LA
Author
LATRAME
@latrame
A name. An image. A few lines. Maybe a date, a place, a sentence he might have said.
It isn't a story yet. It's a threshold.
This kind of page does exactly what a book cover does, a back-cover blurb, an epigraph : it prepares the reader without telling anything. It sets a tone, a promise, an expectation. It's called paratext, everything that surrounds the text and shapes how we'll read it, before we've read a single word of the story itself.
And paratext isn't an accessory. The same paragraph reads differently depending on whether the word "novel" or the word "testimony" comes before it. A banal argument scene becomes heartbreaking if the previous page told you one of the two will die tomorrow.
So a character sheet, however tiny, is already working. It decides the air the reader breathes on the way in. Treat it like a beginning, because that's what it is.
It isn't a story yet. It's a threshold.
This kind of page does exactly what a book cover does, a back-cover blurb, an epigraph : it prepares the reader without telling anything. It sets a tone, a promise, an expectation. It's called paratext, everything that surrounds the text and shapes how we'll read it, before we've read a single word of the story itself.
And paratext isn't an accessory. The same paragraph reads differently depending on whether the word "novel" or the word "testimony" comes before it. A banal argument scene becomes heartbreaking if the previous page told you one of the two will die tomorrow.
So a character sheet, however tiny, is already working. It decides the air the reader breathes on the way in. Treat it like a beginning, because that's what it is.