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Submissions Wanted. If you’d like a fresh look at your opening chapter or prologue, please email your submission to me re the directions at the bottom of this post.
The Flogometer challenge: can you craft a first page that compels me to turn to the next page? Caveat: Please keep in mind that this is entirely subjective.
Note: all the Flogometer posts are here.
What's a first page in publishingland? In a properly formatted novel manuscript (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type, etc.) there should be about 16 or 17 lines on the first page (first pages of chapters/prologues start about 1/3 of the way down the page). Directions for submissions are below—they include a request to post the rest of the chapter, but that’s optional.
A word about the line-editing in these posts: it’s “one-pass” editing, and I don’t try to address everything, which is why I appreciate the comments from the FtQ tribe. In a paid edit, I go through each manuscript three times.
Before you rip into today’s submission, consider this checklist of first-page ingredients from my book, Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling. While it's not a requirement that all of these elements must be on the first page, they can be, and I think you have the best chance of hooking a reader if they are.
A First-page Checklist
- It begins connecting the reader with the protagonist
- Something is happening. On a first page, this does NOT include a character musing about whatever.
- What happens is dramatized in an immediate scene with action and description plus, if it works, dialogue.
- What happens moves the story forward.
- What happens has consequences for the protagonist.
- The protagonist desires something.
- The protagonist does something.
- There’s enough of a setting to orient the reader as to where things are happening.
- It happens in the NOW of the story.
- Backstory? What backstory? We’re in the NOW of the story.
- Set-up? What set-up? We’re in the NOW of the story.
- What happens raises a story question—what happens next? or why did that happen?
Carolyn sends a first chapter of Bellinger Beauty. The rest of the chapter follows the break.
Images of my husband’s dead body flooded my mind as I drove down Placida Road that Florida morning on my way to meet Howard Bellinger,
Throat tight and tears burning in my eyes, I pulled to the side of the road. Shockwaves tore through me as if I’d just received the news.
Two campers found Brett in the woods not far from here. The police had given up looking for his killer. I hadn’t.
A few quick glances out my window showed me Flamingo Mist looked pretty much the same, For every stucco palace with a tile roof, swimming pool and two-acre plot, dozens of trailer parks and cracker box houses sprouted like yard mushrooms after the summer rains. For some reason, the scenery calmed me and I drove back onto the road.
Flamingo Boulevard loomed ahead. I parked at the Elk's Lodge next to a sign listing Square Five and Lulu's Crew, the bands that would be playing for the dinner dances that week. When I stepped inside the two-story stucco building, the smell of fried chicken and French fries reminded me I hadn’t eaten breakfast.
The leather-faced man behind the desk stared at my business card before he stuffed it into the pocket of his jeans. “How can I help you Miss Gale or should I call you Zoe?”
“Ms. Gale’s fine. Which way to Howard Bellinger's home?"
Were you compelled to turn Carolyn's first page?
Good stuff here, I like the descriptions that give values to what we’re seeing, the voice, and a good story question. Well, it seems like the story question is who murdered her husband. It may still be, but that’s not clear in the chapter that follows, where it turns out that she’s a private investigator being hired to look for a missing college student. Suggestion to Carolyn: let the reader know on page one that she’s a PI. And, if the husband’s death is not the point of the story, then you might want to consider starting later when the current case is begun and if there are any consequences to Zoe for taking the case, etc. Nice work.
Comments, please?
For what it’s worth.
Ray
Submitting to the Flogometer:
Email the following in an attachment (.doc, .docx, or .rtf preferred, no PDFs):
- your title
- your complete 1st chapter or prologue plus 1st chapter
- Please include in your email permission to post it on FtQ.
Note: I’m adding a copyright notice for the writer at the end of the post. I’ll use just the first name unless I’m told I can use the full name.
- Also, please tell me if it’s okay to post the rest of the chapter so people can turn the page.
- And, optionally, include your permission to use it as an example in a book on writing craft if that's okay.
- If you’re in a hurry, I’ve done “private floggings,” $50 for a first chapter.
- If you rewrite while you wait for your turn, it’s okay with me to update the submission.
Flogging the Quill © 2014 Ray Rhamey, story © 2014 Carolyn
(continued)
"Just turn left, you can't miss it. Stucco house next to the golf course. I heard Mr. Bellinger just flew in from Hawaii yesterday."
"Which island?"
"The big one. He spends a couple of months a year there. Myself, I like the Bahamas but Mr. Bellinger says Hawaii has better weather even if it is pricey. You know Mr. Bellinger?"
"Not yet."
"I know him pretty well. He comes here every Sunday for dinner and dancing when he's in town." The man gave me a quick once over. I wasn't a youngster and neither was he. "If you're selling something, I wouldn't knock on his door. He'll sic his dog on you."
"Dogs usually like me."
The man grinned. "Not this one. Sorry, have to go. Time to make up the menu for Sunday."
I left the lodge and drove in the direction he'd indicated. Flamingo Mist, the two county town on Florida's West Coast, was settled by my distant relatives who opened a trail from El Jobean to Vineyard and set up a store to serve area fishermen, or so my grandmother told me. She and my grandfather bought a lot of property, some on the posh Manasota Key where a master carpenter built them a beach house. She told me Howard Bellinger swindled most of it away from her after my grandfather died, including the Majestic Casino and Lemon Bay Guest House, where rich folks from the north spent their winters.
I drove by Lemon Bay, remembering. Brett and I had grown up in Flamingo Mist and skipped stones across this water when we were little. Looking across the bay, I once again heard the sound of stones skipping cachou, cachou, cachou and saw his freckled face and the NY Giants cap on his head.
“Did you hear that?” His words echoed in my head as if he’d just spoken them.
Yes, I still hear it and wish you were here.
We’d sneaked into the Majestic Casino in middle school, and sneaked in the window of the Lemon Bay Guest House wedding suite in high school. It was there we gave each other our first kiss. The memories of those times were bittersweet in my mind and even more hurtful than seeing my husband’s dead body. Maybe because they’d never come again or maybe because it was a more innocent, trusting time.
My birthplace stretched out on the edge of this sweltering wasteland like a sleeping beauty. From a distance, this typical Florida subdivision appeared perfect, thrown down amid well-manicured lawns, garnished with golf courses and creeks born of retention ditches.
It was all a lie.
Bellinger's abode stood high above Pebble Beach Creek. My Tracer could barely negotiate the sandy road, and the trip sent the bag of clothes I'd meant to give Goodwill sliding around in the back seat.
The house's forbidding stucco face stood out gray and domineering. The windows reminded me of angry eyes. They seemed to be watching as I drove up to the entrance, or was that someone peeking out of an upstairs window? Standing on the porch I stared down over the golf course and caught a glimpse of a restless creek.
A big-boned, well-fleshed man in an expensive, but rumpled business suit opened the door. Behind him growled a large dog that reminded me of the Hound of the Baskervilles. "Don't mind Homer, he's harmless," the man said, but I held my doubts.
At the sight of Bellinger, a sick feeling crawled up my stomach, the kind I got after eating too much spicy food or when I felt like I needed to avenge a crime. I warned myself to get a grip and stay with being a PI, even though I wanted to flat-out punch the guy in the face.
Too uniformly gray, his hair had to be a toupee. That told me he wasn't entirely pleased with his own. Big creases ran down the sides of his hatchet face and his eyebrows sprang up above eyes of piercing blue, culminating in a look of disgust and suspicion.
"Howard Bellinger. You must be Miss Gale." His expression didn't change much, just loosened a bit about the mouth and eyes. Bellinger's half-smile came from a man who wanted to be liked but hadn't had much practice.
"As advertised." I handed him a card so new, the ink had barely dried. He didn't act as if he recognized me, but then why would he? We'd never met and my grandmother's last name was Winslow.
"You made good time from the beach. Didn't think you'd get here 'til later."
"I started out right after you called. You said the matter was urgent."
"Very urgent. Come in." The dog escaped onto the porch, and Mr. Bellinger led me along a musty hallway under creaky ceiling fans. He walked like a man who had once had a lot, but lost most of it. I wondered if my grandmother's property was part of what he'd lost.
We stepped into a living room while he kept up a constant chatter about his visit to Hawaii. "Can't even offer you a drink. I just got back to reopen the place and my housekeeper is sick. I wasn't even going to come back this time, but I thought Wanda might have come home." He sniffed. I suspected that meant he thought Wanda may never wander back.
The living room had a closed in feeling of old furniture and older secrets. Sheets hung over a chair and two huge objects I thought must be couches. Heavy drapes kept out the light. Bellinger clicked on a floor lamp, looked around in confusion and went to the window. The violence with which he yanked open the drapes surprised me.
Sunlight drifted in as if it didn't want to come inside, roaming across the room to a vivid painting above a stone fireplace composed of raw splotches of color and angles. Bellinger stared at the painting as if it had analyzed him and found him lacking.
"My wife's work." He mumbled to himself, "Should have taken it down years ago."
"Is your wife Wanda?"
"Wanda is my only daughter. Sit down, Miss Gale, and I'll tell you all about it." He slumped into a chair and pointed me into another. "The school called me yesterday. I've been away you know. They said she'd left the premises and they were trying to locate her. Can you imagine? She hasn't been to classes since December. No one has even seen her. I've been so worried about her."
"Is that the University of South Florida?"
"No, Bonaventure College. You've got to find her, Miss Gale. She's so young, so naïve."
"How old is Wanda?"
Protective grilling on the windows reminded me of bars. I wondered if he installed it to keep Wanda in or keep trespassers out.
"Twenty, but she has been protected from the world."
I suspected he’d been doing most of the protecting. "Is this the first time she's done this?"
"It certainly is. Wanda has always been a good girl, doing what we expected of her. She's had the problems any adolescent faces, but she came through it beautifully."
