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 beginnings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beginnings. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Monday, December 6, 2010
Story is a matter of organization
A couple of days ago, I was responsible for teaching a lesson on "Genomic Approaches to Multifactorial Disease" to a class of college juniors. It was a topic that I knew very little about, considering my thesis was about arsenic contamination in Bangladesh.
As the cherry on top, none of my co-workers in lab really knew much about "Genomic Approaches to Multifactorial Disease" either--and they all happened to be very busy last week, so they probably couldn't have helped me even if they did--so I ended up giving a practice lesson to my friend T, who is a fellow writer, not a scientist.
So, there T and I are, practicing in my office, and I'm throwing out scientific terms and diagrams and methods of statistical analysis, when he raises his hand and says, "I think you should show and not tell."
It took me a second to understand where he was going with this, but then I figured it out.
See, I had been giving a general outline of genomic approaches to multifactorial diseases to him without getting to an actual example, like the study of high blood pressure, and he said that, for him, the example would make everything clearer.
The whole experience reminded me that almost every message we communicate to someone else can be organized in the form of a story...and techniques that we use to tell an exciting story can also be applied to any messages to make them more exciting.
When the time came for me to give my actual lesson, I organized each part of my lecture to come out like a story, setting up a question in the beginning, going through the thought process of how to solve that question, and then building to the climax where the question was answered. It made for an engaging discussion, and I had multiple students come up to me after the lecture to say how interesting my talk was.
This has all reminded me that the skills we learn as story tellers can be applied to so many things outside of our fiction writing. I think I seem to be a more interesting person in general because I've learned to share details about my life more in a story form. It's a matter of organization, setting things up so that there's a beginning, middle, and end. It's a nice tool to carry in our back pocket for anytime we need it.
And! It's December 6, just a few days before all of our Notes From Underground stories are due! I'm excited to see what we end up with. Already, we've gotten some great stories, and I can't wait to get them published and available for readers!
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.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Bad, Bad, and Worse
Beginning #1
Naomi couldn’t remember how she had been kidnapped. She didn’t know why two men were keeping her in a motel room, untied, free to move around, but threatened with her life if she tried to escape. She didn’t know why the man named Eric was tall and handsome, angrier than a roiled hornet’s nest, or why the younger man, Jesse, spent most of his time lying on the opposite bed from hers reading novels and collections of poetry.
Beginning #2
She wanted to get her mother’s attention. A desperate need, something she had been feeling the entire sixteen years of her life, throbbed beneath her skin. She pushed the gas harder and glanced at her mother in the passenger seat.
Beginning #3
Naomi vanished during one of these foggy mornings. Nobody saw her except two men. They were breathing heavily, standing in the moist darkness of an empty parking lot, the heat from their mouths drifting through the air in thin, filmy wisps before it dissipated into the surrounding fog. They stared down at the young teenage girl clothed in jeans and a faded brown jacket. She was blond and delicate, like a pale flower thrown onto the pavement, her legs and arms bent at awkward angles, her face almost translucent in the soft red glow from the taillights of an idling car a few feet away.
Beginning #4
Naomi gripped the tan leather-wrapped steering wheel of her mother’s Mercedes and pressed on the gas as hard as she could. It was the first time she had ever felt any sort of rebellion flow through her, and she liked it as the pearl-white sedan zipped along the gentle curves of the California coastline. The sky was a clean azure blue, like thick paint or the underbelly of some exotic sea creature. It made the ocean outside her window look sullen and gray.
Beginning #5
There was an unusual amount of fog the spring Naomi disappeared. Each evening near the end of February, it rolled heavily from the ocean to the coastline, gradually spreading itself over the city until the warmer hours of morning chased it away. It was unsettling how everything appeared and dissolved within seconds, like some elaborate magic act.
Beginning #6
Naomi knew the man could kill her.
“My name’s Jesse,” he stated softly. Kindly.
