Fast out of the gate

On May 20, 2012, Jillian wrote, I always like stories that aren’t slow and get going quickly. But now I look back at my story and am thinking, It’s going too quickly. I have had my friends read it and they understand the beginning completely. I even have backstory in there but it’s just very quick. Is there such a thing as too quick a beginning?

I wasn’t sure I understood, so I asked for clarification, and Jillian answered with this: Continuing my last comment, I guess it moves quickly in that I feel like most beginnings have parts where the narrator takes its time in explaining what’s going on. Like in Ella Enchanted in the beginning she talks a lot about her mom to give backstory. But in my story I give backstory, but it’s slipped in here and there, and the events move quickly one after the other, making a very short exposition. Is there such a thing as too short?

Hard to tell. My favorite writing teacher used to say that a story, and this would go for a beginning too, is the right length if it’s as long as it needs to be.

Let’s consider what the beginning is, because that may be part of the confusion. In Ella Enchanted, to take Jillian’s example, is the beginning those first two paragraphs about the fool of a fairy, Lucinda? Or the first few pages, in which the curse of obedience is explained? Or does the beginning continue through the funeral of Ella’s mother?

I’m not a student of story arcs and rising and falling action, although maybe I’d have an easier time if I were. So I’m not sure. If the beginning is just revealing the curse, very few pages are involved. If it includes Ella’s mother’s death, then it’s two chapters.

Maybe it will be more productive to think about what a beginning needs to do. I mean a final beginning, not the beginning that gets us writers into the story, but the beginning after we’ve reached the end of the entire tale and done all the revising.

First of all and most of all, a beginning needs to engage the reader and make her care enough to keep reading. There’s no such thing as too quick for that. I don’t mean that there has to be a crisis on the first page. Some authors are leisurely about drawing the reader in. It’s gradual. But there has to be enough from the start to intrigue. Why are we examining the wallpaper in an ordinary bedroom? What’s going on? That curiosity may be enough.

Everything else pales in comparison with the imperative to make the reader want to read.

A beginning also acquaints the reader with the world of the story, which is different for every book or every series. Two books set in a contemporary suburb, for example, will still be in different worlds. The characters will differ, their families, their friends. One character is home schooled; another attends an enormous high school. One character likes to buy from thrift shops, another favors big box stores. One lives in a condo subdivision, another in an old house that was built by her great-grandfather. And so on. Both may mention the antique clock tower by the train station, where the trains no longer run, but that’s it.

Familiarity with the world may take a while if POV or time period or setting shifts from chapter to chapter. The reader may be four chapters in before she feels completely at home. In the novel I’m reading right now, Adam & Eve by Sena Jeter Naslund (high school and above), all three change. Some sections are told in first-person, others in third. Time and setting move around too. I have to pay attention! But the story is strong enough to keep me interested.

The beginning also introduces the voice of the story, or voices if the POV shifts, and if it does, the beginning will also be prolonged.

There’s nothing wrong with either approach, consistency or variation. The same voice, same time period, same narrator all the way through are absolutely fine. They’re just likely to shorten the beginning.

Some stories require more set-up than others. If there are aspects of the world that the reader needs to know going in, we’re going to have to spend more time getting started, which is neither virtue nor vice, only a little harder, because while we’re doing the set-up we still have to engage the reader.

We can make the reader care about main character Kira right on the first page. She rescues a puppy then gets hit by a bus and then says something endearing to the EMT who’s loading her on a stretcher.

But we don’t have to. We can lead with the wallpaper. There’s a spot where it’s torn, and the tear is in the shape of a crescent moon. The surface of the dresser is dusty, and in the dust someone has drawn a five-pointed star. The area rug has a pattern of suns. So far the reader has seen only setting, but she’s curious. Why all the celestial symbols?