"Who did she have problems with?"
"Not with me. Her mother, mostly." He glanced at the painting and his face took on a darker, more desperate cast. "I don't want to go into that."
He had a whiny, grating quality in his voice, but I cautioned myself not to react. "Okay, maybe I can talk to her mother then."
"She's not available. She's never available. I don't even know where she is and frankly, I don't care. We separated last fall. No point in going over the gruesome details. Our divorce doesn't have anything to do with Wanda."
"Could she possibly be with her mother?"
"After the way her mother carried on, I doubt Wanda ever wants to see her again." He compressed his mouth as if he wanted to swallow the words he'd just spoken.
"When did Wanda disappear? You mentioned she left college in December. Do you recall the date?"
He sniffed the air as if it had suddenly gone bad. "Early December, the school said. They didn't really give me a date. That's your job to find out. I did speak to Wanda's roommate on the phone last night, but I couldn't get a straight story from her."
"It's been two months. Have you tried to contact your daughter during that time?"
"I was in Hawaii. They didn't notify me there, just left several messages on this phone. It's not my fault she left school."
He rose and looked as if he might pounce on me. Instead, he paced back and forth liked a caged animal that remembered the jungle, but had no idea how to get back there. "You've got to understand this. I wasn't home. I didn't even find out she'd been missing until last night. God only knows what's been going on here."
"When did you last see her?"
"The day I left for Hawaii. She came to the airport to say goodbye. If her roommate can be trusted, Wanda never went back to school."
He stopped in his tracks and looked at me with something fragile glinting in his eyes. "I'm terribly afraid that something very bad has happened to her. I blame myself. I should have paid more attention to her, but all I could think about was getting on that plane and enjoying myself in Hawaii. I wanted to put the divorce behind me and maybe Wanda, too. I deserted her just when she'd reached out for help."
Every time he said her name, it came out shrill and self-deprecating. I aimed to soften it a bit to get some useable information from the man."Young women disappear all the time. They grow up, leave home and start their own lives."
"Without telling their parents?"
"Some do. You were away. She might have tried to contact you."
"I left her my phone number in Hawaii. She could have called me."
"Maybe she didn't think it was important enough. Maybe she thought you deserved a holiday after your divorce."
He fell back down in his chair as if the effort had seeped all the energy out of his body. "I can only hope she's all right. I just don't understand it. She’s so bright and had so many opportunities."
"Maybe she took one of them." I gazed around the prison-like room and felt like leaving myself. "Was Wanda happy here?"
He looked at me with layers of defensiveness lurking in his eyes. "She hasn't been here much lately. We always went to Maine for the summer and then she was in school the rest of the time."
"How were her grades?"
"She was doing okay, not up to her ability, but okay. She had a little trouble at school last year, but she worked it out."
"What kind of trouble?"
"She had to leave Columbia. Not because of grades or anything. It was suggested that she might do better at a smaller school closer to home. That's why she transferred to Bonaventure. It didn't please her mother or me for that matter. We both graduated with honors from Columbia."
"Did it please Wanda?"
He shrugged. "It seemed to. She even found herself a young man."
"What's his name?"
"She called him Dirk, I believe. I'm not expert on these matters, but I think she really liked this boy."
"Was he a student at Bonaventure?"
"Yes. I never met him. She hadn't dated much in high school, so I was pleased that she finally got interested in the opposite sex."
"Young women can fall hard the first time." I pictured my husband and my heart started to pound. I'd been a prime example of that adage. "What does Wanda look like?"
"She's very attractive. She has the good looks her mother used to have." He produced a leather wallet and showed me her picture, holding it far enough away so I couldn't touch it.
Wanda stared up at me through a clear plastic holder, attractive with a casual carelessness about her Howard Bellinger didn't display. Her blonde hair agitated around the edge of her face and her eyes stared back at me, dewy and lavender. She had her father's mouth, except hers held the promise of sensuality. An excitable type, Wanda could become a great beauty or a cold-hearted woman when and if she grew up.
"I'll need her picture. Can I have this one?"
He gawked at me as if I'd just insulted him. "No! This one looks the most like her. I have some others. You can have those."
"Good. I may need several."
"I'll go get them before I forget."
He left the room without another word. His steps pounded up the stairs, taking them as if he was in a race. He banged around above me until something heavy and metal crashed onto the floor and made the ceiling shake.
I'd gone along on cases with my husband before he was murdered, looking for lost relatives, but Howard Bellinger bothered me more than most. He sounded the perfect gentleman, but underneath his semi-polite outer covering, rage ruled. I couldn’t tell if his reactions were part of his grief for his missing daughter or the hostility he held for his ex-wife.
A minute later he boomed down the stairs and smacked his fist against the wall of the living room with such force, I thought his hand might break through the plaster. "Damn it! Someone's taken every blasted picture."
"Who?"
He glared at me and rubbed his hand as if it were a trophy he was polishing. "Probably Monica. My ex-wife's stolen things from me before."
"If she wanted the pictures of your daughter, she must be fond of Wanda."
"I don't think so. Monica never showed any affection for our daughter. She took the pictures to irritate me."
"How long have they been gone?"
He glared at the painting. "I don't know, but she hasn't been here since we got divorced. I haven't seen or heard from her since. She couldn't wait to get out of here and get back to her beloved East Palm."
"Is she still there?"
"Probably, but I have no idea where."
"You must have her address."
"All that's handled by the lawyers."
"Can you give me their names?"
Bellinger's eyes flared into balls of fury. "Yes, but I won't. I don't want you talking to Monica, and I don't want you trying to contact her, either. She'll just lie to you. You can't get a straight answer out of her. You wouldn't want to speak with her anyway. She has the vilest tongue I've ever heard."
He licked his lips and swallowed before he lifted his mouth into a menacing, sarcastic smile. The lines that broke out on his face told me that he didn't like the taste of his words. "I don't want anyone exposed to her language. She said the most dreadful things to me."
"When?"
"She came to the airport the day I left for Hawaii, too. She forced her way through the crowd and attacked me. I had to call for security."
"She hit you?"
"She swung her bag at me and verbally attacked me in the most vicious way, accusing me of taking all the money and leaving her without a cent. I was very generous. She got the house in Aspen and the cabin in Maine."
"When was the divorce final?"
"The end of November."
"Has Wanda visited her mother since then?"
"Never. Her mother hurt us both when she left."
"Monica divorced you."
"Exactly. She's hated me for years, but we tried to keep up appearances. She hated it here, too. She considered herself a young woman, somebody with the energy to go out night clubbing every night. I'm certain the two of them hadn't seen each other for months, maybe longer, until that terrible moment at the airport."
"Wanda was there when your ex-wife was?"
"Yes. I wish I could have shielded her from that scene."
"How did Wanda react?"
"Very well. She looked shocked and horrified when she heard her mother, but she behaved exceedingly well. She even tried to calm her mother down. I was proud of the way she acted except I thought she was too nice to Monica. She deserved much worse."
Rage came up in his eyes and I wondered what his ex-wife could have done to him. "Did they leave the airport together?"
"Of course not. On second thought, I didn't see them leave. I just slipped onto the plane and took my seat when they called for passengers. It's unthinkable that Wanda would want to go with her mother. Not after the way Monica carried on."
"Did Wanda have money enough that she could have taken a plane somewhere?"
"She does have some money from her grandfather, but I believe that's still in trust. I gave her more to help her out. She told me school expenses had gone up and her new car needed repairs. I gave her a couple of thousand to tide her over."
"Check?"
"No, cash. I had been carrying around a lot of money for my trip, but I decided my credit card would do fine."
"Do you know where she was planning to go right after she left you at the airport?"
He gazed out the window and I wondered if he was trying to remember or spent the time making up a plausible answer. Finally, he said, "Back to the hotel. I had a suite at the Sandpiper. The flight was early in the morning and I didn't want to drive for two hours to get there. It was paid up for another night so she didn't have to go back down here right away."
"Was she driving her new car?"
His eyes gravitated back to the painting as if it had a mystical hold on him. "I don't think so. She said she left it with a mechanic to get it fixed. She wanted to drive to the airport, but I told her it was dangerous to drive a car that didn't work correctly. I ended up taking a limousine to the hotel and a taxi to the airport."
"Did she drive herself or take a taxi back to the hotel?"
"I'm not sure. She mentioned that she asked the driver to wait, but that could have been for her mother."
"What did the driver look like?"
"Oh, dark-skinned and tall, maybe. I didn't pay much attention. I was thinking of Hawaii and Wanda."
"Was it a yellow cab?"
Bellinger crossed and uncrossed his arms over his belly. "I'm not very good at things like that. I just don't pay attention to what people look like."
"What about Wanda's car? What does it look like?"
"I never saw it. She said she bought a sports car from some student at Bonaventure."
"I'll ask around the college. What was she wearing that day?"
He looked up at the chandelier that hung from the high ceiling as if it might hold the answer. "A blue suit with a scandalously short skirt. At least she had the decency to dress up. Usually she wears jeans, and tee-shirts. She has much better clothes, but she told me that's how college students dress these days. It seems pretty shabby, but Wanda always had a mind of her own."
I took out my spiral notebook and a pen and started to write.
"What are you doing?" He leaned toward me and stared at the page, a look of anger on his face. "I told you not to talk to Mrs. Bellinger. Why have you written down her name?"
"Just practicing my writing skills." The words slipped out. Bellinger had been getting on my nerves for some time.
"What are you talking about?"
"Just kidding."
"How dare you kid about something this serious?"
"I know it's serious, but you've been putting restrictions on me, making it hard to conduct my business. I can't take your case when you close whole lines of information to investigation. I have to be free to follow where the evidence leads me."
"You have to remember that you're working for me."
"I haven't agreed to that yet."
