I've begun work on a new book while my lovely and charming agent shops my novels around. I'm told that this will keep the insanity away. Also, I'm a writer, or so I tell people, and that means I should be writing. So I am. Writing, that is. Or at least that's what I pretend to be doing.
In truth, I started the new book about two weeks ago and have made very little progress with the narrative. I've made any number of outlines and drafted notes to myself about scenes in the middle of the book and have read some of my research materials but as to actual writing as in putting words on the page? Not so much. Oh, a few thousand words, maybe even the first half of Chapter One. But mostly I've been stalling and decidedly not writing.
Why? It occured to me today that the first chapter of this book is a bit of a mess. It's going to need some work when I get around to revisions and it's just rougher than I like my writing to be, so I've sort of been avoiding it because I have my standards, you know, and I'm not living up to them with this draft, or what I've got of a draft just now.
My choices are to either write miraculously shining prose on the first go-round or to just put my head down and write badly, just to get the shape of the story on the page and have something written that I can revise. My belief is that most of the art actually happens in the revisions and not in the drafting anyway, not that I really see a lot of difference between writing and rewriting but that's a different topic.
No, I need to just accept that this first chapter--maybe even the first couple of chapters of the new book--are going to be a lot of bad writing, and just get on with my bad writing so that possibly I can eventually get to the good writing.
Which gets to the real issue: I took some time off after my last book and got out of the habit of writing prose almost every day. Now my normal routine doesn't make any room for regular prose writing and I have to change things around to accommodate it again. The first thing that has to happen is to get excited (or at least grudgingly willing) to commit to the sustained effort it will take to write a book-length story. For me, this has always meant just being hard enough on myself that I start in on it and accept that, for the next six months, I'll give over my lunches and evening commutes to the new book, and I won't be reading much or thinking about much except the novel. Basically I engage in psychic arm-twisting.
I know that a lot of people start new projects while the idea is fresh and magical and use the energy gained from learning about the ideas while writing them out as a way to get hooked into the effort. But for those of us who do a lot of pre-production work, outlining and research, that is, it might sometimes be harder to get the ball rolling and gather the necessary momentum to jump in and get a good start on a new project. I'd be interested to hear from that group, the planners and outliners, about how it goes with you when you start in on the actual writing of a new project. Does it seem like a big effort is required? Do you drag your feet before starting in earnest? Or do you just happily jump in and start racking up words?
Showing posts with label First Chapter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label First Chapter. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Can a First Chapter Be Too Exciting?
Chapter 1
example
Bill stepped away from the bomb and brushed off his hands. It would explode in a matter of minutes, but first he had to take care of Iggy walking around the corner. He was a bulky man with muscles like sacks of oranges stuffed under his skin. Bill took him on, chuckling the entire time. One, two, three blows. Iggy grunted.
"We'll both die in that bomb you set up!"
Bill grinned. "You will - I'll walk away laughing."
Iggy shoved an elbow against Bill's nose. A sickening crack. Warm blood gushed over his lips. Iggy would pay for that. With his adrenaline rising, Bill's moves came faster, more instinctual, until Iggy fell to the ground unconscious. Perfect.
Bill walked away. Beneath him the ground shook as the bomb exploded, hot and loud, a thunderous applause.
______________________
Chapter 2
example
Bill watched his wife from across the table. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life, but that didn't mean he should say anything. She hated it when he said crap like that. He tapped the divorce papers on the table. His coffee steamed in a china cup decorated with purple pansies. Funny. Ellie's mother owned this cafe. She also painted the china. Funny.
"Are you certain this is the right thing to do?" Bill asked, still tapping the papers.
"Of course," Ellie growled, and picked up her cream cheese pastry. It remained a mystery how she ate so terribly yet remained so thin. Bill guessed it was her night patrol that shed the calories. Vegas had too many criminals to make her job boring and anything like a desk job. He, on the other hand, glanced down at his beer-belly gut and silently cursed his corner office with a view. Cushy chair.
"You know I still love you. I'm going to buy your breakfast and keep sending you checks for the kids."
"Of course you will." Ellie took a huge bite of the pastry, somehow managing to keep crumbs off her perfectly red lips. She chewed and swallowed and kept her eyes on Bill. It was in these moments he thought of a tiger sizing up its prey.
______________________
One of our readers, Justus, asked the question "Can a First Chapter be Too Exciting?" a few weeks ago, and I've been thinking about it for quite awhile. My novel Monarch begins with a fight between a spy and two FBI agents. There are guns and blood and excitement. It then moves to Chapter 2 where nothing more exciting happens than an inn-keeper serving her guests coffee and worrying about the rainstorm. She runs into the spy at the end, but that's at the end.
Obviously I don't think a first chapter can be too exciting, but I do think a first chapter runs the risk of leading your reader in the wrong direction. I run this risk in Monarch except for the fact that I introduce the inn-keeper briefly in the first chapter (who she is). Because I do this, the second chapter carries a question over for the reader: How are the spy and the inn-keeper going to meet again and what will happen?