The thing that would make a beginning feel rushed to me is an absence of detail. If we start with the rescued puppy, the reader will want to know the circumstances. Is the puppy being abused? Or is it alone in a cardboard box on the street? Did whoever left it also leave a few dog biscuits and a toy? How cute or un-cute is the puppy? And then there’s Kira. Does she love dogs? Is she afraid of them? Allergic? Does she have time to pick up the puppy, or is she making herself late for an interview for the internship she’s wanted for five years?

In the wallpaper example, I’ve given a few details but the reader will certainly want to know if anyone is in the house. And what’s the smell? Is there silence? Is the electricity working, the water running?

Without detail the reader can’t enter the story.

Let’s try some prompts.

∙ Now I’m curious. Write the beginning of the puppy story. If you like, keep going.

∙ Write the beginning of the wallpaper story. What is going on in that house? Delay the entry of characters for as long as you can while still maintaining the reader’s interest. Continue and make it a story.

∙ In a new version, combine the puppy story and the wallpaper story. Switch settings and POVs and time frames. The EMT, the puppy, the rescuer can all have their own chapter. The house with the wallpaper can come much earlier or much later.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Off we go

On May 9, 2012, Kelly wrote, I was curious to see if you had any ideas on what to do when you don’t know where to start when you begin writing. I have a great plot, and do-able characters–but I can’t decide where I should start. Anybody have any ideas?

I usually find my beginning in notes. As I’m jotting down ideas for how my story might go, a first scene drops into my head, so I start writing. This first scene may not ultimately be the first scene by the time I reach the end, and it may change again as I revise, but it’s enough to get me going…

which is all we need. The beginning we begin with is no more precious than any words that come later. It needs only to move us further into the story. If we give it too much importance we’re likely to freeze up and never get beyond a few paragraphs written and rewritten until we want to snap our pens in two or pour molasses on our keyboards.

The famous advice, to begin in medias res, in the middle of things, is one way to go. Suppose your plot involves Julie’s quest to establish her independence, a need she doesn’t recognize at the outset. She tends to rely on other people and rarely asserts herself. We can start with action: Julie is doing something foolish on a dare that a more self-possessed character would have refused to take on.

But that’s only one option. We can begin with setting. Say Julie lives in a model housing development for a repressed minority group in the totalitarian kingdom of Ambur. We might start with a guided tour for the free press of the nation’s democratic neighbor, the republic of Guma. If we see Julie at all, she’s merely one in a chorus of teenagers brought out to sing a paean to tyrannical King Stanil. This beginning focuses on setting. We show the small, neat houses where the grass is always kept three inches long; the box-like school with its tiny, barred windows; the community vegetable garden, where space is not allowed for flowers. And because we want to introduce a little blip of tension, we have a rock-and-roll song (considered degenerate by the king) waft out of an upstairs window, which causes the tour guide to take out her notebook and jot down the address of the offending house. (Later we can learn that the house belongs to Julie’s family.)

Or we can take on an explication of the era with a page or several pages from a history book about the reign of King Stanil the Terrible. The excerpt may include the housing complex,.

Or we can start with character. Julie is in the bedroom of her friend, who’s showing off her new leggings in a pattern of tiny mice and rats. Julie’s real reaction is Yuck!, but she expresses only admiration.

Of course there are many ways to begin with character. When we started with action before, with the dare, we were also revealing character. Thoughts are another option for a character start. Julie is trying to fall asleep, but she’s worrying about a dispute between two of her friends and planning how she can position herself so that each one feels her support and both continue to like her.

If we don’t want to go the thoughts route, we can put this rumination in her diary and open with that. In this case, Julie doesn’t have to be the POV character. The next chapter can show our POV character, Mel, reading the diary. Or the next chapter can be Mel’s diary.

If beginnings make you choke up, you can jump right into a scene further along and write the beginning later. When you’ve gotten going you’re likely to discover scenes that come before the one you’ve written. At that point you may know exactly what’s needed, and your beginning may sail right out.