He opened the leather wallet again and grinned at me through clenched teeth as though it gave him great pain to discuss money. "How much to hire you?"
"It depends on how extensive you want this investigation to be. I usually work alone, but if the case crosses state lines, I can call in colleagues from all over the country."
"I want whatever you find to stay with you. No sense letting a lot of people know. There is my family reputation to think about."
"It's your daughter and you know best, but you might want to call the police and have them do the investigation."
"I spoke to Sheriff Buxton last night. He's a friend of the family and used to work for my father. The sheriff thinks that just filing a missing person's report won't bring much unless there's a crime. Without it, those cretins won't lift a finger." His voice carried a tone of depression that stayed with his words when he added, "Sheriff Buxton recommended I employ you."
"I won't exactly be an employee."
"Investigator, then. He said you and your husband were discreet. I hope he was right. I can't have any newspaper coverage of this matter. I've had a few bad experiences with private detectives in the past."
"What kind of bad experiences?"
He held his wallet between us like some kind of magical protector. "I don't want to go into it. It has nothing to do with Wanda having gone missing. How much of a retainer do you want?"
I doubled the usual amount because I believed Bellinger was going to be trouble. That, and I wanted to pay him back for whatever he'd done to my grandmother.
He opened his wallet and counted crisp one hundreds into my hand. The expression on his face told me he didn't part with the green easily.
"It's a deal, but I have to be free to follow the facts."
He grinned at me but the smile didn't reach his eyes. "As long as you stay discrete and open to the possibility that Monica may try to spread noxious lies about me or Wanda."
"Has she spread lies about you in the past?"
He held up a hand and his eyes fixed me in a venomous glare. "I don't care to talk about Monica anymore. Wanda is the one on my mind and the one who should be on yours, too."
"Fair enough. You said Wanda came to the plane to see you off, and that's the last time you saw her. What was that date?"
"My flight to Hawaii was November 24th. I flew back yesterday. I tried to telephone Wanda from the airport because I hadn't heard from her. No mail, no telephone messages, not even an e-mail. She's never been very good at communicating her whereabouts, but I was shocked when her roommate told me on the phone that Wanda hadn't been at school for two months."
"Did your daughter's roommate sound upset?"
"I think she was very upset, but she managed to convince herself, or was convinced, that Wanda was with me. She told me she thought that Wanda had flown to Hawaii with me at the last minute."
"Was that something you'd discussed with Wanda?"
"I asked her come along, but she was just getting used to her new school and she wanted to stick it out. Wanda is a serious student."
"Where does the boyfriend come in?"
"I'm not sure."
"What did Wanda tell you about him?"
"Not much. All she said was that she'd met him in September. That was about the time she started at Bonaventure."
"I'll talk to the roommate and see what information she has. Maybe she knows the boyfriend. What's the roommate's name?"
"Amelia Wilson." I talked to her on the phone, but she didn't seem to have the faintest idea of what's going on in the world."
"What's the landlord's name?"
"She never told me. No doubt you'll find him at the apartment building. The address is 601 Osprey Drive. I think it's very near campus. While you're there, please talk to Wanda's teachers and her adviser." He took out a road map and squinted at the intersections. "The best way to get to the school is to follow this road."
He gave me directions in a frantic and authoritative tempo while I waited for him to finish. I figured him for a retired business man who was better at giving instructions to his sales staff than at doing anything himself.
When he stopped talking, he gazed at me for a reaction, so I gave it to him. "I will drive over there because I think this should be done face-to-face, but you'd get more information if you talk to Wanda's college professors yourself. Sometimes people clam up when they hear the words 'private investigator'."
"I'm not driving anywhere. I just got back from a trip. You don't have to tell them you're a private detective, but I'm paying you to do the investigating and I expect you to do the work."
"All right. I'll drive, but you have to come with me." We sat in silence and stared at each other. A wall of resistance had built up on both sides. On some level I realized that our last words might sum up our attitude toward life.
There was something chilling about Mr. Bellinger. Although I didn't like the man for what he’d done to my grandmother, I hoped he hadn't had anything to do with his daughter's disappearance.
I’m only a proof and a couple of weeks away from publishing Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling, a sorta-new writing craft book.
My original book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells, is now out of print. I’ve gone through it to polish the content, reorganized it completely, and added new content and examples. It still feels good to me, and it seems I’m in good company: a couple of quotes from Amazon reviewers on the original about what's in my book(s):
“This is one of the outstanding 'how-to' books about writing. I keep it right beside two other favorites, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Dave King and Renni Browne and On Writing by Stephen King.”
“Ray’s . . . advice on experiential description is on par with Donald Maass's 'micro tension' advice—critical to delivering top-shelf writing.”
Why a new version with a new title and new cover?
By going from 8.5” by 11” to a 5.5” by 8.5” trade paperback, the new size lowers the price—$16.99 versus $21.95—and may make it more convenient for writers to have in their bookshelves. At 320 pages, it should look something like the 3D image at the bottom of this post.
The change in print format also enabled conversion to ebooks, too, so there will be a Kindle edition published at the same time. Maybe an epub too, but I’m focused on Kindle for now.
By the way, did you know that you can get a free Kindle reader for a PC or a Mac that enables you to read a Kindle book on your computer? Same goes for epub (Nook) ebooks, too, with Adobe Digital Editions.
New title? I’m hoping that a more benefit-oriented title will attract more readers.
New cover? I felt the original wasn’t all that good and needed refreshing.
And I’m hoping the new ebook formats will also reach more readers.
Want to receive a free Kindle ebook in return for a review?
On Amazon, the new version won’t be able to bring to its pages all the amazingly positive reviews of the original. While it can point to the old FtQ page, it would be good to have fresh reviews—if, of course, they’re positive. But that’s the chance all authors take.
If you want a free beta Kindle version to read for review purposes, please email me. I’ll let you know when the book is officially published and has a page on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Pass this on?
More anon.
Thanks for your time and consideration,
Ray
This is the last post of content from my of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells. I hope you’ve enjoyed them and occasionally found something useful. And I hope you’ll buy the dang thing one of these days. Here is a second word processor tip, “Use the comment feature for better storytelling.”
Word’s Comment feature is a hugely useful tool. You can insert an invisible note for yourself or someone else, such as an editor. When I was in an e-mail critique group, we used comments in our critiques along with line editing with Track Changes turned on. WordPerfect also offers a Comment tool.
I sometimes create a skeletal version of a scene that’s not fully developed and use Comment to leave a note about thoughts for fleshing it out. Or maybe there’s a description or action that I know needs work. In one of my novels I described a character as having a “pretty face.” A critiquer rightly noted that this was vague—and it’s an example of a “conclusion” word.
When I came to that place as I was rewriting, I just wasn’t ready to deal with finding other language, so it was easy to highlight “pretty” and add this little note to myself: “better adjective/description—fine-boned, delicate features…” When I was good and ready, I took my time to do justice to the description.
The woman’s face emerged—oval shape, delicate features, and big eyes like you see in fashion models.
For me, that’s one of the best uses for comments—to annotate possibilities that occur to me when I don’t have the time or inclination to write them out. For example, in one scene the protagonist has left an intense but brief scene with his boss in which he quit his job. In the narrative I jumped ahead in time and simply wrote this:
In his office, Gabe slammed the few personal things he didn’t want to lose into his briefcase.
Then he left. Later, when skimming through the chapter, I had a nagging sense that the scene had ended too abruptly. So I highlighted “In his office” and added this comment: “consider having the boss following him into the hallway and finishing the confrontation.” I went back later and created a much stronger scene. Here’s the addition:
Gabe was twenty feet down the hallway before Lawrence’s voice attacked from behind. “You hold on there!”
Gabe stopped and turned. Lawrence advanced on him, his face flushed, his hands clenched into fists.
Lawrence came to a halt close enough for Gabe to smell the cigarette smoke in his breath. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Shackles lifted from Gabe’s mind, and he felt strong and free. “How about the right thing?”
Lawrence sucked in air as if Gabe had thrown a jab to his belly. His face reddened even more. “You’re one more word from being out of a job.”
Out of a job. But this job, with Lawrence fouling his work and yanking on a leash, would be hell. Gabe had been there before, suffering the daily insult of working for a lesser man. Last time it had cost him lots of sleep and the beginnings of an ulcer. He’d vowed to never suffer fools again.
One more word? Hell, he could do better than that. “Lawrence, don’t you have ass-kissing to do? I think the client’s going to need a long, deep pucker if you want to keep him happy.”
Like a fish, complete with glassy eyes, Lawrence opened and shut his mouth a couple of times. Then he spun and hurried back to the conference room. Gabe headed for his office, a flush of triumph thrumming through him.
There are different ways to add a comment. In W
From the Words section of section of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells: “Watch your as.”
As I sipped my coffee this morning, I typed, “Watch your as.”
What’s wrong with that bit of narrative? Well, I’m not about to be able to sip my coffee and type simultaneously unless I’ve got three hands. Oh, I guess it’s possible—if I were sipping my coffee through a straw while typing. But who does that?
We’re about to pick at a nit here—the misuse of the “as” construction in narratives.
I suspect you’ve seen a phrase such as the example above, and it may not have struck you that something was awry. When you examine it, though, it describes a highly improbable event.
Y’see, in this situation “as” means simultaneously. Often I see writers use “as” when they should be using “when,” or sometimes “after.”
In the opening example, it should be something like:
I sipped my coffee, and then I typed, “Watch your as.”
Following are examples collected from samples and manuscripts I’ve received.
Morgan collapsed onto the sofa as his knees gave way.
To my mind, the collapse was the result of his knees giving way. He wouldn’t collapse as they gave way because they haven’t finished giving way, and so are not “collapsible.” The fix here is to use “when” (after would also work):
Morgan collapsed onto the sofa when his knees gave way.
What about this one?