She held still, immobilized from the pain in her head. She had been awake for several hours, but everything was blurry and dark, until now.
“Where am I?” she asked with a voice drier than cotton. “Who are you?” A sudden urge to cry washed over her. Throbs of pain spread like wildfire through her body, and she gasped. Pain everywhere! As if she’d been beaten with a baseball bat.
Beginning #7
A book of poetry. Naomi didn’t know why the man looking down at her was pressing a thin volume of poetry to his chest, but it was the first thing that fueled her hope of staying alive.
“My name’s Jesse,” he said in a hushed voice. He pulled the book from his chest and bent his knees, reaching down to touch her arm. “How are you feeling?”
That was embarrassing.
I have a trainer novel. It's the first novel I ever wrote, and it's a complete and utter mess. I've had it for 14 years now. It comes back to me whenever I take on a new project and wonder if I should be working on the trainer novel instead. This novel has bad prose and a structure that looks like a labyrinth. I thought I was being clever. As you can see from above, I've rewritten this book a bazillion times. Nothing seems to work for the dang thing.
I thought I was being clever every time I wrote this book. I finally participated in NanoWrimo to get this trainer novel out of my head. Now I have another book that I've been working on for 2 years and I can't seem to get anything to work for it, either. I thought I was being clever when I wrote it, too.
Clever.
We all think we're pretty clever, don't we? Then many of us hand our clever little stories to a reader who is honest and thumps us over the head with reality. "Your prose needs work. Your characters are flat. Your themes are mixed. Your structure is a nightmare. Your dialogue sucks." And what hurts is when more than one person says these things. Or an agent says them. Or someone we admire.
I have a feeling my NaNoWrimo book, which has evolved greatly, is still only a trainer novel. It seems to have the same deep flaws as the other one. So I wrote another novel, a novella, that I'm currently in love with. I think it's clever.
See the pattern here?
My point today is that as writers, we follow patterns we unconsciously set for ourselves. We tend to keep the same deep flaws in our writing, and you know what? I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing over the long run. I'm beta reading a novel right now for a good friend of mine, and I'm impressed with many things and unimpressed by others, just as I am with any piece of writing I pick up. Many people enjoyed my first novel. Nobody has read my 2nd novel. Many people have enjoyed my third novel. Many people will enjoy my fourth one. Perfection isn't attainable and we all have to pick and choose the things we improve upon in our writing. We can only perfect what makes sense to us as the writer.
I'll repeat that.
We can only perfect what makes sense to us as the writer.
All those beginnings you see up there are the result of too many opinions and my feeble attempts at trying to please everyone. Imagine the time - the years(!) I've spent with those attempts. See, I'll bet that most of you like some of those beginnings and dislike others. I'll bet some of you don't like any of them - probably because I never got around to writing the book just for you.
__________
Davin wanted me to put a note here today that lets you all know he won't be around this week. He's at a conference on the East Coast and although he thought he would have internet access there, it turns out he doesn't. He'll be back next Monday. Scott and I will attempt to hold down this fort in his absence...
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
It's a Story From the Very First Word
I'm plowing ahead with the new version of my book, and as I head toward the midpoint of Act One I have to keep reminding myself that what I am doing is telling a story, and not setting up a story. What I mean by that is that the opening chapters of a book are supposed to be just as much of a story as the middle, or the end. The first act, or chapter, or page or even the very first word, is not introduction. It's all story. I have to be telling my story from the very first word.
I am not talking about "hooking your reader from the first word" or whatever bullshit advice non-writers are pawning off on writers this week. I mean simply that you have to have a real story you're telling and you have to start telling it at the start of the book and tell it all the way through.
A lot of the unpublished manuscripts I'm allowed to read spend a great deal of time at the start just setting the stage, moving pieces around the game board and explaining the rules of the game. None of that is story, usually.
The main way I use to determine if I'm drifting out of actual storytelling and into stage setting is to remain aware of my scenes. Am I writing a scene, or am I writing an essay? If there's no scene, if nothing is being dramatized, then I'm not telling a story and so I'd better stop writing and think about what I'm trying to do.
