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In another short story I introduce a guy, give some background to explain his mood and then have him kill the protagonist (the story takes place in Heaven - protagonist needs to die). When I showed the story around a couple people were confused/upset that I opened with a character that is never heard from again. My opinion is that the guy served the same purpose a car/plane/train crash or choking on a soup cracker - he just happened to have a name and a motivation.
Thanks.
There are pretty hefty negative consequences in beginning with a character who is never seen or heard from again. For one thing, a character's importance is measured by two factors:
1. How close to the beginning of the story they appear.
2. How much page time they get.
Number 2 is variable. At the end of the book, Al might have only shown up in chapter 1 and so we know he wasn't all that imprtant. But at the end of chapter one Al's been there all along, he showed up early, and frankly, readers are going to assume that he is the most important character in the story. They have nothing else to go on.
Depending upon the circumstance, the reader may be upset by any or all of the following reasons:
1. They keep waiting for the story to go back to the character they got to know in chapter 1 and are frustrated that it never does.
2. Frustration at having been emotionally cheated out of a character they spent a chapter investing in when they figure out that he's not coming back.
3. Lack of empathy with your real protagonist because he wasn't there first...they may not even realize who the protagonist is supposed to be.
Speaking frankly, the first example you provided sounds clunky in several different ways.
1. It begins with a character who is not the protagonist.
2. It immediately goes to a flashback. This is a key sign that you began in the wrong place. Flashbacks are meaningless if the reader is not immersed enough in the present time to continue caring about it as they read the backstory -- if you've begun with a throw-away character, the normal problems with flashbacks get compounded.
3. This is a guess...I could be way off, but it sounds like when you say "gives some milieu and character intros" that you may be presenting an info dump. Especially if one of these characters you introduce really is the true protagonist of the story then not only have you failed to mention him right off, but you may have given us little reason to care about him in the follow-up.
As to your second example, I find myself wondering why the mood and backstory of the killer is important to the story. It may well be interesting, but important? In fact, I have personal experience here. I once began a story with an assassin who gets himself killed in chapter 1. As a throw-away character beginning, it sort of worked, although my dad was particularly disappointed that the assassin died because he liked him. The real trouble was that this began the wrong story entirely. MICE...it was starting an idea story when I wanted to start an event story. It is double important to watch out for this false start problem when introducing a throw-away character because most types of stories truly begin when the main character gets involved.
Your second example sounded interesting. I would read a story like that. I often enjoy getting an 'outside' perspective on a story before I settle into the main POV. I only become frustrated or confused if it isn't fairly clear that the first character is disposable--that is, generally shallow penetration and not too much page time.
I'm not sure how it would be in actuality ( that is I do not remember ever reading a story like this ), but I think if the story develops any characters at all, then that development begins an emotional connection with the reader, even if that connection were very small, it would be disappointing to have it abruptly ended. So I can see how it would throw people off.
In the second story that you outlined wouldn't it be more effective to spend the time developing and making one care about the protagonist and then have the death make a huge impact? Something like "Meet Joe Black" You don't know who was driving the vehicle that slams into him. In fact that would be another story.
Perhaps this is the key, diverging the narrative into multiple stories creates a fundamental storyline issue.
That particular bit of adaptation almost insures that your readers won't get as much out of the story as would have been the case otherwise. You should only kill/abandon a POV character if the payoff in doing so is genuinely significant. Again, if readers learn that you only kill/abandon the POV character for really good reasons, they will tend to accept this from you rather than disengaging.
You might try re-writing your opening without the disposable character. Or cut him down to the bare bones so there is nothing for the reader to become emotionally attached to, and thus, disappointed when the character suddenly dies.
Be wary of falling into the "red shirt" problem. It got so bad on the numerous "Star Trek" series and movies that every time one of the regulars wasn't sitting at his assigned station, you knew full well the (usually voiceless) character that was would die.
[This message has been edited by Robert Nowall (edited August 17, 2005).]
