One More, Just for Fun

Ah, good old Lemony Snicket. Those stories are so darn much fun precisely because of the way they play with reader expectations. My brother, who was unfamiliar with the series, recently watched A Series of Unfortunate Events with his young children and was shocked by the premise. "I had no idea," he kept saying. "They were trying to kill those kids!"

Yes, they were. heheheheheh

I have to throw this similar but more adult example into the mix. Alicia, I'll see your omniscient narrative warning and raise you one first-person transmogrified demon:

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Burn this book.

Go on. quickly, while there's still time. Burn it. Don't look at another word. Did you hear me? Not. One. More. Word.

Why are you waiting? It's not that difficult. Just stop reading and burn the book. It's for your own good, believe me. No, I can't explain why. We don't have time for explanations. Every syllable that you let your eyes wander over gets you into more and more trouble. And when I say trouble, I mean things so terrifying your sanity won't hold once you see them, feel them. You'll go mad. Become a living blank, all that you ever were wiped away, because you wouldn't do one simple thing. Burn this book.

It doesn't matter if you spent your last dollar buying it. No, and it doesn't matter if it was a gift from somebody you love. Believe me, friend, you should set fire to this book right now, or you'll regret the consequences.

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That's the opening from Mister B. Gone by Clive Barker. Barker has been writing kid lit for the last few years, and I think this opening shows it in the way he echoes Lemony Snicket. The book shows it in other ways, too -- much as I love Barker's writing, he was off his adult game here. The plot was underdeveloped, stripped down like the plot of a children's book. The premise was hammered into the reader until I wanted to beg the narrative to move on, already. I'm generally a huge fan of Barker's novels, but this one didn't satisfy. Yet I can't help thinking my middle grade and early teen nephews would love it.

But look at that opening -- again, as with the Sherry Thomas opening, we're not in scene. No dialogue, no action. The first person narrator is directly addressing the reader, which is unusual and intimate in all the right ways. The promise of the opening is explicit: reading this book will horrify you and change you.

I also love the way he plays with the notion of book burning. Who burns books? Crazed mobs led by wackos with no respect for ideas. Who refuses to burn books? Rational, intellectually-oriented people who are occasionally passionate about the First Amendment. In other words, readers. Asking readers to burn a book doesn't merely toy with their expectations of story and character, but it challenges, on some level, their self-concepts. This is the kind of subtle engagement that will make a reader turn the page.

It also introduces a major motif, fire, in a very direct way. The plea for fire is repeated (a few too many times) over the course of the book, but the reader's understanding of this request changes as the plot advances. By the end, we understand that it wouldn't just be a book we're burning, but the altered corpus of a demon who no longer has fingers to flick the match himself. It's a neat trick to have the request remain constant and the reader's understanding of the request evolve.

Theresa

Same plot, different openings

The opening of your story should promise what you want to promise. And that is going to depend a whole lot on what the story IS.

A comedy, for example, might (or might not... depending) use a deceptively bright opening-- the sunny beach with nice sunbathers everywhere-- to set up a comically disastrous afternoon; that is, relying on surprise to startle laughter out of the readers. Paradoxically, a tragedy might start with a happy scene, again to set up the contrast between what is to come.

It all depends. :) But you are dealing with reader expectation, and you should think about what that is and how you'll use it. Snicket is dealing with a child reader's expectation that stories usually have happy endings. That exists BEFORE the child picks up the book, so Snicket plays with it.

Another author, however, might know that children expect that happy ending, and go in the opposite direction, using that expectation to lull the reader into a state of relaxation. I've always found the opening of Little Women paradoxically terrifying (in retrospect), because it shows the Ordinary World of the four girls to be, despite their poverty, a place of family love and security. I remember very clearly how unprepared I was for what happened later in the book (you know—I still can't deal with it openly— B d-ing). Of course, now I see that I was being set up for the most painful of crashes because that first scene makes the promise, "If you have love, you will be happy." Ha! As if! Those sisters loved each other and their mother and father and see what that horrible cruel author did to them! (You can tell, I'm not yet over this. :)

Most of the time, however, there's a silent conspiracy between author and reader. The opening events promise a sort of book, and that's what the reader gets. However, as I said, it's a silent conspiracy. It's not as obvious as Snicket's opening paragraph. You generally aren't going to get a first scene that says, "This is a thriller. That means you can expect chills and thrills, and also don't be surprised if I reveal the identity of the villain very early, and don't waste a lot of brain cells trying to find the REAL villain, because he IS the real villain, you dolt. This is a thriller—an emotional experience—not a mystery—an intellectual experience. So settle down, turn off the higher brain, and prepare to be scared, okay?"