My book has some good-sized chunks of backstory to work in, and I have worked out a provisional system for giving it to the reader. There are a couple of rules I make myself obey for this:
1. Write in scenes. This is just my overall rule of writing novels.
2. There is no backstory. By which I mean that in general, I simply don't allow myself to talk about what happened; I only let myself talk about what is happening. If there was some incident in a character's past that had to do with his/her motivations or personality, I find a way to have that incident--or a similar incident--happen inside the main storyline, in the "story present." If I can't find a way to do that, then I am increasingly tempted to just not include it at all. We do not have to explain every single thing about our characters. In real life, we meet people where they are and figure them out as we go along.
3. Action before explanation. This is a sort of framework I am using in the current book, that goes sort of like this:
Not only is this how I structure scenes, it's also how I am structuring chapters. It's also how I am structuring each act. It's also how the overall structure of the book works. I'm a fan of nested structures; they make me happier than is reasonable.
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that, especially in the beginning of a book if it's a book being written by me, it's very easy to drift off from the story and describe the world and the history of the world and I don't think that's necessary and I don't think it's a good idea and so I am trying now to write carefully and make sure I'm still telling a story with each page of prose and that's causing me to write more slowly than I'd like and so it feels, frankly, like I'm making no progress at all. I have a large cast and I have to introduce all the characters. I have to introduce them in dramatized scenes. Each scene has to be an important part of the actual storyline; I don't get to have scenes just to introduce characters. I don't get to have standalone chunks of backstory. I don't get to have flashbacks or a prologue. I just have a story that starts with the first word of the book and continues to the final word of the book. Writing: harder than it looks.
I am not talking about "hooking your reader from the first word" or whatever bullshit advice non-writers are pawning off on writers this week. I mean simply that you have to have a real story you're telling and you have to start telling it at the start of the book and tell it all the way through.
A lot of the unpublished manuscripts I'm allowed to read spend a great deal of time at the start just setting the stage, moving pieces around the game board and explaining the rules of the game. None of that is story, usually.
The main way I use to determine if I'm drifting out of actual storytelling and into stage setting is to remain aware of my scenes. Am I writing a scene, or am I writing an essay? If there's no scene, if nothing is being dramatized, then I'm not telling a story and so I'd better stop writing and think about what I'm trying to do.
My book has some good-sized chunks of backstory to work in, and I have worked out a provisional system for giving it to the reader. There are a couple of rules I make myself obey for this:
1. Write in scenes. This is just my overall rule of writing novels.
2. There is no backstory. By which I mean that in general, I simply don't allow myself to talk about what happened; I only let myself talk about what is happening. If there was some incident in a character's past that had to do with his/her motivations or personality, I find a way to have that incident--or a similar incident--happen inside the main storyline, in the "story present." If I can't find a way to do that, then I am increasingly tempted to just not include it at all. We do not have to explain every single thing about our characters. In real life, we meet people where they are and figure them out as we go along.
3. Action before explanation. This is a sort of framework I am using in the current book, that goes sort of like this:
- Dramatized scene begins. Show major conflict of scene.
- Insert necessary background information.
- Finish dramatized scene.
Not only is this how I structure scenes, it's also how I am structuring chapters. It's also how I am structuring each act. It's also how the overall structure of the book works. I'm a fan of nested structures; they make me happier than is reasonable.
