In
beginning of your story you have to grab your readers’ interest and sustain it till end. Our hook is our character. Readers keep on reading to find out more about character. To see what he’ll do in story; how he’ll solve his problems. What his goals are and whether he’ll achieve them.And because our character is reason readers become hooked on our stories, establishing him at start is a must in a short story. And it is essential to establish him at start because we don’t have capacity in our limited word length to introduce him at our leisure.
The bond between readers and character has to be developed almost immediately.
You might have a few characters though. How do you decide who your main character will be? A main character is one that drives story.
Think of it this way… If we were to take him away, there will be no story because it’s his story we are telling. The story will unfold by what is happening or what has happened to him.
When you establish who your main character will be, next thing to do is to find which of your characters is in best position to tell story. Will your main character tell his story or will you give that role to another character?
This is what we call Viewpoint and what we’ll see in more detail in proceeding chapters.
Your main character isn’t necessarily one who is telling story; he might not even appear in our story ‘physically’ but will be there through thoughts of others. So viewpoint character might be a secondary character.
Whoever is telling story is viewpoint character.
The viewpoint character gives coloring of story. Whatever this characters says, we will believe. It may or may not be true, according to main character, but because he isn’t there ‘physically’ to voice his opinions, we will have to take viewpoint character’s word for it.
In a novel you can play around with viewpoint. You can have several viewpoint characters. In a short story it works best with one.
So your main character, whether he’ll be telling his own story or someone else will be doing it for him, has to be established at start of your story.
