Think of your character introductions as short stories, little standalone short films created for the purpose of presenting your main characters to your reader. They will serve not only as introduction but as résumé and business card, brief snapshots conveying the essence of who these people are.

Most of the novelists I’ve worked with over the years do not naturally think to construct introductory short stories like this. They just want to get going with the main story, and they give almost no thought to how the reader will encounter the hero. But doing so with care is essential to get the protagonist “set” in the reader’s mind. Watch some movies and see how the main characters are introduced. Then sit down and write a short story to introduce your hero.

Remember to show what is likable about your protagonist . . . engage your reader by introducing your hero in a way that shows what’s heroic or sympathetic about her. Make us care about her.

First impressions are so powerful, especially in fiction. They shape every expectation we have about what this person is going to be like in the future. In the character’s introduction is the seed of the whole story. We see, in embryonic form, who he is, what makes him heroic, and where he is going.

Gerke, Jeff. The First 50 Pages: Engage Agents, Editors, and Readers, and Set Up Your Novel for Success. Blue Ash, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 2011. 93–94. Print.

You can’t be a great fiction writer without reading. A lot. All kinds of novels. And poetry and nonfiction.

Each time you read a book, the flow and rhythm of the writing implants itself in your brain. When it’s good writing, when you respond to it, it goes in the good file. When it’s not-so-good writing, you’ll sense it and put it under bad.

You’ll learn about plot and story construction and character building. Your storehouse will fill up and be ready for you when you’re in need.

Be self-directed in your reading. In Plot & Structure, I explained a process for learning plot so you’ll begin to feel it in your marrow. Here’s a brief recap:

1. Get half a dozen novels of the type you want to write.

2. Read the first book for pleasure and think about it afterward. What did you like about it?

3. Now read the second book and take some time to think about it, too.

4. Read the next four books in the same fashion.

5. Now go back to book one and, on index cards, mark each scene. Number them, then give us the setting, what the scene is about, and what, if anything, makes you want to read on.

6. Repeat this drill for all of the books.

7. Beginning with any stack of cards, go through them quickly, remembering the book, giving yourself a movie in the mind.

8. Do the same with the other stacks of index cards.

What this exercise does is burn plot and structure into your mind. Keep those cards and review them periodically.

With some modification, you can do the same thing for any aspect of the fiction craft….

So read.

Bell, James Scott. Revision and Self-Editing for Publication: Techniques for transforming your First Draft into a Novel (2nd ed.). Blue Ash, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 2012. 5–6. Print.

I’ve known writers who got very uneasy—or downright panicky—because they thought they needed to get certain broad-scale information or sense impressions into their story at a given point, but couldn’t find a character to experience all that they desired to convey. If you ever get that feeling, let me suggest that you sit back for a minute and ask yourself if the reader really needs that panoramic view (or additional information). Often you may discover that she doesn’t, and that your feeling is an author concern, not a reader concern. You may be wanting to tell more than necessary just because you happen to know it.

It’s hard sometimes to accept that a reader doesn’t need to experience or know something. You know everything about the setting, can see it all in your imagination, and your natural impulse is to want to share your vision with your reader—to put in everything for the reader to know, see, hear, smell, taste, feel, and believe about the setting at that moment of story time. It’s a brave impulse, and one that’s very hard to dissuade writers of sometimes, but nearly always it’s fallacious.

Your reader seldom needs to know all you do at any point. You might think he would benefit from a vast and panoramic view of that city setting, but he does not experience his real life that way, and he does not want to experience the story setting that way, either. Belief comes from identification with the viewpoint. Identification with the viewpoint comes from a restricted view of the setting. The reader’s concern is with what the character knows. Your authorial concern about showing the big picture often has nothing whatsoever to do with telling a good story in the most effective way.

Bickham, Jack M. Setting (Elements of Fiction). Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 1994. 97–98. Print.

There’s a place waiting for you in Readerland. Editors are out there now, poised with checkbook in hand, hoping that today is the day they open a manuscript and a real, live person begins speaking from the page to them. A new, unique person with a voice they haven’t heard before.

