One novelist once said that you needed to introduce character and conflict as early in the novel as possible to gain your reader’s trust to stick through the length of a novel with you. While I can’t quite put a digital frame on it, I can say that I’ve been thinking a lot about how to introduce readers to my main character.

I’m thinking that one clever way to do this is to have it be his first day and when he arrives, there’s a check sitting there for quite a bit of money… with the catch that he has to step down immediately to cash it in.

That might grab some attention.