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that, especially in the beginning of a book if it's a book being written by me, it's very easy to drift off from the story and describe the world and the history of the world and I don't think that's necessary and I don't think it's a good idea and so I am trying now to write carefully and make sure I'm still telling a story with each page of prose and that's causing me to write more slowly than I'd like and so it feels, frankly, like I'm making no progress at all. I have a large cast and I have to introduce all the characters. I have to introduce them in dramatized scenes. Each scene has to be an important part of the actual storyline; I don't get to have scenes just to introduce characters. I don't get to have standalone chunks of backstory. I don't get to have flashbacks or a prologue. I just have a story that starts with the first word of the book and continues to the final word of the book. Writing: harder than it looks.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Some Thoughts on First Acts
If you are basing your novel in any way on the traditional three-act structure, I think there are certain things you should think about when writing your first act. This applies to stories where the protagonist is goal-oriented and must work against some sort of active antagonist; other types of stories will require other types of structures, I'm sure.
In many of the unpublished mss I'm privileged to read, the first act isn't very strong. The ideas are there, the conflict is there, but there's just not enough of it. I don't like to hand out formulas or recipes for writing, but I do think that writers should have tools they can use (and no, I'm not prepared to distinguish between "formulas" and "tools" today), so I offer up these thoughts.
1. Your first act should end with the literary equivalent of a train wreck. What I mean by that is that you should be moving constantly toward a collision of conflicting needs and desires that results in the protagonist having to make a major life decision and consequently act upon that decision.
2. Your protagonist should have a clearly-defined goal. Often this is a wrong-headed goal based on a misunderstanding the protagonist has about the world. The train wreck at the end of the first act will leave the protagonist with a better picture of reality and possibly a new or modified goal to which he must direct his life and actions.
3. Your antagonist should have a clearly-defined goal. This isn't necessarily something Evil, but it has to set your antagonist and your protagonist on intersecting paths that will result in the above-mentioned train wreck. Generally, the train wreck leaves your antagonist stronger, and his goals won't change at all; he'll just keep moving in the direction of his goals and continue acting upon his desires and needs.
4. Your support characters should have clearly-defined goals. These are usually goals that are supported by or aligned loosely with the protagonist or the antagonist. Know which is which. Your protagonist could be allied with people who are actually working against his goals, even if not deliberately or with Evil Intent. Their lives will also be affected by the train wreck in some way. Some of them will change their goals, others won't, but all of them will continue to act to achieve their goals.
5. The story must MOVE toward the train wreck, and things have to REMAIN IN ACTION. Think of your first act as the opening of a game of chess, where each side is closing in on the other, and pieces are constantly being moved forward, some pieces captured and removed from the game as it progresses. Often the protagonist won't even know that there is another player opposite him, killing his pawns and planning to put his king in checkmate. The point is, the characters are all active and constantly moving forward.
You are, in a traditional first act of a traditional three-act structure, moving toward a point where all of these conflicting courses crash into each other with a big bang, from which the rest of the story will spin away toward the climax.
Your job is therefore to:
Keep your characters moving toward goals
Let your readers know what these goals are
Let your readers see what the conflicts are
Let your readers know what is at stake for each character
Let your reader see the train wreck coming before your protagonist sees it
Make sure all the motivations are plausible and clear
I do find myself thinking in terms of either a train wreck between locomotives racing toward each other on the same track, or a street intersection with two or more cars all speeding to a messy crash. Don't get me wrong; the pace of the story does not have to be breakneck. But you do need to set forces in opposition and have them collide.
The most effective way to do this is not, surprisingly, through plot but through character. What happens to people is not nearly as interesting as what people are trying to do. This is a very important distinction. Don't let your plot push the protagonist; have the plot result from the protagonist pushing against life. Agents, editors and, yes, readers generally aren't interested in characters who are reactive, who get pushed around by life. You might think that this sort of victimhood will make your characters sympathetic, and you may be right, but you will probably be wrong if you think that will make them compelling to readers. So think of the train wreck you'll be creating as a collision of characters and goals, not as the meeting up of plot strands, okay?
Sorry about all the italics. I got carried away.
Note: I am currently on vacation, so I won't be able to reply to any comments on this post. Hopefully Michelle and Davin can pick up the slack for me. Apologies all around. Also: someone needs to remind me at some point that I want to write about beginnings of stories, Chekhov's gun and how the two can work together to give a writer story options.
