Tag Archives: fiction

Starting Your Book: Three Blocks to Smash

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TMI! Don’t let too much advice about book openings stun you into silence! Starting your book today smashes the blocks!

 

 

 

 

The idea of starting your book is often held at bay by three simple blocks. Avoid them!

  1. Panic.

Don’t Let panic keep you from starting your book!

This means

  • don’t look up 5 million Google listings on how to create a famous opening line
  • don’t chew your fingernails over point of view, characterization, or other craft issues
  • don’t sign up for conferences, workshops, classes, and/or university MFA programs

These activities are procrastination. Any activity except writing is not writing!

Just write. Start your book with anything. Picture your character in trouble and start writing her or him out of it. If you can’t think of a first word, steal a beginning. It isn’t plagiarism if you revise before you publish.

Here’s an infamous book opening by Edward Bulwer-Lytton:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in –pick your own city– that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

Now keep writing with your own character. That’s how a writing prompt works.

  1. Overcrowding.

When starting your book, don’t introduce more than two or three characters except as a background crowd (Five thousand people stomped their feet, yelled, and Ellen began to fear the stadium itself would collapse). A milling throng at a rock concert can provide tension, but don’t try to introduce the names of a dozen people attending with the central character.

Trying to balance too many primary characters is tiring for both the author and the readers.

Be a good host

Think about hosting a party. A guest shows up, someone you met in your apartment building, but she knows no one at the party. Greet her, let her know where the food, drink, and bathroom are. Introduce her to a small conversational grouping. Provide snippets of conversational tidbits about each person as you introduce them.

That’s good hosting etiquette.

Avoid those broad, sweeping introductions of “Hey, everybody! This is Jan. Make her welcome!”

That’s a good way to send Jan back to her cozy apartment.

You’re the host for your readers. Let them get to know a character or two before you throw other people at them or your own brain. Make them welcome by giving them some familiar grabbing points for the start. The “dark and stormy night” above might not win awards for innovation but all readers are familiar with stormy nights.

Even if you’re starting your book about a strange planet or the future, you can provide clues. The following is the opening to my new novel Quantum Consequences, which takes place in Seattle in 2029:

Vala jacked her pod into one of the few slots available at the Pike’s Place Market floating lot and clambered out. The weekend before the Fourth of July had all of Seattle jammed, including parking lots, not with individual pods, such as Vala Glen’s, so much as extra renta-chairs, carts, and scootbots. Even the glide-walks were jammed with people, hopeful tourists or holiday-crazed locals.

The Fourth of July is familiar, as are crowds and Seattle. Other details set up the idea of changes. With luck, the reader isn’t lost yet. The central character is the only one named, and her name appears twice.

  1. Following the “rules.”

When starting your book, ignore rules (except for mine, of course). Don’t exclude, limit,or conform when you first start a book.

You and your book need to fly free for a while. This first draft won’t be your last draft (or shouldn’t be).

You don’t need to be limited to “what you know.” You don’t need to have a story arc worked out. You don’t have to know the end. You don’t have to even know your genre or market at this point.

Allow the book to surprise you, and you’ll have a better chance of surprising readers.

After you have started your book, write a little every day. If you have trouble “getting to it,” limit your time. Write no more than 10 minutes a day. That will be enough to keep the book in your thoughts but not so much that you feel as though you need a huge block of time to write.

Just keep moving forward. The writing doesn’t have to be brilliant. The spelling doesn’t have to be correct. The setting details don’t have to be accurate. The plot doesn’t have to make sense.

But your story needs to be told. Just tell it the way you would to your friend over lunch.

Everything else is revision.

Take the plunge and start writing your book now! Don’t turn your back on the excitement of what’s waiting below the surface.

 

 

Genre Discussion: Helpful Guide or Straitjacket?

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The other day, I ran into a friend while I was talking to a librarian about my new book. My friend asked to see my book. She looked at the blurb on the back and said, “Oh, dear, I have a terrible time with books like this. Fantasy. I just don’t understand it.”