As I flipped the switch the kitchen was flooded with light and I saw Portia on the floor.
You see it coming, don’t you? While I’m at it, I’ll get rid of a “was.”
When I flipped the light switch, light flooded the kitchen and I saw Portia on the floor.
That was a clear case of “when” because light would not flood the kitchen until after the switch was flipped. With “as,” the switch could be anywhere in the process of completing the circuit, including before it’s completed.
“As” often ignores a stimulus and response scenario.
George stiffened as the man swore a solemn oath.
I see the stiffening as a reaction to the nature (and content) of the oath, not the act of swearing. How would George know it was solemn until it was spoken? An adjustment:
The man swore a solemn oath. George stiffened.
Some uses of “as” are downright sloppy:
Lee jokes as he swigs from his bottle.
Have you ever tried telling a joke while simultaneously taking a swig from a bottle? If that’s your habit, remind me not to buy you a drink. How it might be written:
Lee swigs from his bottle and then jokes.
From a romance:
As their eyes met her knees turned to butter.
Nope, the buttery knees were a reaction to the meeting of their gazes (not eyes). “When” tells you the sequence of events.
When their gazes met, her knees turned to butter.
From horror:
Chills ran down Tim’s spine as he realized that evil was close to his son.
Once again, there’s a ca
Upcoming Internet “appearances.”
Today and tomorrow (May 16th & 17th) I’ll be guesting on Patricia Bates’s blog, Of Ink and Quille. There’s a Q&A on Monday, and I’ll be stopping in throughout Monday and Tuesday to answer any questions that readers submit.
An Internet radio interview is set for Thursday, May 19, on the subject of my novel, We the Enemy. It will happen on The New American Dream Radio Show. The show starts at 7:45 pm Eastern time and the guest interview comes about a half hour into the show. They archive the show in case the timing isn’t good for you.
Look for the listen live link.
There is a menu item, shows; the main page has downloadable file links, and each show has its own archive page underneath that menu as a dropdown.
In hopes of inciting your interest, here’s a new reader review from an Amazon.com.
First of all We the Enemy is an entertaining conflicted hero, action novel. On that level it is similar to many Grisham, Balducci or other stories, an entertaining, compelling read. If it were only that it would be one of many books that allow us a few hours in a world unlike our own that we visit to sample different lives or just escape our own.
However, there is much more going on here. Into into his dark view of what our society could look like not long from now the author weaves ideas about re-interpreted constitutional rights that make it difficult for these rights to be ignored, twisted or used for ill. It is these ideas that make this book stand out. Not just another action story but a good story with compelling notions that stick in the mind. These ideas seem so reasonable (and yet not impossibly Utopian) that they keep coming back, teasing you to make you wonder why they couldn't be tried.
It's a good story full of interesting characters with some of the most interesting ideas of justice around. I recommend it.
From the Words section of section of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells: “Do without ‘without’.”
I’ll wager you’ve seen one or more of these phrases in stories:
- Without a sound
- Without a glance
- Without a doubt
- Without a thought
- Without a word
You might have even used them.
It seems to me that most of the time these phrases are about as useful as your appendix. They are comfortable-feeling collections of words that describe a negative, an absence. But I think they are frequently lazy writing. They are a missed opportunity to write for effect.
If whatever it is the story is doing without isn’t there, why bring it up? You, the writer, control absolutely everything the character and the reader experience. If you don’t put something into the narrative, it doesn’t exist, does it? So why tell the reader that what isn’t there isn’t there? Actually, in most cases the writer intends meaning, it’s just that
From the Words section of section of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells: “Adverbs: good? Bad? Yes.”
Here’s a simple-minded example of one of the reasons adverbs can be the bane of writing for effect. This is fundamental stuff, and I don’t mean to insult you…I just want to contrast effect to info. A story starts with this:
Jimmy walked slowly across the cluttered room.
Simple information. I see, fuzzily, a guy walking. Not very fast (but I can’t really picture it). There’s stuff in the room (but who knows what).
The effect? Not much. No clear picture comes to mind. First thing to do: ditch the verb/adverb combo and choose a verb that evokes a picture, at the least, and at best characterizes the action. If, for example, your story is suspense, then how about…
Jimmy crept across the cluttered room.
Better. Here are other possibilities, depending on the story:
- In a fight scene, Jimmy would have lunged across the room.
- If Jimmy is a dancer, then he glided.
- Make Jimmy a burglar and he skulked.
- If Jimmy is in no hurry, then he ambled.
- If Jimmy is in a hurry, then he dashed.
- If Jimmy has been over-served at a bar, then he weaved. Or maybe he tottered, or staggered, or lurched, or, my personal favorite, sloshed.
Each of those verbs evokes a picture of Jimmy’s body moving in specific ways. They are “visual” verbs that created a specific effect in your mind.
Stimulus > response.
There’s another bit of lazy writing in the example sentence—the adjective “cluttered.” It did nothing to create a picture. At the very least, we should see what the room was cluttered with, e.g.:
Jimmy crept across a room cluttered with shrunken heads.
Ooooo. See how specificity stirs up story questions? Don’t you want more? What about the room? Is it dark? Any smells? Sounds? Is anyone else there? What about characterization? Put on Jimmy’s skin and…
He was glad that the light of his candle was dim—all those tiny faces staring up at him were entirely too creepy. He set a foot down and winced at a crunch. He froze, listening for sounds of renewed pursuit. But only the scurrying of rats troubled the air, musty with the dust of the dead.
Rats?
Oh, fine.
Let’s get back to adverbs. There’s a reason adverbs rob you of effect.
Adverbs are telling
I believe that adverbs that modify action verbs are merely a form of telling. They are abstractions of action, pallid substitutes for the real thing, mere stand-ins. As a result, they rarely give the reader much of an experience. For example, one of my clients wrote,
She grinned mischievously.
Now, the average reader would take that in, plug in some sort of vague image, keep on rolling and never realize she had been cheated—but she was. There’s a much more lively and concrete picture to be created in the reader’s mind. For example:
She grinned, mischief sparking in her eyes.
In the original, because you have to interpret “mischievously” (what, exactly, is that?) the effect is to evoke an unsure image of a grin. In the second, you see a face in action: lips curve, you see a grin, you see eyes, you see playful activity behind those eyes. All that from four extra words chosen for effect. Or, hey, what about something like t
From the Technique section of section of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells: “Flashing back.”
Flashbacks are risky. You chance losing readers (like me) who really, really, really want to know what’s going to happen next which, if you’ve done your job, is exactly what they should be interested in.
When should you use flashbacks, if at all? Editors and agents see scores of manuscripts with openings slowed to a halt by the weight of flashbacks and explanatory exposition.
Some say to never use them, and that’s possible. But there are times a flashback can enrich a story, adding depth and meaning that would otherwise not be there. There are times when, without knowledge of the past, a character’s actions will seem unmotivated, and thus not credible.
So when and how do you use flashbacks? I advocate using them only when the knowledge revealed in the flashback is absolutely critical for understanding what’s going on in the story’s present. Beginning writers need to be tough on themselves here. They’ll feel like a reader needs to know things about a character that, truthfully, are not necessary for understanding the NOW of the story. It’s the NOW that readers want to be immersed in.
Another reason for flashbacks is necessary characterization—an example is coming right up.
We pause for notes on how to create a flashback that works.
- Weave it as seamlessly as possible into the action. Words such as “remembered” and phrases such as “thought of the time when” are bright red flags that signal to many readers that coming soon to a page near them is a part to skip. Transitions are key.
- Make the flashback a true scene with action, dialogue, tension, and all the storytelling elements that you use to keep a reader engaged. Avoid telling a past event, show it (unless it can be done in one brief, crisp paragraph). Readers want to experience what’s happening, not just receive information. A good flashback, for the moment, becomes the “now” of the story.
Here’s an example of slipping from the present to the past and back in order to give the reader necessary information about a character. Note: in the story, lledri refers to an energy these people can manipulate like magic.
Graeme had been so full of life the day they strolled through Central Park . . . if only she hadn’t said, “I thought the Met’s new sculpture exhibit was excellent.”
Graeme had shrugged. “Perhaps.” He gestured at the people who plodded through the park. “But there’s little else of excellence from that sorry race.”
Ailia’s contrary side had reared its head at the unfairness of the bias against the lessi that Graeme inherited from his father. “There’s plenty of good in them, and you know it.”
“I do not.” He surveyed the people around them. Dozens wandered, for it was a sunny day. “See their colors, Ailia. Is there kindness or good will anywhere?”
She had looked, and the lledri auras around their heads writhed with the nasty burgundy of hostility, the bilious color of lies, the ash-violet of depression, and the bruised red of violence. That, of course, only served to rally her resistance. “Perhaps not here, not now, but there are many good-hearted lessi
From the Technique section of section of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells: “From there to here, then to now.”
Often in an edit I’ll see a need for a transition. Writers sometimes just leap over time and space without giving the reader a clue as to what’s going on. This is caused, I suspect, by the usual syndrome—the writer sees all in his/her head but just doesn’t get it on paper.
So how do you get from there to here…or from then to now? I advocate using character and action. The following example is a simple shift from one location to another; such a transition, in a book, would include a blank line between paragraphs like this to denote a change in place or time.
Jennifer knew there was only one place to find Jason. She raced out the door and down the stairs to the parking garage.
As soon as Jennifer hit the smoky air in Timothy’s Tavern it hit right back—eyes, throat, lungs. God, how could Jason stand this?
What the reader will know without being told:
- Jennifer drove to the tavern (she raced to her parking garage).
- She is inside the tavern (so must have parked her car and come in the door).
Note how the transition is motivated by action that leads the reader to expect movement.
What isn’t needed because it has no impact on the story:
- Getting Jennifer into her car
- Showing Jennifer driving down Main Street and taking a hard left on Pine.
