Characters are at the center of every story you read. Whether it’s a romance novel or a history book, the reader takes the journey alongside a character they find deeply relatable, completely deplorable, or somewhere in between.
A well-crafted character is complex and multi-faceted. They have gone through unique experiences or have a strong voice that makes you want to learn more about them. For journalists, finding those characters is one thing, but presenting them to an audience is another.
From the Nieman Storyboard annotation archives, here are six journalists sharing how they introduced the characters from some of their most acclaimed pieces:
1. The main character, in their element: Michael J. Mooney and ‘The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever’ (2015)
Mooney was having a conversation with his editor at D Magazine, who slightly misremembered a story from the local paper about a bowler who almost had a perfect score. The story stuck with Mooney for a while until he called the bowling alley and found Bill Fong.
Fong's goal was to score a perfect series: three consecutive perfect games, 900 points. Mooney took readers through the night of the game that brought Fong so close to his goal. Mooney had watched him bowl more than 100 times, and he believed the best way to start the story would be simply describing how Fong felt while preparing to bowl:
When Bill Fong approaches the lane, 15-pound bowling ball in hand, he tries not to breathe. He tries not to think about not breathing. He wants his body to perform a series of complex movements that his muscles themselves have memorized. In short, he wants to become a robot.
Here’s how Mooney described his opening:
On a really, really basic level, the entire story is about him throwing a bowling ball. So why not start with the way he throws a bowling ball? … It felt like it was kind of part of his personality. That’s the way we’re going to help build this, help people understand this character — by looking at the way he does the thing he loves doing.
2. Reliving a moment of heartbreak and desperation: ESPN's Sarah Spain and ‘Runs in the Family’ (2018)
Spain chronicled the story of football star Deland McCullough and his mentor, Sherman Smith. McCullough, who was adopted as a baby, never knew either of his biological parents until he started digging and found a truth too stunning to believe.
Spain's story doesn't open with Sherman meeting McCullough — which happened when he was in high school — or even when McCullough found his calling in football. Instead, Spain takes the reader back to when McCullough was born, in a moment described by his biological mother:
Carol Briggs placed her newborn son on the bed and removed all of his clothes. She tried to find herself in his face, searching his mouth, his nose, his eyes. "Not yet," she thought. She saw only his father. She looked him up and down, making a mental note of each of his 10 tiny toes, chubby legs, puffy belly and two little arms reaching up at her. "In my mind," Briggs says, "that was probably going to be the last time I ever saw him."
Spain didn’t expect the story to start the way it did, but this is how she explained her choice:
When I was talking to Carol … that line stood out to me because it was going to be the last time she was going to see her baby. What really helped guide me (in writing the piece) is that it is mostly chronological; that’s the way you let the story tell itself. You meet the baby and this mother, then you meet who the baby became all these years later. Then we shift back to telling the story in order again. I thought that was really effective because you got to where the story is going to lead and then you have to fill in the pieces the same way Deland did.
3. The main character, at work and at home: Jose A. Del Real on ‘A Mother's Charge’ (2022)
For a Washington Post series called “Masculinity in America,” Del Real found his main character at a restaurant in Wyoming. In “A Mother's Charge,” we meet a 23-year-old server named Sarah, who is a single mother of a 5-year-old boy and struggling with questions about how to raise him right.
She had abusive partners in the past, including the father of her child. She told Del Real that she wished there was a story out there sharing what mothers of young boys have to go through in the age of toxic masculinity.
Del Real opens the story at the restaurant where he first met her:
The waitress knows to be chatty and cheerful. She makes $3 per hour and lives on tips, so she smiles as she walks through the restaurant, especially at the men, who seem to expect it most. Her hair is long and curly; her clothes are tight. A lip ring and several tattoos hint at some irreverence but mostly they draw attention to her age, 23 years old.
She introduces herself by her first name, Sarah, and for all anyone here knows or cares, these facts mark the beginning and the end of her story.
But at home, after she puts her 5-year-old son to sleep, she sometimes starts to cry and can’t stop. She cries because the man she was building a life with betrayed her trust and abused her body. Because she should have left him but she stayed. Because of all that happened next.
Del Real explained why he opened the story this way:
I made a few quick judgments here. I wanted to start the piece in March and end it in June, to give the narrative space to unfold in a longer arc. I knew that Sarah’s abrupt decision to quit her waitress job and leave the ranch would be a pivotal moment in this story, even before I sat down to write. And lastly, the vulnerabilities and compromises inherent to tipped service work overlap nicely with the broader themes in the piece … Starting at the restaurant was a way to set up a lot of those tensions right away. I also really liked the idea of readers first meeting Sarah there, which was where I first met her.
4. Finding the story in moments of silence: Samantha Schmidt on a transgender teen who is denied her full identity (2021)
Also for the Post, Samantha Schmidt set out to profile a transgender teen during a time when transgender rights were — and still are — under attack.