“Well, it’s science fiction…” I began, but she was shoving the book back at me.

“I just don’t like dragons and swords and stuff like that.”

“Not all fantasy has that,” I said, abandoning a discussion of both my book–which lacks dragons and swords–and science fiction.

“Yes, it does,” she said.

I started listing some books I thought she would like, everything from The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker and Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord to Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Most she hadn’t read (because it was fantasy) but “Oh, I loved Mists of Avalon!” she said and then added, “But that’s not fantasy.”

“Of course, it is,” I said always willing to state my opinion.

A couple days later, I ran into this friend again, this time at the post office. She was bubbling over with excitement because she’d talked to her son about the Golem and the Jinni and found out he’d read it and loved it. She’d started it, and she loved it, too. I don’t know if this is going to open up her thoughts to reading outside her “usual” genres, but it points out how writers can fail to reach readers and how readers can miss out on great books because of genre:

  1. Readers become trapped in the idea that genre defines a book’s content, theme, style.
  2. Writers find themselves trapped into writing stories that don’t take unique paths.

Writers suffer the most damage. Genre conventions dictate what they can write and/or how they can write it. That can smother creativity. This starts early in a writer’s career. For instance, one of my friends was denied admission to a university MFA program because she wrote science fiction. Many programs still limit work to “literary.” It’s not just academia. For instance, writers in the fantasy genre must be careful to not mix character origins. Take care not to mix a mythological god in a story with randomly chosen creatures such as dinosaurs and the Cheshire Cat. 

Of course, all these genre boundaries shift about. What a shock when genre fiction writers became recognized for their literary accomplishments; for instance, writers such as Vonnegut and LeGuin have work that science fiction writers sometimes now claim as “literary science fiction” and the academic world calls, simply, “literary.”

Sometimes this classification game begins to look as complicated as listing all the animal species (a couple million or so). Wikipedia breaks down the “common fiction genres” into 25 categories. Various departments of education often cut that down a little, but in reality the genres multiply as professors of literature (one of the fields I taught for decades) bring books into the classroom. The classifications become as narrow as the hair on a villain’s chin.

Of course, many writers shrug off the rules and write what their imagination dictates. This often results in wonderfully imaginative and unique books, which is what I’d say about Redemption in Indigo and Going Postal by Terry Pratchett. Each page is a surprise.

Even cross-genre (or genre bending) writing has become a genre. I keep seeing articles such as “Three rules for writing a cross-genre novel.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for writing rules. Grammar and punctuation (I was a teacher after all) are essential, in my opinion, for clarity. Rules also apply to style: show don’t tell, for instance. Essentials of plot and scene building keep a story from dying on the page. On the other hand, one purpose of learning rules is to know how and when to break them effectively. For instance, a well-used sentence fragment adds spice and characterization.

“Ticket-sellers in the subway, breathing sweat in its gaseous form…. Farmers plowing sterile fields behind sad meditative horses, both suffering from the bites of insects….Grocery-clerks trying to make assignations with soapy servant girls….”            –from “Diligence,” A Mencken Chrestomathy–H. L. Mencken

So sometimes, if you’re willing to pay the penalty, genre rule breaking is an option (including cross-genre rules). For instance, in my last book Quantum Consequences, I used science fiction as the main genre; however, I took on fantasy to account for the origin myth of elves and dwarfs as well as some abilities of central characters. I was aware of the fact that I was violating many traditions of the fantasy field. In so doing, I also knew I was limiting publishing options. Few big publishers want to risk a book that breaks with genre tradition unless the writer is already well-known and popular.

Look how hard it was for Stephen King to move out of horror. Even so, his work is sometimes still restricted. I recently read an article that said he had mastered almost all the genres except literary. I guess that means that his nearly 20 awards for writing won’t ever include a Pulitzer.

So who wins in this genre box building?

Academics

In literary circles where analysis is the name of the game, genre allows for historical, social, and cultural contexts. Taking something apart to study it is SOP.

