jude
Introducing and Developing Characters John Gardner said characters are the reason readers read any story. The moment your character arrives on stage, you must make him memorable, someone your reader will care about (either positively or negatively) and will want to spend the rest of the story with him. Your introduction will give the reader a first impression as in real life, and like in “real life,” when you meet someone for the first time, that first impression determines whether he’s someone you’d like to meet again. There are two traditional ways of introducing characters. The first is by giving a capsule description at the outset. Here’s an example of this method from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure: Jude would now have been described as a young man with a forcible, meditative, and earnest rather than handsome cast of countenance.