No, the author doesn't say it outfront like that; rather the first scene usually prepares the reader for this type of book, and the reader knows what to expect and so isn't disappointed when that's what happens in the book.

Let's take an example. Now I should make clear that the same basic plot can be done in different ways to produce different genres or types of stories. A murder can be the initiating event in the external plot for almost any type of story, not just a mystery or thriller. I just had someone email me and ask if a murder can be the start of a relationship story, where a mother and daughter reconcile. Sure. A murder can be a central or initiating event in a relationship story, a romance, a romantic suspense, a horror story, a comedy, a thriller, a suspense novel (which is different from a romantic suspense), a mystery, a legal thriller, a medical thriller, a family saga, a s/f novel, a psychological drama… really almost anything. Murder is the sort of big culturally significant event that will always get our attention.

But… each type of book is likely to have an opening consonant with its purpose (to horrify, thrill, bring a couple together, explore psychology, etc.). You know as a reader what an opening means. Haven't you ever been in a certain mood and wanted a certain type of book? I was recently undergoing a stressful time—just too much work, the usual—and I didn't want to read anything agitating, so I wouldn't get past page 10 in a book that opened like a thriller would. I still love murder mysteries, however, no matter what mood I'm in, so I wasn't about to dispense with the whole dead body thing. But I found myself reading—somewhat compulsively—the Brother Cadfael mysteries (which are beautifully written and realized, and I highly recommend). These start out, almost always, with a scene of order or routine or camaraderie in the Ordinary World (Cadfael's monastery). Then—and only then—the order would be disrupted by a death, but never of anyone we really cared about (not like that evil Little Women, grumble). And then Cadfael would out the murderer and order would be restored.

My point is… I could read the first scene and know what I was going to get, and if I were in the right mood for this type of book, I'd continue reading. Because I am, of course, a savvy, sophisticated reader, I can sense from the emphasis of the first scene what the book was going to be, and so I'm primed to get what I expect. This is kind of like the publisher putting the genre or sub-genre on the spine of the book, or the bookseller shelving it in a certain area. If you are in the "horror" section of the bookstore, well, you expect horror in those books, right?

But… something I've noticed in submissions is how often that opening scene is a mismatch with what the story is supposed to be. I edit erotic romance, and while I certainly don't expect explicit sex in that first chapter, I do expect a heightened presentation of the sensual realm in some way. I also expect, even if the romantic couple don't meet early, that there is the opportunity for or intimation of romance-to-come, and that might be as simple as the heroine being presented as "alone" in the first scene. (Just as with the Snicket excerpt above, the "aloneness" suggests its negation—the Baudelaire children presumably have been separated from their parents, and the solitary heroine is ready, if not willing, to be joined by someone else.) A submission that starts with, say, a young couple proudly showing off their new home, or an army grimly vanquishing the enemy, doesn't "feel" like romance to me, and it's not going to "feel" like a romance to my house's customers.

Okay, so let's get some examples. Let's start with an easily adaptable plot. Sarah, a young woman, goes to the funeral home to deal with the necessities of burying her Uncle Wally. She realizes somehow he was actually murdered, though everyone has assumed the cause of death was natural or an accident.

Now, assume that this really is adaptable and we can add or change to this basic plot. (Like maybe in the end she's going to solve the murder, or maybe she's going to marry the cop who helps her solve the murder, or maybe she's going to get murdered herself—whatever you want.) BUT… you have decided that this is going to be a certain genre or type of book. What I'm suggesting is that even given a similar set of plot events, different genres will produce different openings.

So let's look at a few possibilities, then maybe get more subtle.

Maybe you're an avid reader of Miss Marple novels and you want this to be a cozy mystery. What would you start with? I'd say… first, Sarah can't have been that close to Uncle Wally, because cozy mysteries are cozy precisely because there's not a lot of horror and sorrow associated with the death, hence the victim is usually not important emotionally to the sleuth. So… if we want it to be clearly a cozy, we might start with a scene that emphasizes Sarah's distance from the victim. She could get a call from a hospital saying that her Uncle Wally has her listed as next of kin, and she needs to come deal with his body, and she could say, "Who is Uncle Wally?" and only later figure out that he's her late father's longlost brother. Or if you wanted to start closer to the mystery (the discovery that he was in fact murdered), you could have her arriving at the funeral home and explaining to the director that no, she doesn't have a photo of him for the funeral program because she only just found out he existed. See how that sets up the "coziness"—which emphasizes the intellectual aspect of the mystery by showing the distance between the sleuth and victim, but also establishes a psychological need on the sleuth's part to solve this (because she's "next of kin").

