This week's Refresher Friday takes another look at how to show what's special about your protagonist without it feeling like an infodump.
Every protagonist has something unique about them, otherwise we wouldn’t have picked them as our protagonist. This "thing" is often what gets them into trouble and makes the story happen. It’s central to who they are, which means there’s a pretty good chance it’ll be on the cover copy or in the query. Readers will know what it is before they open the book. Which leads to a bit of a quandary.
How do you show that important trait in the opening without it sounding like setup or infodump?
Readers of The Shifter know my protagonist can heal by shifting pain--it says so right there on the cover. Had I started the novel with an example of Nya just using her ability, it probably would have bored folks and they’d have wanted to know when the story was going to start. Instead, I put Nya in a situation where readers could see the trait in action, but the goal of the scene was something that had nothing to do with that ability. And that’s the key to showing important character traits.
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