It had better be something exciting!
A Promise
From my experience a first chapter should carry a promise, whether it's filled with physical tension, emotional tension, or some other clever kind of tension. That tension - whatever you set up - must carry over into the rest of the story. It might not be in Chapter 2 or 3 or 4, but those chapters had better start building back up to that tension you set up.
If your promise doesn't carry through at a reasonable pace, I'm going to think you threw in all that excitement in Chapter 1 only to hook me as a reader, and that's going to irritate me to no end. I'm going to greatly dislike you as an author because you tricked me. Readers don't like to be tricked. They like to be surprised, but not tricked. There's a difference.
The Base Ingredients
The main thing to remember is to keep your first chapter from sticking out like a sore thumb. It should fit into the rest of your story. I like to think of a first chapter like the base ingredients for a story. Everything starts there, and everything will branch out from there - or at least it should. By the time the reader gets to the end of the book that first chapter should shine! The reader should see things in that first chapter they didn't see before. The last chapter of the book will have ties back to the first. It all comes full circle.
So you tell me: How do the two chapter examples above work for you? Would you keep reading the story? Do they feel completely separate or connected? Is the first chapter too exciting?
example
Bill stepped away from the bomb and brushed off his hands. It would explode in a matter of minutes, but first he had to take care of Iggy walking around the corner. He was a bulky man with muscles like sacks of oranges stuffed under his skin. Bill took him on, chuckling the entire time. One, two, three blows. Iggy grunted.
"We'll both die in that bomb you set up!"
Bill grinned. "You will - I'll walk away laughing."
Iggy shoved an elbow against Bill's nose. A sickening crack. Warm blood gushed over his lips. Iggy would pay for that. With his adrenaline rising, Bill's moves came faster, more instinctual, until Iggy fell to the ground unconscious. Perfect.
Bill walked away. Beneath him the ground shook as the bomb exploded, hot and loud, a thunderous applause.
______________________
Chapter 2
example
Bill watched his wife from across the table. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life, but that didn't mean he should say anything. She hated it when he said crap like that. He tapped the divorce papers on the table. His coffee steamed in a china cup decorated with purple pansies. Funny. Ellie's mother owned this cafe. She also painted the china. Funny.
"Are you certain this is the right thing to do?" Bill asked, still tapping the papers.
"Of course," Ellie growled, and picked up her cream cheese pastry. It remained a mystery how she ate so terribly yet remained so thin. Bill guessed it was her night patrol that shed the calories. Vegas had too many criminals to make her job boring and anything like a desk job. He, on the other hand, glanced down at his beer-belly gut and silently cursed his corner office with a view. Cushy chair.
"You know I still love you. I'm going to buy your breakfast and keep sending you checks for the kids."
"Of course you will." Ellie took a huge bite of the pastry, somehow managing to keep crumbs off her perfectly red lips. She chewed and swallowed and kept her eyes on Bill. It was in these moments he thought of a tiger sizing up its prey.
______________________
One of our readers, Justus, asked the question "Can a First Chapter be Too Exciting?" a few weeks ago, and I've been thinking about it for quite awhile. My novel Monarch begins with a fight between a spy and two FBI agents. There are guns and blood and excitement. It then moves to Chapter 2 where nothing more exciting happens than an inn-keeper serving her guests coffee and worrying about the rainstorm. She runs into the spy at the end, but that's at the end.
Obviously I don't think a first chapter can be too exciting, but I do think a first chapter runs the risk of leading your reader in the wrong direction. I run this risk in Monarch except for the fact that I introduce the inn-keeper briefly in the first chapter (who she is). Because I do this, the second chapter carries a question over for the reader: How are the spy and the inn-keeper going to meet again and what will happen?
It had better be something exciting!
A Promise
From my experience a first chapter should carry a promise, whether it's filled with physical tension, emotional tension, or some other clever kind of tension. That tension - whatever you set up - must carry over into the rest of the story. It might not be in Chapter 2 or 3 or 4, but those chapters had better start building back up to that tension you set up.
If your promise doesn't carry through at a reasonable pace, I'm going to think you threw in all that excitement in Chapter 1 only to hook me as a reader, and that's going to irritate me to no end. I'm going to greatly dislike you as an author because you tricked me. Readers don't like to be tricked. They like to be surprised, but not tricked. There's a difference.
The Base Ingredients
The main thing to remember is to keep your first chapter from sticking out like a sore thumb. It should fit into the rest of your story. I like to think of a first chapter like the base ingredients for a story. Everything starts there, and everything will branch out from there - or at least it should. By the time the reader gets to the end of the book that first chapter should shine! The reader should see things in that first chapter they didn't see before. The last chapter of the book will have ties back to the first. It all comes full circle.