Jurassic Park (the book) opens with disposable characters. They are a family trying to find a deserted beach to have a picnic. At the end of the chapter, they’re attacked by small dinosaurs.
In The Oath (Frank Peretti) the book opens with the death of a disposable character. Much later, you find out the character was the MC's brother.
I think creature stories almost always open with disposable characters.
Here are some BAD movies that illustrate my point:
Attack of the Giant Gila Monster
The first person to die is a nameless door-to-door salesman.
Beware the Blob
It opens with the killing of a kitten; clearly a disposable character.
Of course, your creature story doesn't have to be BAD.
In a creature story I think people expect the first victims to be disposable. They are only there to show the audience how horrible the monster is.
"Oh the horror, it killed a kitten!"
Edited to say:
FYI - None of those examples are followed with a flashback. That might be a problem.
[This message has been edited by NewsBys (edited August 17, 2005).]
As for how developed they are. In the first example the guy, 'BUBBA' gets one paragraph, the main characters get introduced and at the end of chapter 1 the events that led to BUBBA's death are given. The means of his death are the secondary storyline and the characters can go around talking about BUBBA.
I could probably kill this guy off quicker, do it from the perspective of the beast and move the "action" sequence to the end of the chapter. A couple lines to say, "It ate him."
The second example is couple paragraphs for the character that I gave a name instead of saying, 'He' became upset and accidentally killed the protagonist.
Thanks for the thoughs/ideas/suggestions.
[This message has been edited by Mechwarrior (edited August 17, 2005).]
One of the more sucessful ways I've seen this device used was in Grisham's "The Testament", where you witness the narrator's planned demise as it happens -- which sets off the other characters' actions for the rest of the book.
[This message has been edited by Varishta (edited August 17, 2005).]
1. There is far less emotional investment in an on-screen character. One of the things books do far better than movies is get you to know the characters, inside and out. On the screen, they're all just pretty faces until they do something heroic.
2. Movies take far less time to watch than novels take to read. A two-minute death sequence at the beginning of a movie is over with quickly.
3. Movies that successfully use throw-away characters make it clear up front that this character is not actually important: they are not actors you know (unless you pay very close attention to actors with small parts), they have few or no lines, they have little or no human interaction, or they do something shady to begni with so you know not to sympathize with them. Some of these strategies can work in books.
One other strategy that can work in books is a PROLOGUE. I do not necessarily expect anything from the prologue to be true in the book, including who the main character is. I often see prologues use in dramatic ways to show the point of view of the bad guy, for example. The simple act of putting it in that prologue may help.
BTW...your follow-up explanation confuses me...Bubba has a paragraph? And then what? You said you went into a flashback after that. If you have a flashback one paragraph after you start I can be 99.9% sure you started in the wrong place. (I'm being generous about the .1% exception. )
But it did work in Jurassic Park, for some reason (book, not movie -- I didn't like the initial death in the movie).
I reiterate that I have not read, and so I may be way off, but it sounds like you have, in fact, done something I see as a common mistake: started in one place because it's exciting to start there and then backed up to explain the excitement.
BUT...
*He is never named and he's quite young. I never set him up as anything resembling a major character.
*The chapter is VERY short--just over 1000 words.
*His purpose is to give the reader a glimpse of the antagonist and to set up a horrific situation. I could not do that using one of the bad guys as the POV character. His role is to represent his people.
So I'm violating some 'rule.' Do I care? Nope. I've thought long and hard about it. I'm making this decision fully informed of the possible consequences. Like OSC says, you can make whatever choice you want in your story, as long as you're ready to accept the results of those choices. My story stays the way it is--unless some wise editor manages to convince me otherwise. 
Just to squirt more fuel on the fire. I'm not defending their "art", but the folks writing all the TV and movie scripts killing off walk-ons are getting paid good money on a regular basis. People spend far more time watching TV/movies than reading, so that's what they identify with. Nothing smells more like success than money. Yada, yada, yada.