Let’s imagine that Julie discovers that her neighbor Mel is an informant for King Stanil. We write the scene, imagining the circumstances, but we realize the emotional impact on the reader is blunted because the relationship between Julie and Mel hasn’t been shown. So we write an earlier scene between Julie and Mel. Maybe we show Mel being kind to Julie and Julie being a little afraid of him. Now we’re wondering what Julie’s going to do later about the informing and we decide we need a scene that will shed light on her thought process. In this scene, which also takes place before the informing has been revealed, Julie asks her older sister if she ever finds Mel scary. Her sister says, “Mel has been nothing but good to this family. If he could hear you he’d be so disappointed. We’d be shamed, all of us.” When Julie discovers Mel’s perfidy she’s going to have to take her family’s obligation to him into account. Maybe she’ll even decide she should spy along with him.

Taking another tack, it’s possible that the problem in entering a story that has a fine plot may be blurriness about the characters who will put it into action. Suppose we know there’s a despotic monarch and a network of domestic spies and a downtrodden population who will rebel led by a young girl, but we don’t know who the girl will be. We haven’t imagined Julie yet or given her her personal struggle to act independently. We’re certain we need a leader of the spies but we haven’t imagined him either. And every despot is despot in a different way, but we haven’t fleshed out King Stanil.

Once we figure out our cast of characters we can think about how they might rub against each other. We can imagine King Stanil in his royal chamber with his chief counselor while his barber cuts his hair. How does he behave? We can show Mel walking through the housing complex, taking mental notes. We can have Julie’s mother set her a task and watch the way she carries it out. From this, from thinking about who else we may need, we can start writing.

These prompts come from Julie and the kingdom of Ambur:

∙ Write the scene between King Stanil, his barber, and his counselor. Consider not only Stanil but the others too, and how they may figure in the coming drama.

∙ Put Julie in the middle of the quarrel between her two friends. Write the scene and make both of them get mad at her. Use this as the beginning of a story.

∙ Write Julie carrying out the foolish dare. Get her into trouble. Write the story that follows.

∙ Write the scene in the model housing development. Have King Stanil come along in his armored vehicle and motorcade of security guards.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Double, double toil and trouble

On April 19, 2012, Chloral Florderoy wrote, An author told me once that there comes a point in the writing process when the characters start talking to you. I mean, you know what they would do/say in a situation because you’ve spent a long time with them and you feel as though you know them. Does this mean that it’s hard when it comes time to write their deaths? How have you dealt with making bad things happen to your characters, or is it fun for you?

Every writer is different. My characters don’t talk to me unless I start the conversation, generally on paper. I may interview them to find out what they’d do in a particular situation. Otherwise it’s rare for one of them to chime in when I’m out and about in the world.

But recently a friend described a close friend of hers, someone I know a little, and his flaws sounded like one of my character’s flaws. That was a nice moment, when my character came to life in life.

As for making bad things happen, depends on the character. If it’s my main and I love her, then it’s hard. If she suffers, I suffer. And a particularly bad kind of pain is the self-inflicted kind. If my character behaves foolishly or inappropriately or hurts someone because of her faults and suffers the consequences, and she knows she’s to blame, then ouch! I squirm and writhe along with her. In Fairest, for example, Aza’s desire to be beautiful gets her into trouble over and over again.

There’s nothing wrong with feeling for our characters. If our emotions are engaged, the reader’s likely will be too.

When I killed Ella’s mother in Ella Enchanted I used some of my own feelings from when my mother died, which had happened about six years before I started writing the book. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. My writing was more authentic, and my grief for my mother no less real. If you’ve never lost someone you love, you can remember the loss of a pet or even a beloved object. It’s not the same of course, but you can still use the sadness.

On the other hand, killing a bad character is fun. In Fairest again, I enjoyed doing Skulni in. In The Two Princesses of Bamarre, knocking Vollys off was a pleasure too. She has redeeming qualities but she’s evil and I reveled in ending her in a melodramatic way. I didn’t kill Hattie in Ella Enchanted, but it was a delight to make trouble for her. She’s so self-satisfied that I always wanted to take her down a peg or two.