So you tell me: How do the two chapter examples above work for you? Would you keep reading the story? Do they feel completely separate or connected? Is the first chapter too exciting?
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
First Paragraphs, First Pages, First Impressions, Et Cetera
Let's talk about what the opening passage of a book is supposed to do. The writer's number one job when writing a novel's first page is to establish for the reader that a good story is beginning and to assure him that the author has the ability to tell that story. The opening promises something interesting and intelligible (most times). It sets the tone, mood and style of the story, and gives the reader an idea of what she is in for.
We should look at the opening passages from some successful novels.
Here's the beginning of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov:
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precurser? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
This passage is, on the surface, about a girl named Lolita. In reality, it is the egocentric narrator telling us about himself, which prefigures the tone and style of the whole book. Nabokov has begun as he means to continue. He has challenged the reader to a battle of wits and piqued our interest with that thrown-away reference to "a murderer."
Here's the opening of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina:
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
All was confusion in the Oblonskys' house. The wife had found out that the husband was having an affair with their former French governess, and had announced to the husband that she could not live in the same house with him. This situation had continued for three days now, and was painfully felt by the couple themselves, as well as by all the members of the family and household. They felt that there was no sense in their living together and that people who meet accidentally at any inn have more conncection with each other than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife would not leave her rooms, the husband was away for the third day. The children were running all over the house as if lost; the English governess quarrelled with the housekeeper and wrote a note to a friend, asking her to find her a new place; the cook had already left the premises the day before, at dinner-time; the kitchen maid and the coachman had given notice.
The first line here is Tolstoy's "theme sentence," the claim that he will have to "prove" by the events he gives us in the book. We know already that we will see an account of a uniquely unhappy family.
You can say that what follows that first line is all "telling," but so what? The list of tensions, of battles in and defections from the household is delightfully energetic. Tolstoy has launched us headlong into the middle of a domestic war. We know that the situation can't last; something's got to give and it won't be pretty when it does.
Here's one you might already know:
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
A lot of The Hobbit is about being underground, and we are first given a contrast between nice underground living and "nasty, dirty, wet." The nice versus the nasty is a constant element in this book, running all through the story. Even so seemingly tame a sentence as this contains conflict and mystery.
And finally, this is how Neil Gaiman opened his Newberry Prize-winning The Graveyard Book:
The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.
The knife had done almost everything it was brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet.
The street door was still open, just a little, where the knife and the man who held it had slipped in, and wisps of nighttime mist slithered and twined into the house through the open door.
Gaiman begins in medias res. Something horrible is happening. The focus on the knife, as if it is an intelligent agent, and the "not immediately" are sinister and disorienting: we want to know what is going on, as all this elliptical prose is creepy and we want to rule out our own worst fears as soon as possible. The language and tone here are calm, low-key to describe a horrible, violent murder.
It is my claim that all of these openings, which begin radically different books, accomplish the same thing, and do so without being over-the-top or in any way anything but careful and assured. All of these writers begin as they intend to go on. The openings are not prologues, and the action of the books flows directly from these opening passages. There are no tricks, there is no bait-and-switch, there is no huge event followed by a lot of dull backstory. The tales begin where they should, and move forward from there.
Each of the above openings promise that something interesting will happen and it will be told in an interesting way. Most good openings in modern fiction show something happening. This does not have to be something violent or sinister as in the Gaiman example; it just has to be something unexpected. It can be a minor moment of the unexpected, like Nabokov's announcement that the linguistically-playful narrator is a murderer.
I have noticed that some people are putting more emphasis on (and more work into) the first page of their novel than they put into the whole rest of the book. This is a Very Bad Thing, and I'm not exactly sure what's sparked this evil and misguided trend. I think a lot of it has to do with agent websites and online "first page/sentence/paragraph" contests that put too much weight on the opening of the book. Well, anything that makes a writer think more deeply about his own writing is a good thing, but there is a lot of bullshit advice out there. There is a lot of emphasis on "hooks." Everyone seems to be ignoring the very basic idea that we should just write a solid story well. If you write a good story and start the story in the right place and begin the story the way the story goes on rather than trying to do something special and fancy at the start, your opening should mostly take care of itself.
Ironically, therefore, my advice is to ignore the advice about beginnings that you'll get from most people on the internets; just look at real books that have been published and that you love and admire. But don't just mimic an opening you like; figure out why that opening works for that particular book! Your book is not a collage; it is not a pastiche of little techniques you've gathered together from other books. Your book is a single and unified whole that you have written yourself.*
There is no perfect opening gambit that will "hook" every reader, or even most readers. What looks like brilliance to me may be boring to you, and vice versa. Your opening page(s) will either attract, repel, or leave your reader indifferent. You have no control over that. So just write the best you can, always, no matter what page of your novel you're writing.
*Unless you're David Shields, that is.
We should look at the opening passages from some successful novels.
