alabama, he is a graduate of Amherst and N.Y.U. medical school. So he lounges around like an Amherst man, cocking a quizzical eyebrow, and sending out wreaths of maple-sugar smoke, or else he humps off down the hall like a Brooklyn interne, eyes rolled up in his eyebrows, shoes pigeoning in and going squee-gee on the asphalt tile. Yet if he gets excited enough or angry enough the old Alabama hambone shows through. His voice will hit up into falsetto and he might even say aksed instead of asked. (108)

               Here he uses contrast to fill-in the character, giving us his dualistic nature, a good-old-boy and a New England, well-educated society man. Note how he focuses on one detail (the eyebrow) and elaborates on it. He also shows Calley moving, his physicality. Such details, especially the squee-gee, Percy will use later on, pulling out that detail again and again, which is one of O’Conner’s techniques, letting a movement, gesture, sound, affection become the signature for a character.

Max sits behind his desk in his perfectly fitted white coat, erect as a young prince, light glancing from the planes of his forehead. But when he rises, like Toulouse-Lautrec he doesn’t rise much. (108)

               Here a simple analogy (a prince) along with description of clothes captures Max. Percy usually has two qualities played off against one another. That is one of the strategies you can use when you do a description. Think about what is paradoxical about the person. Think of something that may be apparent to others but may be hidden from the character. It builds tension. It leaves us wondering, “Who is this person?” Here the prince and the most unprincely appearing artist Toulouse-Lautrec are contrasted.

Stryker is a tall, willowy doctor who feels obliged by the nature of his work to emphasize the propriety, even the solemnity of his own person. So he dresses somewhat like a funeral director in a dark suit, perfectly laundered shirt, and sober ties. Yet there persists about him the faint air of a dude: his collar has a tricky pin that lofts the knot of his tie. Overly long cuffs show their jeweled links and cover part of his hand, whose fingers are still withered from his years as a chemist before he went into behavior. A wonderful dancer, hopping nimbly though the complicated figures of the Center’s square dances. Even now, in the observation room, there is about him a lightness of foot, a discreet bounciness, as if he were keeping time to an inner hoedown. His foot swings out. (125)

               Here you can see the pattern emerging of a writer who likes to give his characters nuance. He gives us, on the one hand, a person with a drab appearance. We are given a quick historical aside about his having changed careers, the “withered fingers.” Then Percy turns to his dancing, how, even in a professional setting, his body is moving like a dancer. This layer of outward appearance and inner desires, playing one off against the other, makes the character (in E. M. Forster’s term) round”, more fully fleshed out than one who is described by using just one feature.

We kissed. Ruins make her passionate. Ghosts make her want to be touched. She is lovely, her quick upturned heart-shaped face and gold-brown eyes bright with a not quite genuine delight, a willingness rather to be delightful. (132)

               Here he uses geometric images and an elaboration on the eyes to tease out a character. Note the use of short, pithy sentences followed by one with extended modifiers. Throughout his descriptions, the sentences have a dance rhythm—short, long, medium—repeated again and again so no one image or description weighs down the paragraph.

Now she stands in front of me even closer than usual, hands behind her. I have to look up. Her face is tilted back, the bones under her cheeks winged and wide as if the sculptor has spread out the alar ridges with two sure thumb thrusts. The short downy upper lip is lifted clear of the lower by its tendon. Her face, foreshortened, is simple and clear and scrubbed and peach-mottled, its beauty is fortuitous like that of a Puritan woman leaning over her washtub and the blood going despite her to her face. (156)

               Here he is using the minute focusing in on her face, both its gesture as well as how her cheek bones and lips belie something deeper in her personality, her Puritan nature. Notice how the use of one simile, which, when it is used, transports us out the scene, to the washtub and to a more intimate setting of a bath.

She wheels him in. Mr. Ives sits slumped in a folding chair, a little bald-headed monkey of a man, bright monkey eyes snapping at me. His scalp is a smooth cap of skin, heavily freckled, fitted over his low wrinkled brow. The backs of his hands are covered with liver spots and sun scabs. His eyes fairly hop with—what? rage or risibility? is he angry or assumed or just plain crazy? (158)

               Here, again, we see the focus on a detail. One detail, the “eyes snapped” will continue to be used in every scene that Mr. Ives plays a part. Behind his masks of silences, there’s something clicking. What is it? The snapping eyes become a plot point, a question.

