The hidden heroine -- beyond the first impression
Author: Trish Milburn
Original Publication Date in Love Notes: February 2001

First impressions are everywhere. We can't avoid them. Think about if you were walking down a busy city street. You pass a woman striding confidently along in a business suit. You assume she's a successful executive, an attorney perhaps. You pass another woman wearing a waitress uniform and looking so tired and harried that you feel sorry for her. If only this woman had done better in school or not married so young, maybe she would have made a better life for herself. 

Whoa! Hold on a second! You've just formed first impressions that may not have one iota of truth in them. 

Think about this: What if the woman in the business suit is heading to the bank at the corner to rob it? What if she shoplifted those clothes? She could be a villain in disguise. Likewise, the waitress could be a hidden heroine. She might be very intelligent, working this job only until she reaches a higher goal. Maybe she has a very different job during the day and is just waitressing at night to make ends meet because she has a sick child. Maybe she's a student working her way through school, like my younger sister who's waitressing while studying wildlife biology. 

We all ought to be careful about jumping to conclusions in real life, but in our fiction one character forming an erroneous first impression about another can set up some initial conflict or at least some interesting scenes. Lets say we have a waitress who's serving an FBI agent coffee, just like she does every morning. To him, she's the nameless, faceless hand that pours his coffee while he concentrates on his case files. Never does it occur to him that she might be able to help him. 

On the other hand, the waitress resents the way the man in the suit always comes in and drinks buckets of coffee but never even makes eye contact with her. He's probably planning some corporate takeover so he can buy even more expensive suits. It never occurs to her that he's desperately searching for a serial killer. 

Here we have two people who barely know the other exists, but what if one little twist of fate finally made them really look at each other? While pouring another cup of coffee for the guy, the waitress notices a picture in the file folder he's examining. She nearly drops the coffee pot and gasps. He finally looks her in the face and sees her wide eyes. She points to the picture and demands to know why he has a picture of her best friend, who was found dead two years earlier. 

Suddenly, the woman becomes important to him. Her best friend is only one of several young women who have vanished from a local college campus and turned up dead. As he questions the waitress, he finds out that she's a graduate student in ecology and that she still mourns her best friend. He also notices her lovely green eyes and realizes how hard he's been working if he hasn't noticed how pretty she is before. 

The waitress finds out that the guy she thought was plotting to take over someone's family business is an FBI agent who hasn't given up on finding her best friends killer. And now that she knows he's one of the good guys, her heart pumps a little faster when she looks at him. She notices just how nicely that suit fits him. 

Poof! Two more first impressions bite the dust. 

First impressions can be used successfully in fiction as long as they come across as honest and real and not just clichés and convenient plot devices. So, go forth and shock your characters and shoot down their first impressions.

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