Here's the beginning of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov:
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precurser? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
This passage is, on the surface, about a girl named Lolita. In reality, it is the egocentric narrator telling us about himself, which prefigures the tone and style of the whole book. Nabokov has begun as he means to continue. He has challenged the reader to a battle of wits and piqued our interest with that thrown-away reference to "a murderer."
Here's the opening of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina:
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
All was confusion in the Oblonskys' house. The wife had found out that the husband was having an affair with their former French governess, and had announced to the husband that she could not live in the same house with him. This situation had continued for three days now, and was painfully felt by the couple themselves, as well as by all the members of the family and household. They felt that there was no sense in their living together and that people who meet accidentally at any inn have more conncection with each other than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife would not leave her rooms, the husband was away for the third day. The children were running all over the house as if lost; the English governess quarrelled with the housekeeper and wrote a note to a friend, asking her to find her a new place; the cook had already left the premises the day before, at dinner-time; the kitchen maid and the coachman had given notice.
The first line here is Tolstoy's "theme sentence," the claim that he will have to "prove" by the events he gives us in the book. We know already that we will see an account of a uniquely unhappy family.
You can say that what follows that first line is all "telling," but so what? The list of tensions, of battles in and defections from the household is delightfully energetic. Tolstoy has launched us headlong into the middle of a domestic war. We know that the situation can't last; something's got to give and it won't be pretty when it does.
Here's one you might already know:
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
A lot of The Hobbit is about being underground, and we are first given a contrast between nice underground living and "nasty, dirty, wet." The nice versus the nasty is a constant element in this book, running all through the story. Even so seemingly tame a sentence as this contains conflict and mystery.
And finally, this is how Neil Gaiman opened his Newberry Prize-winning The Graveyard Book:
The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.
The knife had done almost everything it was brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet.
The street door was still open, just a little, where the knife and the man who held it had slipped in, and wisps of nighttime mist slithered and twined into the house through the open door.
Gaiman begins in medias res. Something horrible is happening. The focus on the knife, as if it is an intelligent agent, and the "not immediately" are sinister and disorienting: we want to know what is going on, as all this elliptical prose is creepy and we want to rule out our own worst fears as soon as possible. The language and tone here are calm, low-key to describe a horrible, violent murder.
It is my claim that all of these openings, which begin radically different books, accomplish the same thing, and do so without being over-the-top or in any way anything but careful and assured. All of these writers begin as they intend to go on. The openings are not prologues, and the action of the books flows directly from these opening passages. There are no tricks, there is no bait-and-switch, there is no huge event followed by a lot of dull backstory. The tales begin where they should, and move forward from there.
Each of the above openings promise that something interesting will happen and it will be told in an interesting way. Most good openings in modern fiction show something happening. This does not have to be something violent or sinister as in the Gaiman example; it just has to be something unexpected. It can be a minor moment of the unexpected, like Nabokov's announcement that the linguistically-playful narrator is a murderer.
I have noticed that some people are putting more emphasis on (and more work into) the first page of their novel than they put into the whole rest of the book. This is a Very Bad Thing, and I'm not exactly sure what's sparked this evil and misguided trend. I think a lot of it has to do with agent websites and online "first page/sentence/paragraph" contests that put too much weight on the opening of the book. Well, anything that makes a writer think more deeply about his own writing is a good thing, but there is a lot of bullshit advice out there. There is a lot of emphasis on "hooks." Everyone seems to be ignoring the very basic idea that we should just write a solid story well. If you write a good story and start the story in the right place and begin the story the way the story goes on rather than trying to do something special and fancy at the start, your opening should mostly take care of itself.
Ironically, therefore, my advice is to ignore the advice about beginnings that you'll get from most people on the internets; just look at real books that have been published and that you love and admire. But don't just mimic an opening you like; figure out why that opening works for that particular book! Your book is not a collage; it is not a pastiche of little techniques you've gathered together from other books. Your book is a single and unified whole that you have written yourself.*
There is no perfect opening gambit that will "hook" every reader, or even most readers. What looks like brilliance to me may be boring to you, and vice versa. Your opening page(s) will either attract, repel, or leave your reader indifferent. You have no control over that. So just write the best you can, always, no matter what page of your novel you're writing.
*Unless you're David Shields, that is.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Some Third-Hand Advice from the Pros
If you take a few minutes and look here, you'll find some excellent advice about queries and first pages gleaned from the Agent/Author Day at the Backspace Writers' Conference. It's recommended reading.
What I couldn't help noticing is that a lot of writers who are querying agents don't have a firm grasp of basics. Do not be one of those writers. Do your homework. Learn about your genre, learn to write well, and stretch your imagination when you write your book.