- Slamming the door of her car and racing across the parking lot at Timothy’s Tavern.
- Opening the door to Timothy’s Tavern and running in.
Here’s an example from my edit files of a narrative that needs transitional work. It’s from a paranormal romance. I’ll give it to you straight, then with my comments.
She slowed her breathing and reached for the deep sleep. Instinctively, her mind connected with Randall’s. Together, they drifted into sleep. Their breath left their bodies at the same time. Their hearts stopped beating as one.
Randall stared at the faces gathered before him. Some of them were good friends, others were mortal enemies. He took a deep breath and said firmly, “I’ve called this Council today to introduce my intention to take a mate.”
It’s not my job, as an editor, to create a transition for an author—but it is my job to point out the need and make suggestions. Here, along with a little line editing and comments (italicized), is what I did:
She slowed her breathing and reached for the deep sleep. Instinctively, her mind connected with Randall’s. Together, they drifted into sleep. Their breath left their bodies at the same time. Their hearts stopped beating as one.
* * *
(I added a line space and asterisks to indicate changes in point of view and scene.)
Randall stared at the faces gathered before him. (A little transition and scene-setting would be good. Even “the next night” would help. What time of the day/night is it? Where are they? How many council members? What are the attitudes emanat
From the Technique section of section of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells: “Linger for involving storytelling.”
I took a course in literary manuscript development at the University of Washington from novelist Laura Kalpakian. She gave my storytelling high marks for dialogue, description, and pace—but she didn’t get enough from my narrative about the characters to truly involve her, to make her care. For her, my narrative was simply too lean at times for her to experience what was happening to the character in a way that connected with her.
Her wise advice: “Linger.”
The following paragraph comes from a writer’s sample that I critiqued in my blog. In the scene, a teenage boy is approaching a girl’s home for his first date with her, and he’s never been there.
Her mother opened the door as he approached. “Come right in. Kathy isn’t ready yet; it’ll be just a minute.” He found himself in the living room with her mother, father, and little brother. He tried not to say much, passing the time, trying to get through the ordeal without coming apart.
In this writer’s haste to get the boy and girl out the door and to their date, he’s missed opportunities to draw the reader into the boy’s story and build sympathy for his character, not to mention create tension and story questions about what’s going to happen. Anybody who’s been a teenage boy calling on a girl for the first time knows how tense the situation and the boy are. The narrative would be far better served with a brief scene instead of the summary done here. For example, just one of the rich possibilities to explore in a scene is the look the father gives the boy (for he would give him a look, I’m certain), and the boy’s perception/reaction to it.
Kathy’s father lowered his bushy brows and gave Jimmy a look that made him feel like he was lying under an X-ray machine. He jerked a quick little smile and blurted, “Pleased to meet you, sir.” Then he realized how stupid that was because nobody had actually introduced them. The sweat under his arms cranked up to a steady drip.
I would linger more in that living room to capture character and build tension. In this writer’s manuscript, all too quickly he had the teenagers escape the girl’s house and go to a dance in the high school gym. When they dance close, she gives signals of interest such as pressing tightly against him, and he becomes aroused. When they leave the dance, the writer gives us this:
At twelve, he guided Kathy to their coats and out into the frosty October air. The car heater kicked in nicely as they drove down Main Street and into the countryside. The farms they passed were dark. Jamie turned down a gravel road and slowed.
The night is frosty, but what else is there when they walk out of that gym? There’s no tension or anticipation in this expository paragraph, but great opportunity to build it. Is there a moon out? Mightn’t he gaze at her face and have some romantic/lusty thoughts as he takes her to the car? If it’s like any high school dance I ever went to back in the day, there are kids outside, some smoking, some necking. For example, what if we lingered just a bit like this?
At midnight, he guided Kathy to their coats and out into the frosty October air. Laughter and the sweet aroma of cigarette smoke wafted from three guys huddled beside a pickup truck. When Jimmy and Kathy passed a parked car with steamed-up windows, he heard thumping and the car rocked on its springs. He glanced at Kathy and found her gazing at the car. If only.
From the Technique section of section of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells: “Story as garden.”
While enjoying one of my favorite films, The Abyss, I was reminded of the need for effective “seeding” of character and action. The film does it well.
At one point a roughneck in the crew holds up his massive fist and tells a buddy that “they used to call this the hammer.” That nicely sets up a time later in the film when he knocks a bad guy head over keister with one mighty punch. Because of the setup, it was absolutely credible. (Well, the guy’s size was a part of that, too.)
Another fine setup had to do with the hero’s wedding ring as a life-saving device. After a spat between Bud and Lindsey, his about-to-be-divorced wife (and the heroine), he throws his wedding band in a toilet. He leaves. Comes back and fishes the ring out. Cut to extreme close-up of wedding band going back on his finger.
While at the time this seemed pointed at characterizing him and his feelings about her—and it was—that wasn’t everything it did. Later in the film the hold he is in is flooding. He dashes for an already-closing hatch door and manages to put a hand into the gap. Ordinarily his hand would have been crushed by the hydraulic door, but it’s not. Yep, his wedding ring stops the door from closing all the way. Rescuers come and the door is opened. But that must have been one helluva wedding ring.
Without the setup, the ring-stopping-the-door trick would have been a mini deus ex machine and a laughable coincidence. These “seedlings” in the film work so well because they don’t call attention to themselves and just seem like normal parts of what’s happening. Thank you, excellent screenwriter, for your good gardening.
A mystery writer must, of course, plant clues—interesting how even the language for doing this kind of thing is from gardening—but the rest of us need to pay attention to our seeding as well, for both action and characterization.
In a romance novel I recently edited, almost at the end of the book the heroine is groped from behind in a public place by a man whom she assumes to be her current love. She goes along with it because they’ve made love in risky places before. Unfortunately, it’s her old lover doing the groping. As bad luck would have it, her current guy bursts in on the scene. Despite her sincere explanations, he goes into a jealous snit and declares that the relationship won’t work. Goodbye.
All good grist for the romance mill…but for one thing. The current guy has been Mister Adoring Puppy the whole way. He has accepted her dalliance with a celebrity in the beginning of the relationship, including a hot sleepover. He has been accommodating in every way, constantly declaring his love with words and actions. That’s another thing I talked to the writer about—the guy is just too perfect. No flaws. No character arc. No contention between him and her except for the before-mentioned snit.
The problem with how he reacted to this incident was that the motivation for a strong jealous reaction had never been set up. To react strongly was out of character for this guy. Luckily, it didn’t have to be, and I was able to suggest to the writer how to fix it by drawing on other material already in the story. It seems that the protagonist’s first love was jealous and, whenever she even spoke to another man, he would put his arm around her and interfere. If the writer has Mr. Perfect do something similar (an action to which s
From the Technique section of section of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells: “Head-hopping as seen by publishing pros.”
You see plenty of head-hopping in published works, and I wondered if I was taking the wrong stance in being so critical of it. So I surveyed a number of New York publishing pros—editors and agents—for their views.
An executive editor’s view of head-hopping
I share your peeve about “head-hopping”—apt term. So thanks for letting me blather on about it.
I think it’s OK to do it so long as there is only one point of view per discernible section. [RR: emphasis mine.] That is to say, so long as there’s something to represent to the reader that there has been some kind of jump. A chapter or a space break or something.
But when it happens in the middle of continuous action, it’s a serious problem. Basically, if you tell your story with recourse to everyone’s head at all times, you’re basically throwing out all the rules and permitting yourself everything. And if you are permitting yourself everything, then you also forfeit the right to hide anything of narrative importance—who the killer is, for instance—without cheating in a major way.
I’ve always tried to tell the writers that I work with that some kind of consistency of point of view—some ground rules that the reader can grasp—is an essential element of what is an epistemological problem. How does the reader know what he knows? Of course the author knows everything in advance—after all, he came up with the story. But he has to maintain the illusion that the reader and the narrative are on the same footing, discovering at the same time what the author has cooked up. After all, once the reader knows everything, the narrative is over.
Mystery stories are great examples of this kind of narrative epistemology. I always pointed out to the writers I worked with that all the Sherlock Holmes tales were narrated in the first person and by Holmes’s friend, for very sound reasons. Had Doyle used third person, a reader might well ask, “If you are employing the omniscient narrator, then you know everything, including the killer’s identity. In which case you should tell us!” Whereas by using Dr. Watson, he shields himself from this accusation. Dr. Watson can’t possibly know the outcome in advance, and so he reports on the action and shares with the reader the process of discovery. Watson knows enough to introduce Holmes to the reader, but once the story starts, he knows as much as the reader does.
With the advent in the twentieth century of close third person, the objection on the basis of omniscience is less relevant. A writer can use a kind of limited omniscience narrative. And I think that’s OK. Provided nothing is hidden. Agatha Christie used to use a Dr. Watson-like device for her Poirot novels, but then got rid of it, no doubt when she realized that simply following Poirot in close[-enough] third person was sufficient.
Still, that doesn’t excuse her gross violation of this principle in The ABC Murders, where she expands her omniscience but nonetheless hides crucial elements from the reader merely as a ploy to keep the mystery going.
So I think it’s very important, in head-hopping, to keep the points of view distinct through the use of clearly demarked boundaries—space breaks, chapters, etc.—and also to make sure that each point of view is seen divulging the entirety of its knowledge of the narrative.
[RR: Rather than “head-hopping,” I think of this approach as “point-of-view shifts.” The former involves sudden, unrestricted, unmotivated jumps in the midst of action while the latter uses clearly signaled breaks limited to reasonably long, discreet segments of narrative.]
Nonetheless, I do see many bestselling works of fi
From the Technique section of section of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells: “Point of view: a slippery slope.”
