How Soon Is Now?

Most of us are guilty, at some time or another, of judging someone before we really know them. I try not to. I think as we go through life, we learn the lesson that we shouldn't. When we're teenagers, we tend to judge people by what they wear or who they hang out with . . . and there's that first time we meet someone we assume to be not our type only to discover they really aren't so bad after all. When I was in high school, and maybe I can drag out my prom picture and scan it, I dated a jock. ME! Me, skipping my entire senior year . . . tutoring a jock who I considered dumber than dirt (because I was, of course, an opinionated teen), and discovering a nice guy after all. He didn't get to graduate (so much for my tutoring skills), but he got the girl. We dated for a year and a half.

When we get a little older, we still judge. Maybe less on clothes and more on behavior. I can't tell you how many times I would meet someone who was an utter jerk. Only to discover they had lost a child, or their wife had cancer, or there was some other tragedy behind their behavior. Thus the roots of compassion are born. We start to understand and see the world less from a ME-ME-ME perspective and start to see that every person we encounter has a story, and we're not privy to it.

But here's the thing . . . . when writing, I now realize I need readers to form some pretty fast judgments. By the end of chapter one, they should have some pretty clear picture of who this main character is. We don't have to dump the entire back story there. But human beings do a pretty good job of filling in the blanks. So there must simply be enough quirks and dialogue cues, enough of a conflict and behavior, that we "get" who the main character is, and hopefully decide to stick with him or her.

The trick, too, is to make sure there's enough of a character arc for CHANGE to occur. We don't want to "know" them on page 1 and by page 300 not see anything new.

So, opening any one of my books or works in progress . . . I see what I fit into chapter one. In Spanish Disco by the end of the first chapter you know that Cassie Hayes is a book editor, a bitch (she really is very snarky), and having phone sex with her favorite author, who lives in London. She never cooks, keeps her condo in Florida colder than an icebox, is like a daughter to the publisher who owns the small independent publishing house where she works, so she rarely has to put in hours at the office, that she drinks tequila--straight--to be able to fall asleep, and that she's very bright . . . and skilled at pulling the best book possible out of her authors (if they--and her boss--are willing to put up with her difficult nature). You know she is confident enough to--at her age (not yet 30)--drive a mint-condition banana-yellow Cadillac that she bought from a dead person's estate. That she drinks enough coffee all day--whole pots--to give her an ulcer. As for the phone-sex author, Michael, she clearly has a thing for him--they can talk literally until dawn. But she refuses to meet him. In short . . . you don't know everything about her--but she's quirky, eccentric, smart, and very, very crabby in the morning.

I can open any of my books and feel like I know the character. However, when I did some contest judging recently, I noticed that often by the end of chapter one, I didn't really know much. Too often what I knew were character sketch items, but not the character him- or herself. They were things like age and hair color, where they lived and what clothes they wore. But nothing more than that.

It's never too soon to know your character. To have readers make a judgment or two. No, we shouldn't do it in real life. But in books, it's essential.

Thoughts?