In many of the unpublished mss I'm privileged to read, the first act isn't very strong. The ideas are there, the conflict is there, but there's just not enough of it. I don't like to hand out formulas or recipes for writing, but I do think that writers should have tools they can use (and no, I'm not prepared to distinguish between "formulas" and "tools" today), so I offer up these thoughts.
1. Your first act should end with the literary equivalent of a train wreck. What I mean by that is that you should be moving constantly toward a collision of conflicting needs and desires that results in the protagonist having to make a major life decision and consequently act upon that decision.
2. Your protagonist should have a clearly-defined goal. Often this is a wrong-headed goal based on a misunderstanding the protagonist has about the world. The train wreck at the end of the first act will leave the protagonist with a better picture of reality and possibly a new or modified goal to which he must direct his life and actions.
3. Your antagonist should have a clearly-defined goal. This isn't necessarily something Evil, but it has to set your antagonist and your protagonist on intersecting paths that will result in the above-mentioned train wreck. Generally, the train wreck leaves your antagonist stronger, and his goals won't change at all; he'll just keep moving in the direction of his goals and continue acting upon his desires and needs.
4. Your support characters should have clearly-defined goals. These are usually goals that are supported by or aligned loosely with the protagonist or the antagonist. Know which is which. Your protagonist could be allied with people who are actually working against his goals, even if not deliberately or with Evil Intent. Their lives will also be affected by the train wreck in some way. Some of them will change their goals, others won't, but all of them will continue to act to achieve their goals.
5. The story must MOVE toward the train wreck, and things have to REMAIN IN ACTION. Think of your first act as the opening of a game of chess, where each side is closing in on the other, and pieces are constantly being moved forward, some pieces captured and removed from the game as it progresses. Often the protagonist won't even know that there is another player opposite him, killing his pawns and planning to put his king in checkmate. The point is, the characters are all active and constantly moving forward.
You are, in a traditional first act of a traditional three-act structure, moving toward a point where all of these conflicting courses crash into each other with a big bang, from which the rest of the story will spin away toward the climax.
Your job is therefore to:
Keep your characters moving toward goals
Let your readers know what these goals are
Let your readers see what the conflicts are
Let your readers know what is at stake for each character
Let your reader see the train wreck coming before your protagonist sees it
Make sure all the motivations are plausible and clear
I do find myself thinking in terms of either a train wreck between locomotives racing toward each other on the same track, or a street intersection with two or more cars all speeding to a messy crash. Don't get me wrong; the pace of the story does not have to be breakneck. But you do need to set forces in opposition and have them collide.
The most effective way to do this is not, surprisingly, through plot but through character. What happens to people is not nearly as interesting as what people are trying to do. This is a very important distinction. Don't let your plot push the protagonist; have the plot result from the protagonist pushing against life. Agents, editors and, yes, readers generally aren't interested in characters who are reactive, who get pushed around by life. You might think that this sort of victimhood will make your characters sympathetic, and you may be right, but you will probably be wrong if you think that will make them compelling to readers. So think of the train wreck you'll be creating as a collision of characters and goals, not as the meeting up of plot strands, okay?
Sorry about all the italics. I got carried away.
Note: I am currently on vacation, so I won't be able to reply to any comments on this post. Hopefully Michelle and Davin can pick up the slack for me. Apologies all around. Also: someone needs to remind me at some point that I want to write about beginnings of stories, Chekhov's gun and how the two can work together to give a writer story options.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Hinging On Three
“They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for” ~ Tom Bodett
Three can be a good number for me, or a bad number. It can be magic or tragic. In the case of my novels, it has been tragic every single time. Always a huge obstacle. The dreaded Chapter Three is what makes or breaks me. I'm not sure if anybody else has struggled with this weird phenomenon, but it seems to me that Chapter Three is where a novel either soars or plummets to a sickening splat.