Point of view [POV] is the perspective from which a writer tells a story. There are three basic categories. Lynn Viehl, author of forty novels in five genres, gave these examples on her blog, Paperback Writer:
1. First person (the story is told from the perspective of I or We):
I grabbed Marcia’s arm. “What was that about my wallpaper?”
2. Second person (the story is told from the perspective of You), generally in present tense:
You grab Marcia’s arm and demand she repeat the crack she made about your wallpaper.
3. Third person (the story is told from the perspective of He, She, It< or Them):
John grabbed Marcia’s arm. “What’s wrong with my wallpaper?”
Much of modern fiction is written in the close third person point of view, which means the story as experienced by a character, from “inside” the character’s head. Many of the writers whose work I see try to do that. But they often “slip” in subtle ways.
To maintain a close third person point of view, the narrative contains nothing that a character CANNOT directly see, hear, taste, feel, or know. In other words, just like you and me in real life.
- When we’re talking with someone, we can’t know what they’re thinking—unless they tell us.
- When we see someone do something, we can’t know their motive or purpose—unless they tell us.
- If we’re asleep or knocked unconscious or shot dead, the narrative in our point of view can’t then show what happens to us. (I have seen this happen in manuscripts.)
Now, there are actually no “rules” in fiction, so writers can and do stray from this guideline all the time. But there can be negative results if you don’t keep a consistent point of view.
Consider why you might want a close third person point of view. It’s to involve your reader with your protagonist. To create an emotional bond, some form of caring. If the reader cares about a character, they’re a whole lot more likely to care about what happens next. And thus motivated to turn the page.
More than that, the closer you can bring a reader to a character, the tighter the emotional connection and involvement, and the closer you bring a reader to experiencing the story rather than just reading information.
If that’s true, then slipping away from the close third person has the effect of distancing the reader from a character. Of taking her out of the mind and heart of the protagonist. Of disconnecting.
I want to show you some POV slips that occurred in writing samples that have been sent to me. They seem innocuous, but I believe they have their effect.
Perhaps at first glance there’s nothing wrong with this narrative.
She felt radiant, and her brown eyes glistened with happy tears.
Here’s the slip:
She felt radiant, and her brown eyes glistened with happy tears.
Because we’re in the woman’s point of view, she can’t see her eyes glisten. That’s impossible unless she’s looking into a mirror, and she’s not.
From a storytelling point of view, the reader is forced a step back from the character. Because only from outside the character’s point of view can it be perceived that her brown eyes glisten.
She can’t see it so, if it is seen, it has to be from the outside. Maybe an arm’s length away? One other thing that’s a point of view glitch—mentioning the color of her eyes. While she certainly
Now we’re entering the Technique section of section of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells. is “When to tell, how to show.”
In a recent edit, I pointed out instances where I felt my client was telling versus showing. Even though I included examples of ways to show what she had told, she wrote to me and said, “I’m not sure I know how to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’.”
I can understand why. After all, we use the telling mode all the time in conversations with friends, and it works.
“I was really surprised.”
“I was so pissed.”
“I was incredibly happy.”
When to tell
There are times in a novel when telling is the right thing to do. It’s when you need to summarize an event because to create a scene for it would be wrong in terms of pace, tension, etc. A common example is when you’ve shown an event in an earlier scene and then the story comes to a place where your character needs to pass along what happened to another character. Rather than drag your reader blow by blow through something she already knows, you just summarize:
April told May how June had told Julie where to shove her opinion.
That’s a necessary and effective use of telling.
There are other times when it’s the best thing to do. For example, when what needs to happen is so mundane that to waste words on it is to waste words. For example, a character is talking on his cell phone. When he finishes the conversation, you could show this:
Bob pressed the little blue phone icon on his cell-phone keypad to end the call.
Truly, that wasn’t needed and smacks of overwriting. Instead:
Bob ended the call.
The reader can easily imagine ending a call with a cell phone if they’ve ever used one, and even if they haven’t used one, they’ve seen it on television.
So what’s so bad about a lot of telling in a novel? You “tell” a story, right? Not really. In a novel you dramatize with scenes. When you’re writing for effect, you craft words that create a very specific result in the reader’s mind, a vital sense of what is happening. You can only do that through showing.
Your readers want what they read to trigger in them the sights and sounds and smells of what’s happening in the story. They don’t want approximations, they don’t want a report, they want to experience the story’s reality.
How to show
You spot telling by looking for declarative sentences that tell the reader something. The verb “was” is often a sign of a telling statement.
Showing is using behavior (action, speech, thoughts) to illustrate or dramatize what the character is feeling/doing.
Here are looks at telling versus showing that come from actual writing samples.
The scene: Anna is beat from a long, bad day at work and now she’s spent hours at the hospital with her father, who has been unconscious for days. You want to give the reader Anna’s physical and emotional condition. This author wrote:
Anna was physically and mentally exhausted.
Sure, you get information. You have an intellectual understanding of her condition. But you have no feeling for what Anna feels like, do you? To show that Anna is physically and ment
From the Dialogue section of section of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells. is “Don’t say it with with”
I have a pet peeve when it comes to a certain kind of description in dialogue. It’s this type of statement:
He gazed at the painting. “Marvelous,” he said with satisfaction.
My feeling is that “he said with” construction signals lazy, ineffective dialogue. I went to Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King to see what they have to say about it. While they didn’t focus on the use of “with” in this way, it does fall within a craft no-no: explaining dialogue. Their position: don’t do it. Mine, too.
For one thing, it’s telling, not showing. The example above is just that—telling the reader what the character’s emotion is, not showing the emotion.
Saying it with “with” is lazy writing because good dialogue shouldn’t have to be explained. Both the words and the action surrounding it should show emotion and nuance.
What if the example above went something like this instead:
He gazed at the painting, and then smiled. “Marvelous.”
Written that way, I think the reader understands an even more complex array of emotion—pleasure, admiration, satisfaction—via the character’s behavior without an iota of telling. Here are examples of “withage” from samples sent to me and from client manuscripts:
“Dialogue,” she said with a huge grin.
Clumsy. You say things with your mouth, for one thing. Instead:
A grin stretched across her face. “Dialogue.”
Note that you don’t need a “she said” when you use an action beat in this way, although there’s nothing wrong with a “she said” now and then if it helps the rhythm of your narrative.
“Dialogue,” he said with such hope in his voice.
Nope. Show me with behavior that his emotion is one of great hope. What about this one?
“Dialogue,” she said with a grin that couldn’t help but make you smile back.
This is still “said with” and a complicated explanation of dialogue. What if it went this way?
She said, “Dialogue,” and then flashed a grin that couldn’t help but make you smile back.
There’s more than a “said with” troubling the following narrative, including eyes that “dart” around.
“Dialogue,” he said with his eyes darting around looking for hidden spies in the bushes.
Instead, how about:
His gaze darted over the bushes, looking for hidden spies. “Dialogue.”
The following example tries to show me an attitude rather than tell me about it, but it’s still driving in reverse.
“Dialogue,” Farnsworth said with the assurance of a bridge player laying down the ace of trump.
Isn’t his attitude clearer if you just turn it around?
With the assurance of a bridge player laying down the ace of trump, Farnsworth said, “Dialogue.”
Come to think of it, “assurance” is still telling, isn’t it? Wouldn’t the reader get it if the narrative said this?
Like a bridge player laying down the ace of trump, Farnsworth said, “Dialogue.”
Another aspect of “said with” is that it suggests that c
Today we move on to the Dialogue section of section of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells: “Tags: a game writers shouldn’t play”
Because each of us has a lifetime of experience with talking, writing dialogue in a novel seems like it should be easy, and maybe it is for some writers. But for others it’s the weakest part of their narrative. Three common flaws I see in beginning work are:
- Botched use of dialogue tags
- Lack of effective action beats
- Explaining the dialogue instead of showing it happen
Here’s a snippet of dialogue guaranteed to make you flinch:
“Please don’t do that,” he articulated.
“What?” she interrogated.
Okay, perhaps that’s a touch over the top. But how many times have you seen dialogue tags like the following?
Melissa turned to Irving. “Why don’t you zip up your pants?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Air conditioning,” he replied.
What’s with “she asked” and “he replied”? The question mark clearly tells the reader that a question was asked, and the response is clearly a reply, and the reader damn well knows what they were. Yet “she asked” and the ever-popular “he replied” clog thousands of pages like verbal cholesterol.
When it comes to dialogue tags, a couple of clichés should be applied:
1. Less is more.
2. KISS—Keep It Simple, Stupid
Tags can tangle dialogue and slow pace; their absence can smooth and accelerate. Over-explanatory tags (he huffed, she whimpered) create lazy writing; replacing them with action or description gives the words meaning and tone that involves the reader, creates pictures, and enhances emotional effect.
Rarely is there a need for a dialogue tag other than “said,” even with a question. For example, there’s no need to use “asked” or “interrogated” or “queried” if you write
Farnsworth said, “Where do you think the monster is hiding?”
The reader understands that Farnsworth has asked a question—that’s what question marks are for. To add tonality, use description and action, and remove the “said.” For example:
Farnsworth’s voice came from under the couch in a whispery hiss that ended with a sob. “Where do you think the monster is hiding?”
To illustrate minimizing dialogue tags in a scene, here’s an excerpt from my novel, We the Enemy. In the scene, Marion Smith-Taylor, the U.S. Attorney General, is calling her office from out of town. See what you think, tag-wise.
Time enough for one last hail-Mary call—she opened her cell phone and auto-dialed her office. Suzanne Fisher answered. “Ms. Smith-Taylor’s office, how may I help you?”
Marion pictured Suzanne, not in an office outfit but bundled up in her pale blue terry-cloth robe, blond hair tousled, fair cheeks flushed. If Marion had her druthers, Suzanne would be helping her to a tumbler of Scotch—but that would have to wait until she was home. “Hi, it’s me.”
