Introducing a Character

I’m taking a course on fiction writing through the Provincetown [MA] COA. It’s not really a course. It’s a mainly sitting there while some pompous literature professor pontificates for 30 minutes leaving me bamboozled in his wake. Most of what he says has been said countless times before.

Someone said once that one becomes knowledgeable in a given area, he or she no longer understand what others do not know about that subject. I thought that was very wise. Those who teach need to be cognizant of this fact and structure their offerings in such a way that people will understand.

Mondays class covered how different novelists have started their stories. We know from an earlier post that the start of the novel is not necessarily the start of the story. So the question is how to break into it in a way that engages the reader. Otherwise we’ll loose the reader and he or she will quit on us.

One can either in 100 words or so give the gist of the character like Jane Austin and never deviate from it. Or, one can educate the reader in dribs and drabs as Fitzgerald does in The Great Gatsby. I went back to the novel I’m trying to finish and looked at the way I introduced my protagonist, Brian. I tried to do both which sucked, so I fixed it. At least I hope I did, and just described Brian, a 5-year old boy whom we follow through the novel until he lands in prison in his 50s due to a series of terrible acts not entirely of his own making.

My main motivation for trying to finish this novel is that I want to finish the one just behind it. If I don’t get this one out of the way I never will. Then I want to work on the play I just started about a white father moving in with the mixed-race son he adopted when the son was 10 weeks old. I want to do it all, but I can only do one thing at a time