Chapter Three is often where I either stop reading a book, or keep reading. Chapter One is almost always a good hook. Chapter Two I'm willing to put with a lot if Chapter One was amazing. But Chapter Three - well, if it sucks, let's face it. I'll probably toss the book aside. So what does this mean?
Chapter Three is a HINGE.
I like the quote beneath the picture. It tells me something about humanity and happiness. I'm guessing that most readers want the same general things from a novel that they want out of life. Most readers aren't looking for a depressing, sad tale. Even if they know the story is depressing (you know, like Hamlet depressing), they know they'll probably get some sort of good message out of it, or the journey will take them somewhere rich and meaningful - something that will help them learn more about themselves and life in the process. That's the point of a novel, isn't it? To entertain, to make us feel, sometimes to even change us.
So your first three chapters should probably give the reader three things:
Someone to love - at least one character your reader can relate to and care about
Something to do - the emergence of a theme or story line showing your reader there's an amazing journey of emotions up ahead
Something to hope for - an often complex complication (um, lots and lots of tension) promising something to root for until the end
So there you go. If you haven't accomplished those by Chapter Three, you most likely have a problem. Chapter Three often falls into the range of chapters or pages an agent or editor will ask for. The first three chapters are often a good snippet to give your beta readers to see if they're interested in the entire book. They could also serve as a good stopping point for a first draft, to see if you want to continue with the plot and characters.
Also, if you don't section your novel into chapters, the first "three chapters" end up in the first 6 - 10 thousand words of the novel, at least from what I've found in my own writing.
Question For The Day: This is just my experience with Chapter Three. Do you feel the same? Or has Chapter Three posed no particular threat or problem to you?
~MDA (aka Glam)
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.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Show Me Where We're Going
This post is about beginnings, a sort of follow up to my post about starting stories in the middle of the action. Whether you jump directly into the central conflict or not, you still need to create drama for the reader. This means that you have to show things in action.
Character=action
Conflict=action
Drama=action
Put things into motion and keep them in motion. This does not mean that your characters must be running from aliens or leaping volcanoes constantly. It means that the story must move forward, that there must be momentum towards a fixed point (the climax). It means that your characters must be doing things.
What are your characters doing, then? Simply put: they are making decisions and then acting upon them, and then dealing with the consequences of those actions. Your characters want something, and your story is the movement through time of your characters toward that goal, whether they achieve it or not. If your characters don't want anything, then they are not dramatic characters and you should write a different story where people have desires. But I digress.
Put things into motion and keep them in motion. How does the reader know who your characters are? By watching them act. So show them acting. In Homer's Iliad, we know that Achilles is broody and prideful. Do we find this out by reading pages of Achilles brooding, alone in his tent? No; we find this out when he argues publically with Agamemnon or refuses Odysseus' plea to join the battle (both of which are dramatic scenes filled with conflict: a warrior versus his king, and a man versus his friends). In The Lord of the Rings, we don't read pages of Frodo's inner struggle against the evil influence of the One Ring; we see Frodo as he stops heeding Sam and places his trust in Gollum instead, eventually abandoning Sam in Mordor after verbally abusing him. These two examples are both fairly subtle and you might not consider them action at first, but they are: the characters are shown making decisions and acting upon those decisions.
To tie the title of this post into my ramblings, I'll say that in the beginning of a story, you need to let the reader know what the central conflict is, what the story is about: where the characters are going. And you need to show that through action. "Okay, Scott," you say. "We know that. Can you go beyond the basics of 'show don't tell?'" Well, maybe.
Conflict is character. Conflict, for our purposes, means people (or, yes, elves if you must) attempting to achieve specific goals and having to struggle for those achievements. In order for the reader to care about the outcome of this conflict, the reader has to care about the characters. In order to care about the characters, the reader has to know the characters. In order to know the characters, the reader has to see the characters in action. Yes, you can go on for sixty pages about your protagonist's inner thoughts and tell us the whole sad story of his estrangement from his father and his subsequent hatred of all men of a certain age and how that might effect his view of himself as your protagonist becomes the same age as his father when he was disinherited. You might even write it in gorgeous, moving prose. I'd read that. But if that isn't your story--if it's your back-story--you can get the same point across (that your protagonist has "issues" with men of his father's generation) by writing a dramatic scene where your protagonist is cruel or indifferent to an older man. Drama is vivid, memorable and engaging. And, frankly, makes the point better and faster than ruminations.