The physical restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic made reporting difficult. Schmidt was worried that she couldn’t capture the story she was imagining because she wasn’t able to witness scenes with Chloe Clark in person. In the Zoom classes Schmidt attended with Clark, very little dialogue took place, another worry of hers.
But Schmidt found that “the silence was the story.” She worked around it by getting in Clark’s head as much as possible, and building off the opening scene where Clark sits in a personal finance Zoom class to do a presentation.
Schmidt wrote that Clark dreaded times where she would “have to listen to the part of herself that bothered her most, the part that still didn’t match how the transgender girl felt inside.”
Chloe Clark lay in her bed, wrapped in a blanket, as she logged in to the virtual personal finance class on her laptop.
The 15-year-old watched as each of her high school classmates joined the class, their names popping onto the Microsoft Teams screen one by one while the teacher took attendance. As always, the students’ cameras were all turned off, and once again, Chloe was reduced to the name on her screen — and the sound of her voice.
The teenage girl remained muted.
Schmidt told Storyboard:
When I reconnected with Chloe’s mother after many months, it was one of the first things that came up as we talked about the challenges of remote learning for Chloe. I remember mentioning it to my editor [Lynda Robinson] in a phone call, and I knew Chloe’s voice was going to be an important aspect of the piece. But a few days later Lynda called me and suggested the idea of building the story around it. I was immediately drawn to the narrow simplicity of it, but also the symbolism it carried. It really captured the way so many trans kids have lacked a voice in these political debates about their bodies and their decisions.
5. Revealing character in small moments: Elizabeth Weil on the man accused in the Ghost Ship warehouse fire (2019)
Elizabeth Weil was a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine when she pitched the idea of profiling Max Harris, one of two men on trial for the 2016 fire that tore through the Ghost Ship, an abandoned warehouse-turned-artist collective in Oakland, Calif. Thirty-six people died. (Harris was later acquitted.)
Weil visited Harris in jail 10 to 12 times, going without a pen and paper the first few times. She wanted Harris to feel comfortable sharing small details about different events. One such event was the first scene in the story, when Harris described picking up bugs around the courtyard:
Once a week, Max Harris is allowed to leave his 6-by-12-foot cell to go outside. The first thing he does, before the other inmates arrive in the small cement yard in Santa Rita Jail, is run around and yell, “Safari!” as he picks up all the bugs — the furry moths with leopard spots, the grasshoppers in jade armor. He wants to move them out of harm’s way before other men in red-and-white-striped jumpsuits start playing basketball. Sometimes he’ll find a honey bee in distress, lost and spinning in a circle, and he’ll give it a little water, or water mixed with apple jelly, if he can find a half-eaten packet. “It nourishes it,” he says. Or, he’ll see a moth with cobweb stuck on its antenna, and he’ll calmly, lovingly remove it. Each life is precious. Each life is beautiful. Harris, a vegetarian since age 14, believes this to his core. To Harris, even a fruit fly pirouetting in his cell is a miracle. “It’s like a dog,” he told me. “A little Labrador or something. It’s different, but it’s still this little shard of life. It’s still this spark of divinity in this moving work of art.”
Weil captured details as small as what Harris named the spider he found — but that she hadn’t asked about it the first time:
I often have a laundry list of specific details I fish for near the end: What were you wearing? What was the room like? At the start of reporting, you can’t know what scenes you’re going to use, so you can’t ask everything. But once a piece is near closing, you know exactly what material you’re using so (to me, at least) it makes sense to go back.
6. From the character's POV: Thomas Curwen on a surgeon racing to save a life during ‘L.A.'s shooting season’ (2017)
Thomas Curwen worked for the Los Angeles Times for more than four decades, reporting and writing many award-winning stories, from covering a bear attack in Montana (for which he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist), to following eight residents of a homeless encampment.
In 2013, he noticed the increasing number of front-page stories about gun violence and how many of them focused on the shooter and their victims. He sought out a different angle, following a trauma surgeon through an operation on a teenager.
The story opens with this scene:
From the entry wound — the size of a nickel — Dr. Brant Putnam guesses that the bullet is a .45, but it's what he can't see that worries him most.
The boy, a teenager most likely, lies naked on Bed 2 in a trauma bay at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. His brown skin, slick with sweat, is ashen.
"What's your name?" a resident asks as half a dozen doctors and nurses circle him.
The boy can't answer.
The reader is already inside of the doctor’s head without meeting him. This is what Curwen said of his choice:
I am [a] great advocate for telling a story as close to the point of view of the protagonist as possible. This story is Dr. Putnam’s story, and I wanted to establish [that] from the very beginning. All that we’re seeing and experiencing comes from his perspective. Technically, this makes attributions more invisible and creates a more immediate, less intrusive reading experience.
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Emilia Wisniewski is a general assignment reporter and engagement editor at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. She previously worked at Boston.com and The Boston Globe as a correspondent where she covered local politics, business, health, and environment.
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