Your voice!

The world won’t applaud a second William Faulkner, boys and girls. Especially a second-rate Faulkner . . . which is all any imitator can aspire to be. The reading audience can, however, be very receptive to the rollicking small-town tales of Jim Ray Poindexter from Bippus, Indiana. Eagerly open to the article Jim Ray delivers to Gourmet Magazine describing the cuisine delights of crawfish, delivered from the sensibilities of an observer with Jim’s values and particular background that only he can bring to the writing desk. Ecstatic over the short story Mr. Poindexter has penned about the town drunk at Bippus, Indiana’s Fourth of July Barbecue.

Mr. P. is going to get his work published if he observes the principle behind Jules Renard’s remark concerning his own struggle with the literature “masters” on his own shelves, that: “Whenever I apply myself to writing, literature comes between us.”

Jim Ray’s going to get published because he won’t let literature come between his own personality and the page. The voice he respects the most is his own. As you should.

The world wants Jim Ray Poindexter from Bippus, Indiana’s voice.

The world wants your voice. From wherever you are.

Edgerton, Les. Finding Your Voice: How to Put Personality in Your Writing. Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 2003. 39–40. Print.

Make Sure the Reader Knows Something’s Happening, and Going to Happen

There’s another compensation that needs mentioning. Make sure none of your little, simple scenes is static. End them, subtly or obviously, on cliff-hangers. Show something is slipping, something is going wrong, and something is going to happen very soon. That, together with the energy the shifts themselves provide, will supply the dynamic force to make the reader want to keep reading and go to the effort of sorting out all the different people, settings, and situations. Make sure that each scene moves and is leading up to something quite clear and concrete.

Dibell, Ansen. Plot (Elements of Fiction Writing). Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 1988. 39. Print.

What POV Can Do for Your Story
In order to maximize the impact POV has on your readers, an understanding of its potential is essential. The choices you make regarding POV have the power to do the following:

1. Give readers the vicarious experience of a certain perspective on an event (such as what the Battle of Waterloo felt like from the trenches with the privates or from headquarters with the generals). This broadens readers’ worldviews by allowing them to explore how someone other than themselves—the POV character—thinks and feels and perceives reality. This insight provides clues as to who a character is and how perspective affects his behavior.

2. Create an interactive experience of the story, by inviting the readers to participate with the characters and second-guess their decisions and actions.

3. Increase reader identification, so the POV character’s goals and conflicts become, for the moment, important to the readers (which keeps them turning pages).

4. Convey (or conceal) information that is known to a particular character in order to create affiliation (or suspense) with the readers.

5. Individualize characters and distinguish them from each other by showing how differently each feels and thinks about the same event.

6. Provide the contrast between the apparent and the internal in order to create subtext. POV can create tension between what the character says and what she means; between her vision and reality; between what is said and what is interpreted.

Rasley, Alicia. The Power of Point of View: Make Your Story Come to Life. Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 2008. 13–14. Print.

Whenever you tell a story, you make an implicit contract with the reader. Within the first few paragraphs or pages, you tell the reader implicitly what kind of story this is going to be; the reader then knows what to expect, and holds the thread of that structure throughout the tale. . . .

The rule of thumb is this: Readers will expect a story to end when the first major source of structural tension is resolved. If the story begins as an idea story, the reader expects it to end when the idea is discovered, the plan unfolded. If the story begins as a milieu story, the readers will gladly follow any number of story lines of every type, letting them be resolved here and there as needed, continuing to read in order to discover more of the milieu. A story that begins with a character in an intolerable situation will not feel finished until the character is fully content or finally resigned. A story that begins with an unbalanced world will not end until the world is balanced, justified, reordered, healed—or utterly destroyed beyond hope of restoration.

It’s as if you begin the story by pushing a boulder off the top of a hill. No matter what else happens before the end of the story, the reader will not be satisfied until the boulder comes to rest somewhere.

Card, Orson Scott. Characters and Viewpoint (Elements of Fiction Writing). Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 1988. 54–55. Print.