Can't I stop and think ever? Certainly. Please do. I like thoughtful books, but that's not the way to begin one. Before you have your characters consider the state of their lives, show us your characters within their lives, in action. Even a book like "Pride and Prejudice," which is alleged to be pretty tame and undramatic, begins with 1) a statement of theme (a man with money needs a wife), and 2) the event which kicks off the action of the book (the mansion up the road has been rented by a man with money; we simply must meet him!). That's not as dramatic as jumping a volcano or battling Poseidon, but it's still a dramatized scene that immediately introduces us to Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and immediately introduces conflict. Which is exactly what we want as readers, and one reason why Austen's book is still in print after all these years.
This post is a bit of a hash, stucturally. It all seemed brilliant on the way to the office, but it might be less focused than I might like. I'll try to clarify things later.
Character=action
Conflict=action
Drama=action
Put things into motion and keep them in motion. This does not mean that your characters must be running from aliens or leaping volcanoes constantly. It means that the story must move forward, that there must be momentum towards a fixed point (the climax). It means that your characters must be doing things.
What are your characters doing, then? Simply put: they are making decisions and then acting upon them, and then dealing with the consequences of those actions. Your characters want something, and your story is the movement through time of your characters toward that goal, whether they achieve it or not. If your characters don't want anything, then they are not dramatic characters and you should write a different story where people have desires. But I digress.
Put things into motion and keep them in motion. How does the reader know who your characters are? By watching them act. So show them acting. In Homer's Iliad, we know that Achilles is broody and prideful. Do we find this out by reading pages of Achilles brooding, alone in his tent? No; we find this out when he argues publically with Agamemnon or refuses Odysseus' plea to join the battle (both of which are dramatic scenes filled with conflict: a warrior versus his king, and a man versus his friends). In The Lord of the Rings, we don't read pages of Frodo's inner struggle against the evil influence of the One Ring; we see Frodo as he stops heeding Sam and places his trust in Gollum instead, eventually abandoning Sam in Mordor after verbally abusing him. These two examples are both fairly subtle and you might not consider them action at first, but they are: the characters are shown making decisions and acting upon those decisions.
To tie the title of this post into my ramblings, I'll say that in the beginning of a story, you need to let the reader know what the central conflict is, what the story is about: where the characters are going. And you need to show that through action. "Okay, Scott," you say. "We know that. Can you go beyond the basics of 'show don't tell?'" Well, maybe.
Conflict is character. Conflict, for our purposes, means people (or, yes, elves if you must) attempting to achieve specific goals and having to struggle for those achievements. In order for the reader to care about the outcome of this conflict, the reader has to care about the characters. In order to care about the characters, the reader has to know the characters. In order to know the characters, the reader has to see the characters in action. Yes, you can go on for sixty pages about your protagonist's inner thoughts and tell us the whole sad story of his estrangement from his father and his subsequent hatred of all men of a certain age and how that might effect his view of himself as your protagonist becomes the same age as his father when he was disinherited. You might even write it in gorgeous, moving prose. I'd read that. But if that isn't your story--if it's your back-story--you can get the same point across (that your protagonist has "issues" with men of his father's generation) by writing a dramatic scene where your protagonist is cruel or indifferent to an older man. Drama is vivid, memorable and engaging. And, frankly, makes the point better and faster than ruminations.