But killing is only an extreme case of getting our characters into trouble, which we have to do constantly. At the beginning we may not know them well enough to predict what they’ll say, do, and feel, so we have to throw them into situations, and initially we have to dream up responses for them, responses that are expressed in the ordinary way, through action, thoughts, feelings, dialogue, and occasionally setting. Each response narrows the possibilities for the next situation. A character who jumps whenever he hears a loud noise probably won’t be calm in the face of a snarling Rottweiler, possibly not even in the face of a snarling toy poodle.

But anxiety isn’t enough to make a complex character. Maybe as soon as the dog showdown is over, our character texts twelve of his closest friends. We’ve learned something else. And suppose he apologizes to the dog’s owner for being snarled at and rushes to the pet food store to buy a treat for the dog. Put all this together, and pretty soon your characters will be talking to you, too, and going with you when you walk your own dog.

Suppose we toss Jack into a new environment. He’s into fencing, so at the start of our story his supportive parents enroll him in a fencing club.

Some people and characters are fine with strangers. They know just how to fit in. They put others at ease. But we want to make trouble for Jack, so we start developing his character in a direction that will make this new situation torture for him.

We can make him shyer and more solitary than a turtle. But that’s not the only option. He can be socially awkward. He speaks too loud. He assumes that everybody shares his sense of humor. What else? As a prompt, think of five other ways that Jack can fail in a new social situation. Use one (or more) in a story.

Suppose we want to write an interior kind of story. Everything is fine in Jack’s life. He doesn’t have to go to fencing club. His family is wonderful; he has friends; his studies interest him. But we need a story and we want it to be Jack’s struggle with his inner demons. What can they be?

Well, let’s give him some faults. Maybe he’s a tad paranoid. He’s suspicious of his good fortune. There’s a worm in the apple of his life, and he’s going to find it, by gum! His friends and family, at first amused by his mistrust, begin to be annoyed, then angry.

Or he’s easily bored and deliberately sets out to shake things up, with unfortunate results.

I recently read William Styron’s Darkness Visible, his short and interesting memoir of his depression (high school and up). Styron’s descent into madness (his term) hit him hardest just as he was collecting a literary award, when everything was going splendidly.

So, as the next prompt, think of five more ways that a character with a great life can fall apart. Make a story out of one or more of them.

I’ll end by stating the obvious: Even if it’s hard to bring misery down on our complex, interesting, beloved characters, the solution is neither to spare them nor to make them not complex and not interesting.

Here are two more prompts:

∙ Marie is helping her best friend Peony get ready for a little party. Four friends are coming over. One is a boy Peony likes. Nothing has ever happened between them but she has hopes. The two girls are baking a cake for the occasion. Marie has only the best of intentions but she keeps creating disasters. Write the scene. Continue onto the arrival of the boy, and keep the trouble coming.

∙ In Perrault’s version of “Cinderella,” Cinderella forgives her stepsisters, and they marry lords. Rewrite the ending, and punish them. Be harsh.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Unoriginal sin

On March 22, 2012, Inkling wrote, My book is the same genre as Lord of the Rings, and I’m having trouble being original. All books of the fantasy genre are takeoffs (not sure if this is the right word) of LOTR because Tolkien created the genre, and I’m afraid of my book being just another takeoff. The plot isn’t the same (far from it) and I’ve tried to add big differences, such as my Elves mainly being samurai-ish unlike most fantasy books where Elves are pretty peaceful, but I’m still afraid of not being original. I’d let my dad read it (his picture is under the definition of blunt), but most of the book is still in my head since I tend to plan my stuff out before I write. Can you help me???

I’m not sure I agree that Tolkien invented fantasy as a genre, although he certainly was a major figure and has influenced lots of writers. I just looked at a Wikipedia article, and here’s the link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_fantasy, that discusses the roots of fantasy, which go back to antiquity. The article defines modern fantasy as taking place in an invented world beyond the ordinary or tucked into the ordinary. It credits Tolkien as the founder of the sub-genre of epic fantasy. Maybe, although I think there are Arthurian tales that are pretty epic.