Now imagine another author-scenario -- you're up for tenure at a university and your stuffy colleagues will be most impressed with a literary psychological novel (which just happens to have a murder in it… hey, it worked for Umberto Eco!). How would you start this book in a "literary/psychological" way that will make your tenure committee think you haven't been dilettantishly reading Agatha Christie novels in your library carrel? What sort of opening will promise a literary or psychological read?

Some other opportunities: Maybe you really are interested in exploring possibilities of, I don't know, how societies in the future will deal with dead bodies (so the funeral home is actually going to shoot the coffin off the space ship into space). What would you do in that first scene to present this as a science fiction novel that just happens to have a murder in it?

What about the subtle gradations of the other standard "crime novel" sub-genres? How would this plot be started in a thriller novel?

In a legal thriller?

In a medical thriller?

In a suspense novel?

In a romantic suspense novel?

In a private-eye novel?

In a police procedural?

In a mystery (not cozy) novel?

And let's transport this to other genres:

How would you start this in a science fiction novel?

In a romance novel?

In an erotica novel?

In a horror novel?

In a western?

In a comedy?

Your turn! Pick one or more of those options and sketch out an opening that previews that sort of book. Post that in the comments section, and we'll use some as examples. :)

As Long as We're Discussing Great Openings...

Theresa, what a great start! I notice it's in omniscient viewpoint, which gives a nice old-fashioned feel that works well with a historical novel, and also sets up for the irony of the definition of the perfect marriage.

Another omniscient opening is one of my favorites, Lemony Snicket's first page of his first book, The Bad Beginning. As a POV student, I love the very intrusive omniscient narrator, who constantly imposes his own agenda on the story-- notice how he patronizingly instructs his young readers about the definition of "rickety"-- and who uses reverse psychology to draw readers in. "You really, really, really don't want to read this book" is, any parent will tell you, just the right way to get a 9-year-old to read this book.

If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle. This is because not very many happy things happened in the lives of the three Baudelaire youngsters. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire were intelligent children, and they were charming, and resourceful, and had pleasant facial features, but they were extremely unlucky, and most everything that happened to them was rife with misfortune, misery, and despair. I'm sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes.

Their misfortune began one day at Briny Beach. The three Baudelaire children lived with their parents in an enormous mansion at the heart of a dirty and busy city, and occasionally their parents gave them permission to take a rickety trolley-the word "rickety," you probably know, here means "unsteady" or "likely to collapse"-alone to the seashore, where they would spend the day as a sort of vacation as long as they were home for dinner. This particular morning it was gray and cloudy, which didn't bother the Baudelaire youngsters one bit. When it was hot and sunny, Briny Beach was crowded with tourists and it was impossible to find a good place to lay one's blanket. On gray and cloudy days, the Baudelaires had the beach to themselves to do what they liked.

The Bad Beginning, by Lemony Snicket

Notice how Snicket defines two Ordinary Worlds-- the world of the reader (a world full of books with boring happy endings) and the world of the Baudelaire youngsters, which seems comfortable enough to them, maybe, but to us seems a bit threatening-- they must take a rickety bus from the dirty city to the gray, overcast beach... all alone. Why? Well, in both cases, Snicket is foreshadowing, quite obviously in one case ("This is not going to have a happy ending... you have been warned!") and subtly in the other (children alone in an overcast world... only for a day, it seems, but just you wait).

Remember the audience, which is not primarily gleeful POV teachers like me, but middle-grade students who are still learning to read fiction-- learning how to experience a story, how to notice gathering suspense, how to interpret cues in the setting and the action. In the first paragraph, Snicket guides young readers into anticipation of Dreadful Things by pretty explicitly predicting them, but in a backhandedly complimentary way ("If you still want to read this book after I've warned you, well, you're pretty brave!"). He's also teaching them to anticipate the worst, so that when they get into the second paragraph, they'll feel a frisson of worry when they hear about that rickety bus and that deserted beach and those neglected children. Then they're primed for the "Unfortunate Events," as he calls them, that are shortly to befall the Baudelaire children.

