first impressions
Working on my rewrite, I've become aware of certain things. The way we see people, for instance. How we define character. I recently read Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, a fascinating look at the way we as people size up situations in the literal blink of an eye. We know things even before we go through the logical sequence of steps to arrive at a conclusion. Often our immediate response ends up being more correct than the carefully analyzed answer. Intuition, in part. Also a deep-rooted need to respond right away, to know if we should flee or engage, leads us to analyze without knowing we do so. Thin slicing, Gladwell calls it. You extrapolate from a small amount of data, a part of your brain working overtime.
So how does this relate to writing? Well, it turns out readers do the same. The way you set up a character is what sticks in their minds no matter what you say later on down the road. It's therefore crucial to think about what exactly you're planting in their minds. You can play with this, of course. You can send them off in one direction and give that presupposition a twist later on, a nice shock in a twisty turny plot. But my novel isn't one of those. I need to set up certain possibilities, and therefore I need to give the right flavor early on. I realized that I'd done one character a disservice at the get-go. I was going for the contrast of a seedy environment and a dignified person, but people saw the seedy background and superimposed that over the man. Understandable, completely. But fascinating too.
Another character I set up as mysterious. I wanted him to be a little impenetrable, so readers would feel the same frustration and maybe longing as the one in the story who wants to know him better. But there's a fine balance to this. If I make someone too opaque, you as reader feel a distance, you feel a disconnect. And that, again, can't be made better down the road. Not without a hint or two up front. If he opens the door in his mind, if you feel a connection, you can relate and allow yourself to become more emotionally invested. But how much, how far can/should that go without upsetting the sense of mystery, of layers not yet explored?
Writing is not just art, not just craft. It's also psychology.