Originality is at least as slippery a topic as the origins of fantasy. I wrote a post that also addresses the subject, which I suggest you visit. Just click on the label Originality. Then come back because I have a few more thoughts.

First off, there’s the question of outright infringement, that is, appropriating someone else’s creativity. We’re in danger of that if we copy word for word or if we put another author’s characters into our stories, not merely their names but also their essences. Fanfiction routinely uses other author’s characters, which I think is okay (I’m not a lawyer) when the writer is open about it and not profiting.

Even without infringing we can be unoriginal. If our story revolves around the rediscovery of a lost object of great power we may be in danger. LOTR isn’t the only example of this. Think of the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark and even stories about the search for the Holy Grail, and there must be many more. Then suppose the forces of good and the forces of evil are both vying to get to it first. You can write the rest in your head. Many struggles, many battles, and good wins out but at great cost.

But we can take this framework and still be original. Our characters can be so unexpected that they surprise the reader at every turn. We can spoof the prototype and exaggerate everything until the reader is laughing so hard he’s gasping for air.

In your example, Inkling, why do your characters have to be elves? If you’re worried about originality, why not invent a new kind of creature with a samurai sort of culture? Maybe your creatures have long heads and short bodies and their limbs are extraordinarily flexible. In my Disney fairy books I came up with tiffens, who are smaller than people and whose ears are thin and floppy like elephant ears and who debate everything and accomplish little beyond banana farming.

In writing there are a zillion candidates for fretting, and worry about originality may just be one of them. Writing a quest, say, or a conflict between good and evil doesn’t mean you’re unoriginal. There must be thousands of novels that involve one or the other or both. Some are tired and predictable, but many many take a fresh approach. Both are archetypal plot structures that probably will never get used up.

But if you’re still worrying, go through your story or review your conception of it. In every spot where you’re unsure, list at least five other possible ways to go. See if one of them pleases you more than your first choice. But also keep in mind that your fears very likely are exaggerated. You’re you and not this other author. Your choices will be your own. Your uniqueness will infuse your tale.

Oddly enough, another place to go for originality is real life. I wrote in an early blog post that when I want to describe a new character, in particular a character character, like a character actor, not beautiful or handsome, I like to look at photographs or portrait paintings from the art books on my shelves. Seeing actual faces moves me beyond the standard elements like hair and eye color, complexion, smile, into shape of upper lip, length of jaw line, forehead furrows – elements I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. Likewise, the real life attitudes and struggles of actual personalities involve so many variables and quirks that we can never run out of ideas. We can recast the efforts of a friend to get along with a sibling as a the challenge of a new initiate to establish herself in society of warrior butterfly hunters while hanging on to the actual idiosyncratic approach our friend takes.

Here are four prompts:

∙ Invent a new species of creature different from elves, ogres, giants, fairies, and the like. Imagine that their habitat, which may not be a forest (a forest is unoriginal), is threatened. Invent a character who is such a creature. What happens? Write it!

∙ Retell “Beauty and the Beast,” setting it in the future and making all the characters robots.

∙ Turn something difficult, a struggle in your life or in the life of someone you know into an epic. For example, from my life, finishing Beloved Elodie was tough. If I were going to dramatize it, I might cast my editor and my critique buddy as guardian angels battling along with me and I’d incorporate aspects of their personalities into the story. There could be a swamp, a mountain, certainly a desert. Maybe a mine would need to be explored or a tunnel dug.

∙ As an exercise, which may turn into something more, chart out the story of LOTR. At each plot point, imagine other directions the story might have gone. For example, what if Sam had chosen not to go with Frodo? Write what might have happened. Keep going. Suppose Sam had gone along, but Strider wasn’t at the inn in Bree? What then? And so on. If you get to a point that intrigues you, write a new beginning that plunged your characters into this fix, replace the cast with your own creations, and keep going. You’ve got a new, original story on your hands.

Have fun, and save what you write!