“I was just thinking about you.”
That was one of the things Marion loved about Suzanne—no coy games, she just said how she felt. “Me, too. Listen, they’re about to get here. Anything on the Alliance from Joe Donovan or Sally Arnold?”
“No word.”
“Damn.” She’d been praying for better information on the Oregon situation before the meet
Here, from the Description section of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells. is “Overwriting: the attack of killer verbiage”
Some writers new to the task of the novel put in every possible nuance and detail of a scene or action—and drown their pace and tension in a sludge of words. Invisible and deadly, overwriting can suffocate a narrative.
Overwriting is insidious, and can grow just a word or two at a time. Here are two examples from a client’s work:
He tasted her in his mouth. (Where else would he taste her?)
Her heart clenched in her chest. (Better there than in her purse, I guess.)
What pains me are far worse examples in published novels. Take the following trudge from The Experiment by John Darnton.
The scene: a woman enters a darkened bedroom. In the bed sleeps a man who she assumes is her love interest. Spreading minutiae like a blanket of kudzu, Darnton writes…and writes…and writes…
She thought that perhaps she should try to take a nap, too; the trip home had exhausted her. She walked around the bed, sat in a chair and unstrapped her shoes and took them off, placing them to one side. She stood up and unzipped her dress, letting it fall to the floor in a heap and bent down to pick it up and drape it over the back of the chair. She slipped her thumbs into the waist of her panties and slid them down her legs, placing them over the dress. Then she unfastened her bra and placed it on top. From the bed, she heard his breathing shift as he moved to a different level of sleep.
She walked to the right side of the bed, lifted the sheet and slipped underneath, pulling it up to her chin. The cotton felt cool to her skin.
Does the word “turgid” come to mind? If not, see a therapist immediately. Trust me on this: the entire purpose of this passage was to get the woman into the bed. Her method of disrobing had absolutely no bearing on anything that had gone before or anything that happened afterward.
It didn’t matter that she walked around the bed. Or sat in a chair. Or where she placed her discarded shoes. Or what she did with her dress or bra. Nor did her panty-removal process have any bearing—the person in the bed was asleep, and there was no sexual intent to the scene. And it didn’t matter which side of the bed she got into, either. Don’t get me started on other deficiencies in this dawdle.
When it comes to description, I’m with Stephen King, as expressed in his On Writing. To quote from his book,
Look—here’s a table covered with a red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes. In its front paws is a carrot upon which it is contentedly chewing. On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8.
As King points out, the paragraph doesn’t tell us what the cage is made of. Wire mesh? Steel rods? Glass? It doesn’t tell us because it doesn’t matter. Whatever the reader “sees” allows him to visualize the rabbit inside and the most important story part of the description, the number on its back.
King says that good description makes the reader a participant in the story. Exactly right. Crisp, tight description lets the reader fill in the details, especially if they don’t matter to the storyline.
In the above example from Mr. Darnton’s book, all that verbiage boils
Here, from the Description section of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells. is the second chapter, “Color narrative to characterize”
What a character says, thinks, and does is guided by personality, needs, perceptions, abilities and limitations. Of course. But I believe a writer should take that principle a level deeper: even expository narration should reflect the character’s personality, should be colored by the character’s persona in a way that creates a distinct voice in your reader’s ear. That portion of the story should read as if the character has composed the narrative, not the author. Done well, once a reader is introduced to a character she will recognize a character’s narrative even if the character is not named. Each character is a different color on your narrative pallet.
The key to doing this was brought home to me when a critique partner said, about a novel in progress that she was helping with, “I love the change of vocabulary accompanying the change in POV [point of view].” She referred to the word choices in the exposition part of the narrative, and had put her finger on the root technique for flavoring in a way that I hadn’t thought of. It’s the words, stupid.
How many popular novels fail to do this? I see them; don’t you? While dialogue may differ (often not by much), exposition is flat and non-differentiated. But it could be different. I say it should be.
Here’s an example of coloring a narrative from a suspense novel that takes place in the old West. When it shifts from one point of view to another, so does the voice of the narrative.
Wood thunked on wood and Zach whirled, his finger tightening against the trigger. In the doorway to the spare room stood a boy of about ten. A boy propped on a crutch, his left leg hanging limp. A boy with Tom’s long, serious face, his sandy hair, and his hazel eyes, eyes that fastened on Zach’s. They widened. “Father?”
Zach turned to the woman. “Where’s Tom Duval?”
She swayed and braced herself with a hand on the window sill. She stared at him.
He had to have an answer. “Who are you?”
She lifted her chin and leveled golden eyes at him.
“His widow.”
* * *
Amber felt him lookin’ at her. Like all men did.
Except for the fancy city suit, he was the spittin’ image of Tom. Same stocky body,
strong-looking, the hazel eyes with arching brows that made his gaze seem like it was coming after her.
Why in hell did he have to show up? A few more days and she’d have been out of this inferno.
Here are the narratives about two characters in a speculative thriller.
A tiresome clump of a half-dozen gang jerks swaggered toward Jake with cocky menace and semi-automatic pistols visible. They blocked most of the sidewalk, forcing people to step off the curb or sidle along a building front. Jake locked his gaze onto the eyes of the guy in the center and walked straight at him.
The kid kept his cool as they came together, but one stride from colliding he dropped his gaze and sidestepped. Jake cut through, never slowing.
He focused on what he knew of the Attorney General. He’d heard from his old contacts in Justice that she was honest and devoted to the law, and that she hated the under-the-table deal-making of politics. He had too, at one time.
* * *
Two punks, slouching against a gun shop window, smacked kisses at Jewel. A green stripe ran down the center of the blond’s buzz-cut hair. A red do-rag decorated the smaller guy’s shaved head—he cupped his balls and licked his lips. Ugh. She picked up her pace, her min
Here, from the Description section of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells. is the second chapter, “Describing a point-of-view character”
One of the first opportunities for a writer to break the spell he’s weaving in the reader’s mind is when the time comes to describe a character from within that character’s point of view. You’ve seen the hackneyed “looks in a mirror” approach—although it works, it just isn’t, well, good. But that’s just one among many clumsy ways to add description. For example:
She shook her long blond hair out of her eyes.
What’s wrong with that? In my view, if you’re close in a character’s point of view, experiencing the story as they do, you don’t include things the character would not think or do. If your hair is in your eyes, the thought in your mind isn’t to get your long blond hair out of your eyes, it’s simply to get your hair out of your eyes. In this example, adding “long blond” is an authorial intrusion that distances the reader from the character.
Maybe you don’t even need to describe a character
Don’t forget that you’ve got a reader out there, ready and eager to contribute to the vision. If you sketch in enough of a character’s appearance for the reader to distinguish the character from others, the reader is perfectly capable of adding details to the picture in their mind. Being a participant in building the scene is part of the fun of reading.
When Elmore Leonard wrote in the New York Times about his ten rules of writing, he quoted a character from a John Steinbeck novel who says, “I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.”
Leonard goes on to say this:
In Ernest Hemingway’s Hills like White Elephants, what do the “American and the girl with him” look like?
“She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.”
That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.
Readers will indeed fill in the picture without much help from you. While the author may know what a character looks like, maybe the reader doesn’t need to quite so much.
If there’s something remarkable about a character’s appearance that affects the story, then there’s a clear need to describe. A couple of examples that come to mind:
- A character is so beautiful that she or he draws a crowd wherever she or he goes.
- A man who is so ugly that he can’t find work because people can’t look at him.
But if you do need to describe a character, there are several ways to do it.
The “character thinks about himself” approach:
In this example, we’re in a teenager named Jesse’s point of view. He’s just remarked to his friend Dudley about a girl they’ve met who sparked a lot of interest in him.
Dudley shrugged. “She was looking at you.”
Jesse could think of only one word for what she had seen—medium. Medium tall, medium brown hair, medium brown eyes, medium looks, medium build (if he could shed a couple pounds). Medium nobody.
Jesse’s relatively low self-esteem gives the reader enough of a picture to go on. The passage continues, finding a way to give the reader Jesse’s age, but doing it within the context of describing the girl, which leads to. . .
The “see a character through another’s eyes” approach:
Jesse had figured the rancher’s daughter for fifteen w
Here, from the Description section of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells. is the second chapter, “Use specifics to deliver what you intend”
I enjoyed immensely The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop by Stephen Koch, a noted teacher and author. One of the reasons is that he talks about storytelling in ways that resonate with the way I approach it.
One point he made that sparked for me is that we (the authors) haven’t actually told our stories until someone reads them. Koch writes:
To be sure, the reader follows the writer’s lead; but only the reader’s imagination, collaborating with the writer’s, can make anything happen on any page. It’s the reader who visualizes the characters, the reader who feels and finds the forward movement of the story, the reader who catches and is caught in the swirls of suspense, rides the flow of meaning, and unfolds the whole kaleidoscope of perception.
Our readers can do that—must do that—to experience our stories. Or, rather, their version of our stories. Each reader will add shades to the meanings of words and expressions and actions. They’ll never read the story we’ve imagined.
Still, we hope a reader will experience our stories the way we feel them, and we can get ‘em close, damn close, close enough, with strong craft. One aspect of craft, in particular, is the tool we need: specific, concrete details and imagery.
It’s what author and teacher Oakley Hall in How Fiction Works, calls “specification,” using concrete words and images rather than abstract words and generalizations. Here are wrong/right examples he gave.
- He was a big man with a beard.
- He filled the doorway, his beard glistening with curls.
- It was cold in the kitchen.
- She hunched her shoulders and rubbed her hands together against the chill in the kitchen.
- The crowd passed in the street.
- The street brimmed with the jostling of men in cloth caps and women in babushkas.
- It was raining.
- He drew his hand inside and licked raindrops from his fingertips.