But Ted is more than ever the alert young crop-headed narrow-necked Oppenheimer. Tanya is an angular brunette who has smoldering violet eyes, one of which is cocked, and wears a ringlet of hair at each temple like a gypsy. They love each other, do Ted ‘n Tanya, and, though heathen, are irrevocably monogamous and faithful. (162)

               Here a couple is described, first doing one, then the other, finally concluding with an overview of their relationship. Note use of analogy with Ted, the Oppenheimer image which Percy will use again—“Ted leans forward, big Oppenheimer head bobbing on its slender neck”—which elaborates on the first image and keeps us visually engaged with how Ted’s odd head and neck look. By repeating a descriptor he helps the reader remember what a character looks like as well as who the character is. Oh, yeah, that’s the guy with the Oppenheimer neck who’s married to Tanya.

He’s an old-looking fellow, curiously old-fashioned. Indeed, with his old-style flat-top haircut, white shirt with short sleeves, which even have vestigial cuff buttons, and neat dark trousers, he looks like a small-town businessman in the old Auto Age, on of those wiry old-young fifty-year-olds,, perhaps a Southern Bell manager, who used to go to Howard Johnson’s every Tuesday for Rotary luncheons. His face is both youthful and lined. The flat-top makes a tangent with the crown of his skull, given the effect of a tonsure. Is it an early bald spot or too-close a flat-top? (166)

               Here the narrator is speculating and observing at the same time, trying as best he can to make out what will be a character that never seems to fit into any category and changes his identity in nearly every scene.  But here Percy allows us to follow the narrator’s eyes as he scans Mr. Immerman. He becomes infatuated with the flat-top and even wonders what causes the bald spot, which allows us to see the quirky way that the narrator assesses a person. So, the description in some ways develops the narrator’s and the other character’s personality at once.

The Director is a tough old party, a lean leathery emeritus behaviorist with white thatch and a single caliper crease in his withered brown cheek. Though he is reputed to have a cancer in his lung that is getting the better of him, one can easily believe that the growth is feeding on his nonvital parts, fats and body liquors, leaving the man himself worn fine and dusty and durable as Don Quixote. The only sign of illness is a fruity cough and his handkerchiefs, which he uses expertly, folding them flat as a napkin over his sputum and popping them up his sleeve or into the slits of his white coat. (202)

               Here Percy blends descriptions of the Director’s profession with a visual description of his face. Then he focuses on cancer and the handkerchiefs which, in the next encounters with the Director, will be used again, becoming his trademark as well as the evidence that his illness rules his life.

               As you look at how Percy uses descriptions to create character, how he heightens drama in a scene  by having the descriptions contain with them some inherent polarity and tension, and how he associates with mythic or cinematic heroes that, in turn, further elaborate on the characters, you see how a master of character development works.

               For a poet who wants to get a character in a poem, not taking too much time, Percy is a great model. With a few quick brush strokes—focus on a bodily feature, a facial tick, a finely pressed white jacket, and add an association, Don Quixote or Puritan lady at a bath—a character can be vividly presented. Tony Hoagland was a master of the quick take, introducing characters into his poems. It is a skill that allowed him, as it allows Percy, to do double duty with description. It introduces us to a character and also fleshes out the paradoxes or contradictions within the character that will play out in the poem or novel. In Tony’s case, he describes his sister who is getting older and has lost her beauty:

                                                          I’m probably the only one in the whole world

                                                          who actually remembers the year in high school

                                                          she perfected the art

                                                          of being a dumb blond,

                                                          spending recess on the breezeway by the physics lab,

                                                          tossing her hair and laughing the canary trill

                                                          which was her specialty (“Beauty”, Donkey Gospel, (St Paul: Greywolf                                                                                                                                                                                                              Press, 1989, 18)

               Here we have a poet who takes a few descriptions to paint a picture of a young girl who, as the poem will tell us, must come to face the loss a beauty. As with Percy, he does it with an image, both visual and auditory, that immerses us in a scene by a specific place, the physics lab. Of course, with Percy, he has four hundred pages to elaborate on the nuances of his characters. That’s the nature of a novel: giving you time to tease out one aspect after another of a character. But the craft of doing that while also keep the pace of the novel moving is difficult. On the one hand, you have to break, slow down enough to stop the dialogue, hold up the action, and pay attention to someone’s flat-top haircut. But, on the other, you need to keep that description interesting enough and filled with enough tension and conflict to warrant your interest so that it adds, and doesn’t detract, to the dramatic narrative. Percy manages to do both.

               How can you, as a poet or novelist or short story writer learn to do it?

               I found the best way to learn how to do what he does is to imitate him, to take a character in a story, make a list of things you know about them, things that are contradictory, aspects of his or her appearance, life history, professional background, favorite sports teams, hobbies, quirks, passions, guilts—all those things that make them unique—and to take one of the above examples and weave your information into his sentences, noticing how he shifts from physical features to social qualities, how he incorporates mythic or cinematic analogies, and see if you can make your characters come more alive, and do it quickly. It’s worth a try. I find it’s the best way for me to learn the craft from a master.