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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/20348
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

It is very hard for me to ask this without an overwhelming amount of information on how the plot goes, so this is just a warning of what's ahead...

I am writing a fictional story which begins with an amnesiac waking up by a giant tree, wounded. A nearby lady finds him and takes him in to her residence. It is made known to him that the lady has a stepdaughter. He runs away minutes after getting treatment, feeling he's become a burden for them.

Sometime after, the lady goes to another village for an appointment. The village members, expecting her to have come back hours ago, go out to the forest and search for her. They find the amnesiac unconscious by another tree, deep in the forest and bring him back to village. When the stepdaughter arrives back, she finds that her father and other village members found a letter, seemingly written by the lady. The letter, addressed to the stepdaughter and her husband, warns them of a man (named T for this question) that died a few years ago. Of course, that could not be possible. T was an outcast who did not get along with the members of the village, but found a place in the hearts of the lady, stepdaughter and her father. The amnesiac does not know about T's history in this village.

Afterwards, the stepdaughter waits for the amnesiac to wake up so she can question him about what he saw in the forest before losing conscience. All of a sudden, an agonizing scream overpowers their ears, and it becomes certain that the source of this bewildering sound is just by the window of the room he was resting in. They go outside, only to find the lady's guts and blood, sprawled all over her corpse. Because of that scream, the other residents of the residence gather around the corpse. Some background characters quietly ask each other, whether lady's warning about T was real.

The amnesiac soon gets a headache, due to hearing a very familiar name. He then gets hallucinations about a snowy terrain which is associated to the man named T.

* * *

Now, is this perhaps too early for an amnesiac? Does this reveal too much about the plot in the first chapter?

I am mainly worried about the lack of effect this kind of character development will have on whoever will read this fiction. This story also uses two POV's that switch frequently throughout the first chapter etc. One belongs to the amnesiac, other to the stepdaughter.

This is also my first time writing in first person view while being an amnesiac, so I am not entirely strong with this knowledge, other than recurring, cropped visions that are mostly unclear until a certain point in time when the individual regains memory.

I'd really like to hear some of your advice on how I can 'sell' the protagonist to others, while he has no background and because I don't want to rush the return of his childhood memories, or any memories at all that help him find out who he is.

Original score: 1