The good news is, in story with the guy that gets eaten, I found/wrote a scene at the end of chapter two that has a cliffhanger AND involves the two primary characters. Cut, paste, done.
There was a post mentioning Memento. The director's brother wrote a companion short called "Memento Mori" you can Google and read . Interesting story how they used the same idea but developed two different stories. The short is amazing writing, IMHO.
In Chapter 1, the only living character is seen at a distance by the POV character and executed. We know it's the same character because he had a distinguishing feature, but the POV character knows almost nothing about him. It worked to connect me to the events in the prologue and make me realize their larger significance. It made me feel smarter than the POV character, without making me feel like he was stupid--almost always a good thing.
If Mr. Martin had labeled the prologue as "Chapter One" I think I would have been disappointed when the POV character died, but he used the prologue appropriately. Prologues--the type people skip over--tend to be large world-building affairs that are closer to encyclopedia articles written in high language. But in this context it let me see a scene, which I need in order to understand the world, while labeling it as something that happens before the real story begins. His choice of which character to use as POV also let me know that they were all going to die, because the POV character had a foreboding sense of it. It's really well-handled and an example of when breaking this particular rule works.
It isn't even possible to kill a POV character at any point in a movie or similar work, because movies don't have POV characters.
End of discussion, end of any talk about how "they do this all the time in movies" et al.
(Anyone have any spare letters to give the poor guy a longer handle?)
In an artificial document, you don't actually have POV characters, because you're not allowed to have them in artificial documents, they make it too obviously fake. And you can't do POV characters in movies, the closest thing to that is when you do a camera shot that is supposedly what a robot is seeing with all the little graphics and text messages that represent the robot's programming. That's as close as you can get, and you can do similar things (mostly for comedic effect) with non-robot characters, but it really isn't the same thing at all.
Movies are told in a special form of third person omniscient...a camera's eye view. The point of view is the camera...there is no person.
Do not confuse point of view character and focus charater. Even in an omniscient story, the narrator is following someone around. That person is the focus of the story, but not necessarily the point of view character.
It was pretty strange, because I guess the audience was expected to get an idea of how it "felt" to be a soldier sent to a M.A.S.H. unit, but since they couldn't really convey the feelings, the audience had to imagine them.
It was analoguous, in a way, to second person POV.
[This message has been edited by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (edited August 19, 2005).]
Sounds like BLAIR WITCH PROJECT.
Of course directors are going to try stuff like this to imitate the effect of POV, just as writers are going to try to imitate the "limited camera eye" effect of movies.
Doesn't necessarily mean either imitation is going to work well for the story's audience.
quote:
For whatever it may be worth, they tried to do POV on M*A*S*H once when they filmed an episode as if the camera were looking out of the eyes of a wounded soldier. If I remember correctly, the soldier had an injury that prevented him from being able to speak, and that's how they dealt with the audience not being able to talk to the actors.
I remember that episode -- it was very interesting, to say the least! Another example of this can be seen in "Being John Malkovich".
When go to a movie, however, I really do feel like I'm slipping inside a character's shoes for a couple of hours. I become Clarice Starling, stalking a serial killer. I become Indiana Jones, fighting bad guys in the desert. I don't feel like I'm "watching" them, at all.
(But then, I always have had an overactive imagination.)
quote:
It was pretty strange, because I guess the audience was expected to get an idea of how it "felt" to be a soldier sent to a M.A.S.H. unit,
I didn't like that episode in the least. First, M*A*S*H is a comedy and that one wasn't funny. Second, I couldn't feel like a wounded soldier because I was in my living room and wasn't wounded. I didn't like when they did it on E.R. either. The 2nd person video really irritates me.
I think that artificial document films can be quite clever. The Holy Grail played it entirely for laughs, but they were able to use a variety of different techniques because they didn't need to make it believable. But it's still not the same thing as a POV character.
Jon