And, yes, this post is mostly filler. It's Friday, and nobody reads blogs on Fridays, as I pointed out last week. I was going to write about how some people I know are upset that I don't take to heart their advice the way I do that of publishing industry professionals (like my agent), and how it's likely a good idea to be a bit secretive about the publishing process once it's underway. My best friend Mighty Reader works in publishing, and last week she received a snarky note from one of her author's mothers, sent along by the author. The author is an adult, and the author's mother (even if she is, as she claims, a retired editor) needs to step off. Publishing is a business. Act in a businesslike manner if you want to make this your career. If you're getting paid by a publisher, then being a writer is your job, even if it's not your full-time job. Do you bring your friends and family to the office to argue with the people who sign your paychecks? No? I didn't think so. Anyway, I was going to write about this but as it's Friday and nobody reads blogs on Fridays, I'll just skip it. Have a swell weekend, all.
What I couldn't help noticing is that a lot of writers who are querying agents don't have a firm grasp of basics. Do not be one of those writers. Do your homework. Learn about your genre, learn to write well, and stretch your imagination when you write your book.
And, yes, this post is mostly filler. It's Friday, and nobody reads blogs on Fridays, as I pointed out last week. I was going to write about how some people I know are upset that I don't take to heart their advice the way I do that of publishing industry professionals (like my agent), and how it's likely a good idea to be a bit secretive about the publishing process once it's underway. My best friend Mighty Reader works in publishing, and last week she received a snarky note from one of her author's mothers, sent along by the author. The author is an adult, and the author's mother (even if she is, as she claims, a retired editor) needs to step off. Publishing is a business. Act in a businesslike manner if you want to make this your career. If you're getting paid by a publisher, then being a writer is your job, even if it's not your full-time job. Do you bring your friends and family to the office to argue with the people who sign your paychecks? No? I didn't think so. Anyway, I was going to write about this but as it's Friday and nobody reads blogs on Fridays, I'll just skip it. Have a swell weekend, all.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Evolution of an Opening Chapter
This post is a sort of continuation of Davin's post from yesterday, about First Chapter Blues. I don't know if I have any sort of advice or wisdom to impart with what I'm going to say today, but it might be interesting to other writers. Might not; time will tell.
When I first began my book, I thought I would ease my way into the story the way a good 19th-century author would, starting at some distance from my protagonist and his tale, and gradually bringing the reader closer. This, then, is the way the first draft of the book began:
The Elbe River rises in the Giant Mountains, east of Prague in the land of the Czechs, on the frontiers of the Holy Roman Empire. The Czech realm is a barbarous place of infidels, pagans and mislaid Christians forever at war, battling to the death over land of little value to any. Here the Elbe rushes down mountain-sides and through steep valleys, past savage villages of straw and mud, under the eyes of savage villagers who cannot imagine the seven hundred miles this river courses, arcing across Europe through lands of civilized men, running beneath bridges of ancient stone, her waters reflecting here and there the spires of great palaces and cathedrals, her currents washing everything lost in her out to the cold North Sea on Germany’s coast.
The Elbe is fed at first by the lesser waters of the Labe and the Sazaba, then by the Ohre between Prague and Dresden; the Mulde joins her at Desau, the Saale near Schoenebeck, the Havel a hundred miles north of Magdeburg, and the Elde a hunded miles further on, before the great river forces her way through the canals of Hamburg and rushes home to the ocean.
Midway along her journey, between the savage Czech headwaters and the chaos of the North Sea, the river runs for a time directly westward through Saxony, a land of civilized men; there the course of the Elbe cuts the Duchy in half, north and south. On the north bank of the river, in a region of low forested hills which rise to a plateau further north near Berlin, sits Wittenberg. Named for the white sand found in the soil of those hills, this is the city where I would have remained forever had not I become involved in the history I will unfold.
I like the writing here and I like the image of the river cutting across time and geography, but this doesn't work as an opening to the story. There is too much emphasis on the river, and the river does not return as a setting of any importance in the novel. Gunter Grass could make the river into a character, a personality of its own that interacts with the story, but that's not what I did with my book. So I decided that the river as focal point was out, and I wanted instead to begin with the protagonist himself, his social and historical situation, and some conflict. Here is how the second, third and fourth drafts all began (notice that I still begin at the river):
When I was a lad, I would sometimes steal away from my father's house and follow the sandy banks of the Elbe to a small backwater a mile east of town, there to settle among mounds of wildflowers in the shade under the many trees growing along the water’s edge, and watch a man fish for eels in the shallows. I do not know the man's name, nor did I ever; all I did know was that he was one of the royal fishers in the employ of the Duke. The Duke had an insatiable taste for the shimmering green eels: boiled into soups, soused in brine and served with lemons, breaded and fried, smoked, jellied, grilled over open flames, or diced and baked inside game birds; there were few ways to prepare them that did not please the Duke's palate.
