Cameo appearance?

So here I am with a novel that should be all written, and today (yesterday) I thought of a new chapter/sequence that should make it much better. I envision that it includes a scene where my male main character seems to have his priorities all wrong and someone tells him so. But who?

I don't think the female main character should be the teller-offer: she's in love with him and too likely to make allowances. No, it should be somebody from the outside, with no emotional entanglement. I have an idea who should do this, but it would be the only scene in the book where that character actually appears or speaks.

Now, other people speak of her in other places, and you get an idea that she's the kind of person who would call a spade a spade. Tell the MMC he's got his head screwed on wrong, I mean. But I worry that her showing up at just the right time is a little too convenient.

Or am I worrying for nothing?

 

I was wondering about this too.

He could just have an epiphany? Maybe he sees, remembers or hears something that guides him to the right track and then he realizes he has to get his priorities straight.

It's a cliché, but I used the moment a character is being beaten to a pulp by a gangbanger to help him realize his priorities were all effed up and it was time to pull his head out of his ass. Could anything plot-related happen to your character that'd help him come to whatever conclusion you need on his own?

 

He will have such an epiphany later, but at this point, no. This new chapter will happen about 3/5 of the way through the novel and if he comes to himself now, the story's over. Right then I just want him to start doubting himself. Just a little . . .

To give some context, the MMC is my architect hero, and his greatest strength is that he's totally dedicated to his art. And his potentially fatal flaw is . . . that he's totally dedicated to his art. The antagonist/villain is working to use that weakness to get my hero to ally himself with him and use his talent and skill to forward the villain's nefarious goals.

The situation I'm thinking of adding will be that my architect's two biggest clients, who are partners in a private firm, are both lying in the ICU, fighting back from what the doctors say should have been certain death. One has been in a hit-and-run car crash, while the other is suffering from food poisoning. As far as my hero and anyone else knows, both were accidents--- though the reader is free to suspect otherwise.

So here's my hero, back at his office, and along with the FMC he's meeting with the representative from a fabric company. This rep is the wife of my hero's best buddy and a friend in her own right. When my hero says how lucky it is that his clients' mishaps haven't halted work on the multi-million-dollar project he's doing for them, she observes that he seems to care more about the work than he does about the suffering men and their families. At which point he'll get coldly mad and decide he's wasting his time looking at fabric samples and leave the room.

Later the FMC will try to reassure him. He didn't mean it the way it sounded, of course he cares most about the people involved, etc. But he will begin to wonder. No epiphanies at this point, though. Saving that for the big crisis at the end.

Anyway, as things sit now, this 3/5 mark would be the first time and only time the fabric rep appears in person in the novel, as opposed to other people referring to her in her absence. But having thought about it overnight, I believe there's a point toward the beginning where she can have a line or two and establish her place in my hero's world.

 

That's a good way to pull it off. I like putting in a character that I'm going to use later, either to save the day, or introduce conflict.