12 Dos and Don'ts for Introducing your Protagonist

I've been dealing with an evil computer virus which first attacked my desktop and now seems to have killed my laptop dead. They're both old machines, so it may be better to replace them than try to fix them, but now I'm worried my back-up drives may be infected too. This is not a nice thing. But I seem to have the desktop kind of working for now.

For the last two days I've been at the Central Coast Writers conference, having a fantastic time, hanging out with my idol, MR.. NATHAN BRANSFORD (yes, he really is that smart and classy. A snappy dresser, too.) I also got to meet some of my followers in person. Hi there, 1st Daughter! I'll write more about the conference later when I have a reliable computer.

Congrats to followers Sherry Heber, Susan Tuttle, and Paul Fahey for cleaning up at the Conference awards. And I mean cleaning up: Sherry won ALL THREE of the poetry awards!. Woo-hoo you guys! Judy Salamacha and Cathe Olsen--thanks for making the event a fantastic experience. Last year, the C. C. Conference was named by Westways Magazine the friendliest writers conference in the West, and Judy is keeping up that tradition.

But what with battling viruses and having too much fun for the last two days, I don't have a new post for today. In fact, I feel amazingly lucky that I've got onto my blog at all. So I'm going to give you an oldie but goodie.

The wonderful Sierra Godfrey mentioned this post in her round up of round-ups last week as one of her favorite posts ever, so I figured it would be a good one to post again.

One note of caution: these are rules for the final draft. When you’re first diving into a novel, you’re not introducing your characters to a reader; you’re introducing them to yourself. All kinds of information about your MC will come up, like she eats cold pizza for breakfast, grew up next to an adult book store, and feels a deep hatred for Smurfs. This stuff will spill out in your first chapters. Let it. That’s the fun part. But be aware you’ll want to cut most of the information or move it to another part of the book when you edit.

When you’re doing that editing, here are some dos and don’ts:

DON’T start with a Robinson Crusoe opening. That’s when your character is alone and musing. Robinson Crusoe is boring until Friday shows up. So don’t snoozify the reader with a character driving alone in the car, sitting on an airplane, waking up and going to work, or looking in the mirror.

DO open with the protagonist in a scene with other characters—showing how he interacts with the world. Two or three is ideal: not too many or the reader will be overwhelmed.

DON’T give a lot of physical description, especially of the "police report" variety. All we know about Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice is that she has “fine eyes.” We don’t have to be told the color of Sam Spade’s hair, or Inspector Morse’s weight. The reader’s imagination fills in the blanks.

DO give us some physical markers that indicate personality. Unusual characteristics like Nero Wolfe’s size, Hercule Poirot’s mustache, and Miss Marple’s age show who these characters are and make them memorable.

DON’T plunge into action before introducing the characters. The introductions can be minimal, but they have to make us feel connected enough to these people to care. Example: If you hear some stranger got hit by a car—it’s sad, but you don’t have much curiosity about it. If you hear your next door neighbor’s mom got hit by a car, you want to know when, where, how badly she’s injured, etc.

DO give your MC strong emotions we can identify with in the opening scene. We don’t have to identify with the situation, but with the emotion: the fury he feels because his roommate keeps watching that DVD of the Smurfs, the desperate hunger from not eating anybody’s brains for weeks, or mortification because he has a run in his panty hose.

DON’T start with a POV character about to be killed or otherwise eliminated from the storyline. The reader will feel his time and sympathy have been wasted getting to know somebody irrelevant.

DO introduce the MC as close to page one as possible.

DON’T start with dialogue. Readers want to know who’s speaking before they’ll pay much attention to what they say. It’s just like real life: if strangers are shouting in the hallway, it’s noise. If you recognize the shouters as your boss and the hooker from 12B—you’re all ears.

DO let us know where we are and who’s speaking in couple of sentences before you let them start blabbering.

DON’T start with a prologue. They annoy readers and infuriate agents. (Yes, I know there are arguments on both sides, but they work against you most of the time.

DO dribble in your MC’s backstory in thoughts, conversations and mini-flashbacks--AFTER you’ve got us hooked by your MC and her story.