During the cold months, the eels would burrow into the mud and the fisher would use a long, barbed spear to bring them up, knocking them off the tines into a wooden box where they wriggled and fought in sawdust and salt. In the spring a net was used, thrown out into the water near the strong river current, then hauled back to check the catch. On hot summer days, when the fisher was too lazy to work for the eels, he would open a filthy oilskin sack he'd brought from town and pull out the head of a horse which he'd gotten from a stableman or butcher, knot a rope through the horse's mouth and throat, then weight the head down with an iron bar. This he'd throw out into the river, tying the other end of the rope to a tree on the bank. The fisher settled down to wait then, eating his breakfast, drinking the wine he'd brought along, often sleeping for an hour or so. When he'd grown impatient enough, or if the day was too hot for him, the horse’s head would be dragged back to shore, filled with dozens of voracious eels, writhing in the air, their sinuous bodies glistening green. The fisher pulled the eels from the head on which they'd been feeding, dropped them into his wooden box, and after untying his rope and setting aside the iron weight, cast the bit of horse back into the river for the other eels.
The eel man and I did not speak much. He didn't mind my company, and sometimes when he drank more than he was used to, he would tell me stories of taking his eels back to the ducal residence, rubbing their bodies with salt to clean off the slime, cutting long slits in their backs to pull out guts and spines. He did never once give me any eels to take home, as all the eels coming from that particular spot along the Elbe belonged to the Duke, who was a powerful man, jealous of his property. Nor did afternoons spent in his company fill me with any desire to fish for eels myself. Though they have beautiful skins, fine shirts crafted of a million flecks of emerald, eels have wicked faces and eyes like snakes, and I did not like to touch them.
“Wherefrom have you taken the horse?” I asked him once.
“This fellow,” he answered, looping his rope through the mouth and throat of the immense brown head, “Were the proud mount of a noble. Broke his leg two days past; the gentleman shot a pistol ball in its brain--see this hole, right here by the eye? Sold the horse to a butcher, an' he sold me the head. A fine head, too. Marry, I'll have twoscore eels eating his brains in an hour or two, lad.”
I must have looked greatly sad, as the fisher eyed me with some kindness. “Mourn not for this dead horse,” he said. “He served his master well enough, I warrant, and now his head does service for the Duke and the great ones the Duke will feast with the eels I'll bring home. We all serve our masters, lad. This horse yet does honorable duty.”
“I'd sooner be the Duke than the horse,” I said.
The fisher cuffed me hard, on the ear. “Watch your tongue, that I don't use it for bait,” he said. “Your lot is to obey your masters. Learn a trade, and mind your place in the world. Remember you this: you are the horse, not the rider. If the Duke cuts off your head and feed it to the fishes, that's his godly right.”
I was quite pleased with this opening gambit, and the beginning of the book stayed this way for some time. This is how the narrative began when I found an agent; these are the first pages he read. But my agent asked me if I could do anything to deepen the protagonist's character, to sharpen the conflict. He didn't specifically ask that I do anything with the opening, but I wanted to somehow have conflict in every scene so I took the passages I had above and forced some conflict into it:
On the day that my wife Astrid gave birth to our daughter, I carried our son Justus, who was but a year old, down to the banks of the Elbe. We followed the river to a small backwater a mile east of town and I found the very spot where, when I was a lad, I had often settled among mounds of wildflowers under the trees along the water’s edge. Many a day had I spent there, watching a man fish for eels in the shallows. I do not know the man’s name, nor did I ever. All I did know was that he was one of the royal fishers in the employ of the Duke, who had an insatiable taste for eels.
[...]
As the eel fisher so wisely noted, I was of no importance; the poor never are. I sat on the river’s north bank and held my young boy to my breast, promising him that I would not let our little family live and die in poverty. Justus smiled to hear me speak but understood nothing of my promise. He knew nothing yet of poverty, neither of despair nor fear. I had long since passed such innocence, and I knew that after I carried Justus home and fed him his gruel, after I kissed his mother and newborn sister as they slept, I would commit an act that would change the fortunes of many men, for both good and ill. My name is Horatio Johannes Andersmann, and I was born on December 27 in the year of our Lord 1571 in the city of Wittenberg, in Saxony. I would have remained in Wittenberg forever had I not done terrible things to protect my Astrid and our children. I shall reveal everything.
This does not work. It's a cheat, announcing to the reader that there is drama to come if you'll just bear with me. It's the same sort of cheap trick a lot of prologues play, and I never did like it. It says, "I don't so much have compelling characters or a great premise to draw you in, so here's a bit of a mystery that will remain unresolved for a couple hundred pages." Like I say, that's just cheating the reader. Which is why it's been cut, all of it. My current rewrite begins with the action of the story itself, my character in the situation lamely hinted at above, in real conflict in the "story present." I am opening, this time around, in medias res, with the action already underway. My plan is to take all the backstory I have cut and, if I think I really need it (and likely I don't need most of it), work it back in around page 100 or 150 or so.
My agent, by the way, likes the eels. But he's wrong, and I'm no longer starting with them.