Alfred Hitchcock pointed out that suspense is more than surprise. See how that works here. Let's say you wanted the unfortunate events to be a surprise. Well, you'd probably ditch that first paragraph-- there's no surprise if the readers have been warned! And the second paragraph, where you're setting up the children's ordinary world? Maybe you'd have the same event, but brighten it up. The bus is rickety, perhaps, but with a jovial driver and pleasant passengers. The beach is sunlit and filled with happy people who share their lunches with the children. Then the bad event about to befall them will be a surprise, because there will have been no hint that in this Ordinary World, bad things happen to nice children.

But Snicket is going for suspense, not surprise, and suspense is "disaster postponed." But we have to sense the disaster coming to feel suspense. So Snicket keeps warning, openly and subtly, that it's coming. Look out! Don't be fooled! Yes, it's a beach, but it's a DESERTED beach! The reader is sensing that disaster. What form the disaster will take is still a surprise, but the longer the disaster is postponed, the more the readers will feel unease and dread.

That first couple paragraphs is a promise to the readers-- Something Bad Is Going to Happen.

More thoughts later---

Alicia

Strong Beginnings: One Example

I thought it might be useful to take a look at a strong beginning that emphasizes the ordinary world of the story, but before we do that, I want to make one other comment about my last post.

Alicia is absolutely right. You want to send your best work in at all times--though I have a hard enough time remembering what day it is and am unlikely to remember a laughably bad submission from months ago. (Though I'm afraid the "onion cryer" -- tears leeked from her eyes -- will be stuck in my mind for some time to come.)

My subtle point in that post was that I wanted you all to get a glimpse (blurry and vague, but a glimpse nonetheless) of what a stack of submissions looks like from this end of things. In that particular batch it would have been very easy for a solid submission to have leaped out at me. Instead, I got submission after submission with the same basic problems. Sloppy prose. Inattention to detail. Characters and plots that disappeared behind a thick wall of clutter. If you can avoid even these basic problems, you will rise above most of the competition.

OK, enough of that. Let's talk prose.

I first became aware of Private Arrangements by Sherry Thomas at a conference last year when her agent, Sara Megibow, told a story about finding the manuscript in her slush pile. Since then I've heard some other buzz about this title, so I went over to the Amazon page to check it out. Street date isn't until March, but there's an excerpt of the first chapter posted. Take a look:

Only one kind of marriage ever bore Society's stamp of approval.

Happy marriages were considered vulgar, as matrimonial felicity rarely kept longer than a well-boiled pudding. Unhappy marriages were, of course, even more vulgar, on a par with Mrs. Jeffries's special contraption that spanked forty bottoms at once: unspeakable, for half of the upper crust had experienced it firsthand.

No, the only kind of marriage that held up to life's vicissitudes was the courteous marriage. And it was widely recognized that Lord and Lady Tremaine had the most courteous marriage of them all.

In the ten years since their wedding, neither of them had ever uttered an unkind word about the other, not to parents, siblings, bosom friends, or strangers. Moreover, as their servants could attest, they never had spats, big or small; never embarrassed each other; never, in fact, disagreed on anything at all.

However, every year some cheeky debutante fresh from the schoolroom would point out—as if it weren't common knowledge—that Lord and Lady Tremaine lived on separate continents and had not been seen together since the day after their wedding.

Her elders would shake their heads. Foolish young girl. Wait 'til she heard about her beau's piece on the side. Or fell out of love with the man she married. Then she'd understand what a wonderful arrangement the Tremaines had: civility, distance, and freedom from the very beginning, unencumbered by tiresome emotions. Indeed, it was the most perfect marriage.


OK. That's 244 words by my count, and those 244 words accomplish a lot. I bet each of you, regardless of your personal like/dislike of the excerpt or romance in general, already has enough information to understand the ordinary world. Two characters, husband and wife, estranged since the day of their marriage, in a world where polite marital estrangement is the norm. In fact, these characters are applauded for their civility even as their estrangement is condoned. Right? Of course. It's spelled out very clearly. The norms are defined.

I bet you can even figure out where the story is going -- it's about how these two characters reconcile, and based on this excerpt, I'd bet a chocolate truffle that the polite facade will crack. There will be scandal and gossip and yelling. There would almost have to be.

Why does this opening work? If conventional wisdom is to start in the middle of a scene, start with dialogue, with action, with conflict, then why does this work? I mean, look at it. It's omniscient. Romance conventions require us to always be in the viewpoint of an actual character, but there's no viewpoint character here. There's no scene. It's all summary -- exposition, to be precise, and we all know that it's bad to start with exposition, right?