Institutions

Libraries and stores know where to shelve books. Publishers and publicists know where to market.

Writers

Marketing is easier if you write mysteries that follow the genre boilerplate. Finding publishers and readers is marginally easier. One writer I know has churned out five or six books a year by following this practice and now has almost 200 books attributed to his name. Readers devour such books in the same way that my husband eats potato chips (except the books aren’t fattening). Likewise, getting publicity is easier if you have a clear genre.

Readers

Readers who don’t want surprises, don’t want their assumptions challenged, also benefit. If they pick up a Regency romance, they already know the time period, the basic plot (romance), the likely class of characters, and the outcome. Readers who don’t find the expected in such a novel will be as upset as a Texan who orders sirloin steak and gets tofu. That doesn’t mean either the Texan or the tofu is bad. Likewise, genre preferences don’t make advocates “bad readers.” Books for escape (entertainment) have an important place in our culture. This, for the same reason, means that writers of such books are not “bad writers.”

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With all that said, the controversy over genre continues. Some writers and readers like risk, like taking a literary journey where no one has gone before. Natural rebels? Eager to tell their own stories in their own ways? More in love with the art and craft of writing than publication? Or, for readers, more in love with meeting unexpected people and traveling on unexpected paths with uncertainty always in the balance and utter delight only one sentence away?

We need those who write within conventional structures and those who don’t.

Sometimes the unconventional becomes conventional. Edgar Allen Poe and Anton Chekhov pioneered the short story. Murasaki Shikibu penned the world’s first novel (according to most sources) The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century. Short story and novel are now standard conventions.

Who knows what the next convention will be?

Whatever it is, the result will no doubt be named and placed in the growing hierarchy of genres becoming standard, like steampunk novels today.

Reading Fiction: A Brief Checklist

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By Wayne Ude 

Five general suggestions:

  1. Read the story through once, quickly, without stopping, both to get a general sense of what it’s about and to see how readable it is. If you have to stop to figure out what’s going on (or, worse yet, to go back and reread), make an x in the margin at that point to remind yourself, but don’t further break your first reading to make extensive notes.
  2. Give the story a very careful second reading, in which you write as many comments in the margins as occur to you. On this reading, you may look for any or all of the elements discussed below.
  3. Ask yourself what seems to be at the story’s core: it could be a character, an event or series of events, a symbol or image, a theme, a relationship, etc. Attempt to identify those elements in the story which most effectively create the core, and those which seem less important or even irrelevant to the core.
  4. Look for elements in at least three categories: strengths, weaknesses, and undeveloped potential strengths. It’s a mistake in critiquing a story to focus only on strengths or only on weaknesses – either approach will lead others to regard you as a one-dimensional critic.
  5. Don’t be afraid to suggest radical changes in the story. One purpose of critiquing a story is to re-open the author’s mind to unexplored possibilities, and sometimes, in the process of rejecting a wild suggestion, the author will simultaneously come up with a better one. In other words, looking at something which the author knows won’t work may reveal what will work.

Some more technical suggestions:

  1. In what ways are characters created – through action and dialogue, through their thoughts, through others’ reactions to them, through the narrator’s commentary, through the quality of the language that surrounds them?
  2. Are important moments shown in scenes rather than in summary? What is the relationship between scene and summary – key moments should be in scene, but ten pages of summary and three of scene still isn’t likely to make an effective story even if the key event takes place in the story’s single scene. Do individual summaries go on too long?
  3. What point of view is used to tell the story? Is that point of view effective, or might another be more effective?
  4. Is the language consistent, or does it range out of control from very colloquial to very formal? Is the language appropriate to the characters? And beyond that: is the language doing anything special, anything that has you noticing and appreciating it? Is there a sense of an individual mind behind the words?
  5. Is the central character involved in relationships, conflict, action, or does s/he tend to go off alone and soliloquize at key moments? If the latter, is there a way to involve him/her with other characters? Further, does the story create or at least imply a society within which the central character moves?

Originally published in Southeast Writers’ Handbook: see our Books