While I feel confident that I am right in changing the way my book begins, I make no claims that a book shouldn't begin with back-story. I have read (and continue to read) a lot of classic literature which does not obey the currently popular ideas of structure and story-telling, and these classics have aged well. This is just the choice I have made, and I thought it might be fun to share the evolution of my book's opening.
When I first began my book, I thought I would ease my way into the story the way a good 19th-century author would, starting at some distance from my protagonist and his tale, and gradually bringing the reader closer. This, then, is the way the first draft of the book began:
The Elbe River rises in the Giant Mountains, east of Prague in the land of the Czechs, on the frontiers of the Holy Roman Empire. The Czech realm is a barbarous place of infidels, pagans and mislaid Christians forever at war, battling to the death over land of little value to any. Here the Elbe rushes down mountain-sides and through steep valleys, past savage villages of straw and mud, under the eyes of savage villagers who cannot imagine the seven hundred miles this river courses, arcing across Europe through lands of civilized men, running beneath bridges of ancient stone, her waters reflecting here and there the spires of great palaces and cathedrals, her currents washing everything lost in her out to the cold North Sea on Germany’s coast.
The Elbe is fed at first by the lesser waters of the Labe and the Sazaba, then by the Ohre between Prague and Dresden; the Mulde joins her at Desau, the Saale near Schoenebeck, the Havel a hundred miles north of Magdeburg, and the Elde a hunded miles further on, before the great river forces her way through the canals of Hamburg and rushes home to the ocean.
Midway along her journey, between the savage Czech headwaters and the chaos of the North Sea, the river runs for a time directly westward through Saxony, a land of civilized men; there the course of the Elbe cuts the Duchy in half, north and south. On the north bank of the river, in a region of low forested hills which rise to a plateau further north near Berlin, sits Wittenberg. Named for the white sand found in the soil of those hills, this is the city where I would have remained forever had not I become involved in the history I will unfold.
I like the writing here and I like the image of the river cutting across time and geography, but this doesn't work as an opening to the story. There is too much emphasis on the river, and the river does not return as a setting of any importance in the novel. Gunter Grass could make the river into a character, a personality of its own that interacts with the story, but that's not what I did with my book. So I decided that the river as focal point was out, and I wanted instead to begin with the protagonist himself, his social and historical situation, and some conflict. Here is how the second, third and fourth drafts all began (notice that I still begin at the river):
When I was a lad, I would sometimes steal away from my father's house and follow the sandy banks of the Elbe to a small backwater a mile east of town, there to settle among mounds of wildflowers in the shade under the many trees growing along the water’s edge, and watch a man fish for eels in the shallows. I do not know the man's name, nor did I ever; all I did know was that he was one of the royal fishers in the employ of the Duke. The Duke had an insatiable taste for the shimmering green eels: boiled into soups, soused in brine and served with lemons, breaded and fried, smoked, jellied, grilled over open flames, or diced and baked inside game birds; there were few ways to prepare them that did not please the Duke's palate.
During the cold months, the eels would burrow into the mud and the fisher would use a long, barbed spear to bring them up, knocking them off the tines into a wooden box where they wriggled and fought in sawdust and salt. In the spring a net was used, thrown out into the water near the strong river current, then hauled back to check the catch. On hot summer days, when the fisher was too lazy to work for the eels, he would open a filthy oilskin sack he'd brought from town and pull out the head of a horse which he'd gotten from a stableman or butcher, knot a rope through the horse's mouth and throat, then weight the head down with an iron bar. This he'd throw out into the river, tying the other end of the rope to a tree on the bank. The fisher settled down to wait then, eating his breakfast, drinking the wine he'd brought along, often sleeping for an hour or so. When he'd grown impatient enough, or if the day was too hot for him, the horse’s head would be dragged back to shore, filled with dozens of voracious eels, writhing in the air, their sinuous bodies glistening green. The fisher pulled the eels from the head on which they'd been feeding, dropped them into his wooden box, and after untying his rope and setting aside the iron weight, cast the bit of horse back into the river for the other eels.
The eel man and I did not speak much. He didn't mind my company, and sometimes when he drank more than he was used to, he would tell me stories of taking his eels back to the ducal residence, rubbing their bodies with salt to clean off the slime, cutting long slits in their backs to pull out guts and spines. He did never once give me any eels to take home, as all the eels coming from that particular spot along the Elbe belonged to the Duke, who was a powerful man, jealous of his property. Nor did afternoons spent in his company fill me with any desire to fish for eels myself. Though they have beautiful skins, fine shirts crafted of a million flecks of emerald, eels have wicked faces and eyes like snakes, and I did not like to touch them.
“Wherefrom have you taken the horse?” I asked him once.
“This fellow,” he answered, looping his rope through the mouth and throat of the immense brown head, “Were the proud mount of a noble. Broke his leg two days past; the gentleman shot a pistol ball in its brain--see this hole, right here by the eye? Sold the horse to a butcher, an' he sold me the head. A fine head, too. Marry, I'll have twoscore eels eating his brains in an hour or two, lad.”
