Writing the Blockbuster Novel by Albert Zuckerman

Author:Albert Zuckerman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466887596
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Introducing Your Characters

Once you have fixed upon the thrusts or goals of each of your main characters, you must decide how to introduce them and at what points in the story. Try to bring them on one at a time, separately, giving each at least a page before you introduce another character. That way you can solidly establish each one’s identity, and the reader is more likely to remember and recognize him in subsequent scenes. Think of a cocktail party where you are introduced to five or ten people at once, and how difficult it is even to remember their names. In your novel, you don’t want to subject your reader to this difficulty.

Your protagonist should be brought on in the first chapter and no later than the second. The reader wants to know whom the story essentially is about. If you keep your reader waiting longer than this, he may be disoriented, believing that the seemingly important character he first met is your chief subject. Avoid forcing the reader to make this awkward adjustment. It’s good, too, to introduce all your major characters fairly early in your novel and to keep involving them all the way through, as opposed to bringing on a new character with each new plot complication or a new major character as you approach your ending. In Ken Follett’s original outline for Eye of the Needle, Lucy, who as the novel comes to its climax meets and falls in love with Faber and then discovers he’s a German spy, had no role whatsoever in the story until this point near the ending. But in the book, she is introduced in the third chapter. The ongoing subplot of her difficulties with her crippled husband develops our interest in her and prepares wonderfully for her eventual fateful encounter with the Needle.

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