Yes, I know: lots of superb books break all these rules. But established writers can do an awful lot of fun stuff the rest of us can’t get away with. And it helps to know what the rules are before we go whacking at them with blunt instruments.


If there are any glaring typos or snafus here, do let me know. I admit to being seriously impaired today. Fighting viruses makes my eyeballs hurt. I suppose it's from the tears...alas. I loved this computer!

The #1 Talent You Need to be a Good Writer

The brilliant columnist/philosopher/literary outlaw Michael Ventura famously said the most important talent required of a writer is the ability to work alone. In his 1993 Sun article, The Talent of the Room , Ventura wrote,

“Writing is something you do alone in a room. It’s the most important thing to remember if you want to be a writer….Unless you have that, your other talents are worthless.”

But it occurred to me recently that writers no longer have to be as isolated as we were when Ventura wrote those words eighteen years ago. With the click of a mouse, we can communicate with fellow scriveners all over the world. One of the ways technology has altered our universe is that we can now emerge from a session with the muse, pop onto the Internet and tweet, blog, email or whatever and be part of a community.

We’re not so alone in our rooms any more.

But there’s another talent that may be even more important than a capacity for solitude—and that is the ability to get out of our rooms and LISTEN.

Without knowing how to listen attentively, we can only write about ourselves. All our characters will act and sound like us. And readers don’t care much about us. As Margaret Atwood said in Narrative magazine this week : “Nothing interests people so much as themselves.”

All writers may need the talent of the room, but GOOD writers need the talent to shut the *&%! up and listen.

Our technological culture does not listen well. I thought about that last week when a walk in my favorite nature preserve was ruined by some Bozo talking loudly on his cell phone. Talking. Not listening. Hardly even stopping for breath.

I started to wonder if the other person in his conversation was compulsively talking as well, and I was hearing one of two lonely Bozos, both loudly failing to communicate--as is so often the case with real humans.

YA writer Hannah Moskowitz brought this up on Nathan Bransford’s blog last week. She left a comment to his great post on 7 keys to writing good dialogue saying:

“In real life, people don't listen well. They've already formulated most of what they're going to say before they've heard the other person's side of the conversation.”

She’s so right. Most people do a whole lot more talking than listening.

But as writers, we must do the opposite. Otherwise, we’ll create the kind of unbelievable dialogue Nathan warns us against—lines like:

“As you know, Remus, we are twin brothers who were raised by wolves…”

Or characters who say what they’re actually thinking, instead of skirting around the elephants the way real people do:

“Holy batshit, Robin, let’s ditch this Joker and get ourselves a room.”

Or conversations that exist only to show off the writer’s expertise and/or wit:

“While the lady sat on the pouffe and nervously fingered her reticule, Watson said, ‘Hey Sherlock, do you know the one about the platypus who walked into a bar…’”

 Or you’ll fill your character’s mouths with predictable clichés and overused tropes, instead of the wildly unexpected things that pop into real conversations. Like that Bozo in the nature preserve who shouted into his phone,

              “Walt Disney died for your sins, Bro!”

What a gift. I'm sure going to use that in a story.

I think a lot of people become writers because we’re not big talkers. Our early lives may have been dominated by noisier friends or family members. (How many writers are middle children, I wonder?) We write because we want to have our say—to get somebody to listen to US.

But during the process of writing, we come to realize our best stories are mosaics of the voices and stories we have listened to—all those snippets of other people’s lives that have been thrust upon us by the loud and Bozoid. We take the raw material of their non-communications and make it into something that truly communicates.

A good writer offers readers an echo chamber in which they can hear themselves.

In The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut invented a life form he called Harmoniums, who could only communicate two messages: “here I am, here I am, here I am,” and  “so glad you are, so glad you are, so glad you are.”

Maybe Earthlings aren’t so different. Noisy Bozos with cellphones are the “here I ams” and writers are the “so glad you ares.” Out of their seemingly pointless noise, we make art that reflects the truth of their own existence.

It is our way of being heard. And our reward for listening.