Craft Chat Craft Challenge?

[Aethalope]

Anyone up for a craft challenge from @Pamela Jo?

"How can we introduce new characters without interrupting the narrative flow?"

Indeed a tough task. So, what strategies does everyone use? Do you think it’s easier in first person or third person? Do you focus on appearance or behaviour? And here's one that gets me every time: Do you establish the character's role and/or function first, or do you let it emerge through the interaction?

(My answers to those would be first person, behaviour, and let it emerge but badly.)

If you fancy exploring this in more depth, here's a prompt:

Choose a character who is so minor they have only one interaction with your protagonist. Write 150-200 words (a guide, not a rule) describing this interaction.

New stuff? A scene from your WIP? Whatever fits? Show us what you’ve got! Not for critique, just for the mutual exploration of different approaches to the same task. Maybe we can even inspire some blog posts

 

[Sedayne]

Okay, this is the opening of Confessions of a Teenage Undertaker (a short story prequel of Songs for Beginners). The protag introduces himself, then his minor character brother and the brother's unnamed ex-girlfriend.

My name is Mike Davies, and I see the dead.​

To be more accurate, I see dead bodies in the funeral parlour of the family business. Our Kev once used that line on a girl who was into all that gloomy stuff. You know the type – dresses in black and hangs around St Deiniol’s churchyard late at night hoping to see a ghost. God knows what Kev saw in her, but the chat-up worked. They’d been going out for a couple of weeks before he sneaked her into the embalming room one night where she promptly vomited and fled, telling him she never wanted to see him again.​