This example proves why rules are less important than the rationale behind the rules. Your job as the writer is to engage the reader from page one, sentence one. The "rules" (start with action or dialogue, start with scene, etc.) are really nothing more than methods which will generally help you accomplish that task. You can break rules IF you still get the job done by some other method.

What happens in this excerpt is actually quite simple. The author is playing with reader expectations to some degree -- romance is supposed to be about happy endings, finding your one true love and marrying and living happily ever after -- but this is the opposite of what we expect romance to be about. Oppositions create tension, and tension drives the reader forward through the pages.

But it's not just that she created an opposition. It's that she set up a world where the reader's expectation -- happy marriage as the goal -- is turned upside down. Toyed with. Redefined. "Happy marriage" in the ordinary world of this story doesn't sound much like the happy marriage we would expect in a romance novel. And yet the world of the book insists that their version of happy (polite distance) is the correct version of happy, and the reader's expectation of happy (romantic love and commitment) belongs to "foolish young girls" and "debutantes fresh from the schoolroom."

What is the promise this book makes in its first 244 words? Nothing less than that it will redefine the entire ordinary world's definition of a happy marriage. That's enough to make me want to buy the book just so I can read beyond the excerpt over on the amazon page.

Keep this in mind the next time you're evaluating an opening scene. Instead of checking off whether it starts with action, starts with dialogue, and so on, ask yourself this: how is the author loading tension into the opening lines? Is the tension being driven by an active scene (the common method), or by some other method such as the one used by Sherry Thomas, playing with reader expectations?

Theresa

Slush on a slushy day (snowed over the weekend....)

LOL, Theresa, love your examples.

The point all submitters should take from this is-- don't submit less than your best work, and frankly, don't submit until you know (not just think) your best work is really good. The trouble is, some editors (not me, fortunately for those submitting to me :) have very long memories. If months ago you submitted a proposal full of errors, the editor might remember and groan as she sees your name. That's not the reaction you want to produce.

This doesn't apply to manuscripts that just don't go. That is, we assume that 90% of submissions aren't going to be right, and there's no shame attached to that. It's the really sloppy submissions that stick in an editor's craw, the ones to which we can't help but attach value judgments like, "This author must have no pride," and "This author must be lazy." If you plan to submit to this editor again, you want this sort of value judgment: "This author needs some POV help, but boy, this is a meticulously proofed manuscript," or "I anticipate some plot holes coming up, but the author has really worked hard on her voice."

Alicia

Tales From the Slush

I'm cranky today because I'm finishing a line-editing project done as a favor for a friend in a bind. Normally this wouldn't make me cranky, but this manuscript is loaded with silly errors, and it's taking too long to fix, and I'm not getting paid for it. Plus I’ve been sick so I’m behind on my work and really don’t have time for unpaid extras.

This is the mood I’m in as I sit down to go through a stack of slush partials. I know this isn’t the best mindset for this task -- reading slush can be an exercise in patience even on the best days -- but there’s no help for it. My personal interior monologue is equally composed of expletives and reminders that I should keep an open mind.

Spotted in today’s slush:

"Lopped" used as a synonym for "loped," and then later in the same paragraph, as a synonym for "looped."

An author who routinely substitutes possessives for plurals: The dog's barked. She chopped the carrot’s.

An almost unreadable sci fi story that might take place in Europe, or might take place on a space station. Hard to tell.

In the same sci fi story, the author has an odd compulsion to avoid calling ordinary objects by their common names. Everything is either renamed or abbreviated. There's too much of this, and it's distracting. I can't follow the story because I'm so busy trying to sort out the nouns.

I can’t believe how many punctuation errors I’m seeing. This is pretty basic stuff. Commas are not end marks. And if you don’t know how to use semicolons, then don’t use them.

Wow. Someone thinks oatmeal is a proper noun and is capitalizing it.

I’m not even noticing plots or characters. It’s hard to get past all the distracting errors on the pages.

Now I can’t help laughing. The correct spelling is somersault. Not summersalt. From the same manuscript: he reigned in his temper. Maybe this would sooth her nerves. Tears leeked out of her eyes. *giggle*

Here are two partials for stories we would never publish. Not our thing at all, not even close. I’m starting to wonder if this is even my slush pile. It reads like a pile of auto-rejects.

Doesn’t anyone proofread anymore? Ah, well. Rejections all around.

Theresa

Request from a Reader

Reader Linda is asking for book recommendations.

Can anyone suggest any other series authors who write in Deep POV. Wind/Samuels is a master, but I’m hunting for others.

So, what are your favorite examples of limited/subjective third person narrators?

Theresa