Can't I stop and think ever? Certainly. Please do. I like thoughtful books, but that's not the way to begin one. Before you have your characters consider the state of their lives, show us your characters within their lives, in action. Even a book like "Pride and Prejudice," which is alleged to be pretty tame and undramatic, begins with 1) a statement of theme (a man with money needs a wife), and 2) the event which kicks off the action of the book (the mansion up the road has been rented by a man with money; we simply must meet him!). That's not as dramatic as jumping a volcano or battling Poseidon, but it's still a dramatized scene that immediately introduces us to Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and immediately introduces conflict. Which is exactly what we want as readers, and one reason why Austen's book is still in print after all these years.
This post is a bit of a hash, stucturally. It all seemed brilliant on the way to the office, but it might be less focused than I might like. I'll try to clarify things later.
Friday, July 10, 2009
In Medias Res
In Medias Res is Latin for "in the middle of things," and refers to the story-telling device of starting a narrative not at the beginning but during a dramatic scene, skipping any backstory or setting or characterization and getting directly to the action. You open the book to page one and BANG! you're in the middle of the story already.
Literary agents seem to like this approach, if one judges by their blogs, and one is tempted to say that this is a "modern" writing technique, that the classics of literature could not be published today because writers used to spend the first 10,000 words of their books giving us setting and backstory and introducing characters. But beginning in medias res has a long and illustrious history. I took a quick look at my librarything account and grabbed the following titles, all of which start in the middle of the action:
True History of the Kelly Gang (published 2002)
My Name is Red (published 2001)
The Master and Margarita (published 1966)
Crime and Punishment (published 1866)
Paradise Lost (published 1667)
Hamlet (published 1601)
The Iliad (written c. 800 BCE)
The Odyssey (written c. 800 BCE)
I'm not going to discuss the relative merits of beginning in medias res versus easing into/setting up the story (though feel free to do so in the comments). What I will do is, maybe, give some advice on how to structure the beginning of a novel to start off in medias res. It's going to be oversimplified, cookbook-style advice, because we must deal with generalities in a forum like this. Sorry.
I will assume you have written something like this:
Prologue (ick!)
Hook sentence or paragraph.
Backstory and setting.
Dramatic action leading to inciting incident.
Inciting incident.
et cetera.
Step One: Read your first chapter or two and find the first dramatic action that is part of the story's real conflict. By which I mean, if your book is about a vampire hunter who is haunted (sorry) by his past, skip the story about his past, no matter how dramatic, and get to the story-present's first dramatic scene (likely some vampire hunting by the adult protagonist).
Step Two: Start your book at the scene you found in Step One. It begins there and goes on from there, just as you've written it. What about all that stuff that used to go before it? Well, you're going to cut most of it. Read on.
Step Three: Cut your prologue. You don't need it. I know: you love your prologue, and know in your heart that the story can't begin without it. Your heart, alas, she is wrong. Admit that your prologue is back-story, and You Do Not Begin With Back-story!
Step Four: Read your book, beginning with the new first scene. Do you really need any of the back-story you cut out? Really? Do you? How much of it? Note where there is missing information that must be filled in.
Step Five: Read through all the stuff that you have skipped over by beginning with the new first scene. Highlight or otherwise mark those things that are absolutely necessary for the reader to understand the story; you aim to fill in those areas you flagged in Step Four. Cut everything else. No, I mean it: cut everything else. You don't need it, and your readers don't want it.
Step Six: There is no Step Six. You're done. Move on with your life and enjoy your shiny new actiony story beginning. You should have a structure that now looks like this:
Dramatic action leading to inciting incident.
More dramatic action leading to inciting incident.
Inciting incident.
Possible introduction of back-story.
et cetera.
A note on Step Five: You might want to keep some of the details you don't necessarily need for clarity, and use them to add depth and substance to the book. Just don't let your world-building and gorgeous descriptive passages get in the way of the story itself.
Also: there are other ways to do this, other ways to structure a story, and they are equally valid. I'm just offering up a simple way to turn a slow-starting novel into something that starts more quickly. And again, I'm not saying that this is the Best Way to start a story; it's just one way to do it.
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