I must have looked greatly sad, as the fisher eyed me with some kindness. “Mourn not for this dead horse,” he said. “He served his master well enough, I warrant, and now his head does service for the Duke and the great ones the Duke will feast with the eels I'll bring home. We all serve our masters, lad. This horse yet does honorable duty.”
“I'd sooner be the Duke than the horse,” I said.
The fisher cuffed me hard, on the ear. “Watch your tongue, that I don't use it for bait,” he said. “Your lot is to obey your masters. Learn a trade, and mind your place in the world. Remember you this: you are the horse, not the rider. If the Duke cuts off your head and feed it to the fishes, that's his godly right.”
I was quite pleased with this opening gambit, and the beginning of the book stayed this way for some time. This is how the narrative began when I found an agent; these are the first pages he read. But my agent asked me if I could do anything to deepen the protagonist's character, to sharpen the conflict. He didn't specifically ask that I do anything with the opening, but I wanted to somehow have conflict in every scene so I took the passages I had above and forced some conflict into it:
On the day that my wife Astrid gave birth to our daughter, I carried our son Justus, who was but a year old, down to the banks of the Elbe. We followed the river to a small backwater a mile east of town and I found the very spot where, when I was a lad, I had often settled among mounds of wildflowers under the trees along the water’s edge. Many a day had I spent there, watching a man fish for eels in the shallows. I do not know the man’s name, nor did I ever. All I did know was that he was one of the royal fishers in the employ of the Duke, who had an insatiable taste for eels.
[...]
As the eel fisher so wisely noted, I was of no importance; the poor never are. I sat on the river’s north bank and held my young boy to my breast, promising him that I would not let our little family live and die in poverty. Justus smiled to hear me speak but understood nothing of my promise. He knew nothing yet of poverty, neither of despair nor fear. I had long since passed such innocence, and I knew that after I carried Justus home and fed him his gruel, after I kissed his mother and newborn sister as they slept, I would commit an act that would change the fortunes of many men, for both good and ill. My name is Horatio Johannes Andersmann, and I was born on December 27 in the year of our Lord 1571 in the city of Wittenberg, in Saxony. I would have remained in Wittenberg forever had I not done terrible things to protect my Astrid and our children. I shall reveal everything.
This does not work. It's a cheat, announcing to the reader that there is drama to come if you'll just bear with me. It's the same sort of cheap trick a lot of prologues play, and I never did like it. It says, "I don't so much have compelling characters or a great premise to draw you in, so here's a bit of a mystery that will remain unresolved for a couple hundred pages." Like I say, that's just cheating the reader. Which is why it's been cut, all of it. My current rewrite begins with the action of the story itself, my character in the situation lamely hinted at above, in real conflict in the "story present." I am opening, this time around, in medias res, with the action already underway. My plan is to take all the backstory I have cut and, if I think I really need it (and likely I don't need most of it), work it back in around page 100 or 150 or so.
My agent, by the way, likes the eels. But he's wrong, and I'm no longer starting with them.
While I feel confident that I am right in changing the way my book begins, I make no claims that a book shouldn't begin with back-story. I have read (and continue to read) a lot of classic literature which does not obey the currently popular ideas of structure and story-telling, and these classics have aged well. This is just the choice I have made, and I thought it might be fun to share the evolution of my book's opening.
Monday, July 27, 2009
My First Chapter Blues
I haven't spoken much about my own writing progress lately. Well, this last week, I finished the latest draft of my novel, ROOSTER, where I have revamped the ending to flesh out some of the scenes and to try to stay true to the psychology of the characters.
When I was done, I reread the opening chapter of my book and realized that I'm still not 100% confident about it. So, I've been trying to understand what my problem is. Why am I having so much trouble writing my first chapter?
So far, I've come up with two reasons why I'm making the first chapter harder to write than other sections of the book.
A. I feel like readers, agents, and publishers will use the first few pages to determine whether or not they are going to like the rest of the book. I'm telling myself that if they don't like the very first page, they're not going to consider the rest of it. I think there's some truth to this. After all, when I go book shopping, I often (but not always) open up to that first page and see if I can get into a story. If not, I'll move on. (Things like the back cover, opening the book at random pages and reading a scene, and other people's recommendations also play a role.)
B. I'm trying to make my first chapter accomplish too many things at once. Whether I agree with the need for this or not, I'm trying to introduce my protagonist and antagonist, their personalities and relationship to one another, an explanation for the title of my book, the time and place all within the first 8 pages. This really doesn't seem like an incredibly tall order to me, but it does go against my normal method of writing, of letting things unfold more organically. I feel like I have to hit all of my markers, and I think that's making the chapter feel more fast-paced than I actually want it to be.
Do you all have similar issues with your first chapter? Or, can you think of other issues we may be dealing with when we are trying to write our first chapters? What do you recommend for writing that strong first chapter?
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