Specificity makes your visualizations vivid and alive. And probably you “see” an image much closer to what the author imagined. Of Oakley’s examples, the one about the cold kitchen does it best for me.
Without specific, concrete images, your reader might imagine something you never intended, and thus stray far from the story you wanted to tell. And it’s important to make sure it’s your story, not a walkabout made up of random associations to vague language.
Specificity has to do with writing for effect. Or maybe I should say writing to affect, to make sure the things that go on in your reader’s mind are as close to your original thought as possible. Keep in mind the stimulus/response paradigm. What you put on the page—and only what you put on the page—kicks off neural responses in your reader that affect what she thinks, imagines, understands, and feels.
For what it’s worth
Ray
© 2010 Ray Rhamey
Here, from the Description section of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells. is the second chapter, “Inhabit characters to deliver their experience”
When an author story-tells well, a reader comes to inhabit a character, seeing and feeling as the character does—identifying with him. This is a good thing because if a reader cares about what happens to a character, she is compelled to read more (as long as interesting things happen, of course).
I’m a “pantser”—a writer who creates by the seat of his pants with no outline, as opposed to “architects” who plan ahead with an outline. I’m not one for creating character profiles that list everything from religion to shoe size. For me to generate narrative that draws a reader into a character, I shoehorn myself into a character’s head to play the scene from there, to truly “see” so actions and reactions correspond to that reality. I recently applied this technique to introduce a new character and setting.
Going into that scene, all I knew was plot material: the character’s name and his role as an antagonist. I knew that he was inside a vehicle in which he traveled and lived. I knew the outside of the vehicle was wooden, and that he was in a forest preserve outside of Chicago in wintertime. I didn’t even know what kind of vehicle he was in. That was about it.
When I inserted myself into my character’s head and looked around, the first thing I discovered was that the room he was in was paneled with oak, and that Oriental rugs covered the floor. Why? Because that’s the way this character would want his living space—rich and opulent. As I looked more closely, I saw that the oak paneling bore carved scenes from the history of his people. And that led me to how to discover and describe the setting and character in ways that helped the reader feel something.
You’ve seen part of the following scene before in the discussion of caring about characters. Look at it this time for the environment he’s in—it’s the result of stepping inside that character’s head and letting my subconscious deliver the details of his experience.
The percussive whup-whup-whup of a helicopter drew Drago to a porthole in his galleon’s quarterdeck cabin. In the forest clearing where his ship and two others of his clan rested, a half-dozen clan children, teens to toddlers, built a snowman. The tall curved hulls of the sixteenth-century Spanish vessels, all grace when they sailed through the air, now seemed awkward, supports angling out like spider legs to hold them upright. The daylight was dim under the gray January sky, but that didn’t seem to matter to the children.
The helicopter grew closer and smothered their giggles. The galleons vanished behind glaméres of snow-clad forest, the illusions broadcast by alert sentries.
All save one of the children disappeared as well, disguised as young trees. Little Alexandra, her skills not yet awakened, burst into tears. Drago swung the porthole open to help her with a concealing glamére, but then a sapling scooped up the child. In the flicker of a thought, a fat squirrel appeared in her place. Satisfied, he closed the port against the chill.
The helicopter sound faded, the ships and children blinked back into view, and a snowball fight developed. Intrusions by lessi—and the danger they brought—were normal to clan children, but for Drago they were a long-endured infestation that he wo
Here, from the Storytelling section of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells. is “ Chapter endings”
A writer asked me this:
"How about chapter endings? Must they always end with a cliff hanging, hyperventilating, page turning, stomach churning, my-God-I-ripped-the-pages-trying-to-find-what-comes-next? I just realized my ms is structured chronologically and some chapters seem to end naturally with everyone going to sleep at the end of a day, and I’m looking for excuses to leave it as it is."
I know what you’re facing. The story is moving along. A chapter seems solid, it advances the plot, or characterizes, or both. It feels good. But your mental knuckles aren’t clenched at the end. Is that a problem? Could be, unless you have underlying tension from before that’s building.
Agent Cherry Weiner once took a look at a period mystery of mine. Her rejection letter told me that “the characters were good and the story was interesting. But I could put it down.”
From all I’ve read and heard, that’s what both agents and acquisitions editors are looking for—something they don’t want to put down. How hard is that to do, if the story is interesting and the characters good?
I know I haven’t answered the original question yet, but context is important. An agent has requested a manuscript based on a query letter, so it’s sorta screened (a great query letter does not always lead directly to a great read). She’s received hundreds of submissions, many of which are interesting or have good characters. The brain cells the woman uses to evaluate fiction have calluses. What do you think it’s going to take to create a story she doesn’t want to stop reading?
And she knows something you don’t—the fiction market is so tight and so tough that many acquisitions editors are turning more and more to nonfiction just to find something they feel they can recommend for publication. Your novel has to be something that keeps these equally jaded readers from setting the manuscript aside.
Keep in mind that this book is about compelling storytelling. I think that to succeed with fiction in today’s market, every chapter must compel the reader to turn the page because they gotta know what happens.
Does this necessarily mean that every chapter must “always end with a cliff hanging, hyperventilating, page turning, stomach churning, my-God-I-ripped-the-pages-trying-to-find-what-comes-next?”
What every story must do, whether at chapter beginning, middle, or end, is raise story questions that are so provocative, so engaging, so rife with intrigue, that the reader is compelled to keep reading. When I reread the novel that Cherry Weiner rejected, I came to places where I felt I could put it down. She was right. I sent it to my then agent and, even though he loved the two novels he was representing at the time, he couldn’t seem to finish reading that one. I haven’t spent the time to figure out how to fix it yet, but that’s the tough truth.
But story questions can be cumulative; they can add up to create an overriding level of tension in the reader. It’s that level of tension that carries readers through exposition and description. And I think it can affect the reader’s take on a fairly benign chapter.
Midway into one of my novels, a protagonist has just escaped torture and death at the hands of a not-so-ethical Homeland Security agent. The reader knows that he will continue to be pursued. He can’t return to his life. He’s lost his job. He’s on the run. And the reader knows much more about the c
Here, from the Storytelling section of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells. is “ It takes story questions to turn pages.”
To keep a reader reading—especially an agent or editor overwhelmed with submissions—I believe a narrative must continually spark story questions in a reader’s mind. Emphasis on continually: please, no scenic side trips. There’s no more important time to sprout questions than when your novel opens. I learn best by example, so I thought a look at how some of the pros do it might be helpful to you. These are from books on my shelves.
Anne Rice opens The Witching Hour with this:
The doctor woke up afraid. He had been dreaming of the old house in New Orleans again. He had seen the woman in the rocker. He’d seen the man with the brown eyes.
And even now in this quiet hotel room above New York City he felt the old alarming disorientation. He’d been talking again with the brown-haired man. Yes, help her. No, this is just a dream. I want to get out of it.
Even the first sentence raises a story question: Why is the doctor afraid?
I was enthralled by Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. Here’s how it drew me in with a story question provoked by the second sentence.
My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. In newspaper photos of missing girls from the seventies, most looked like me: white girls with mousy brown hair. This was before kids of all races and genders started appearing on milk cartons or in the daily mail. It was still back when people believed things like that didn’t happen.
If that voice alone isn’t enough to hook you, don’t you just have to keep reading long enough to find out what happened to Susie? And note that the author slips in an “active” description of the character in the context of the story question and the character’s thoughts.
I like openings that involve you with the protagonist right away. Here’s the opening from The Footprints of God, by Greg Iles. The first paragraph raises a question that forces you to read further.
“My name is David Tennant, M.D. I’m professor of ethics at the University of Virginia Medical School, and if you’re watching this tape, I’m dead.”
I took a breath and gathered myself. I didn’t want to rant. I’d mounted my Sony camcorder on a tripod and rotated the LCD screen in order to see myself as I spoke. I’d lost weight over the past weeks. My eyes were red with fatigue, the orbits shiny and dark. I looked more like a hunted criminal than a grieving friend.
Story questions don’t, however, have to be limited to what’s happening plot-wise; they can be about the character. Here’s how Pulitzer Prize winner Carol Shields opens Unless:
It happens that I am going through a period of great unhappiness and loss just now. All my life I’ve heard people speak of finding themselves in acute pain, bankrupt in spirit and body, but I’ve never understood what they meant. To lose. To have lost. I believed these visitations of darkness lasted only a few minutes or hours and that these saddened people, in between bouts, were occupied, as we all were, with the useful monotony of happiness. But happiness is not what I thought. Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it’s smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.
We’ve all suffered loss and unhappiness, and the questions in my mind include wondering what caused hers and h
Here, from the Storytelling section of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells. is “ Create a really good bad guy.”
I’m bringing Vladimir back to illustrate creating a “good” antagonist. By that I mean a strong, interesting, and maybe even likeable character. Through the insights of an editor who critiqued one of my novels, I became aware of the need, and realized how to do it. Here’s what we know of good old Vlad:
Vladimir’s blade sliced open Johnson’s throat. The child-killer toppled, hands clutching his neck. Vladimir watched him writhe, and then become still. The bittersweet taste of vengeance filled Vladimir, and he smiled.
He has killed, but for a good reason—maybe. At this point, Vladimir could be the protagonist or the antagonist, although a reader is likely to be rooting for anyone who kills a child-killer. In this initial ambiguity lies a key to creating a good bad guy. We’ll return to Vladimir later to resolve the ambiguity with more of the narrative.
My first novel, as initially written, wasn’t all that good. But it contains themes I care about, and the core of a good story. Being a persistent fellow, I’ve rewritten it at least a half-dozen times. An agent represented it for a time, but it never sold. So I determined that, by damn, I’d publish it myself. I’m working on that as I write this book.
Faced with the prospect of strangers looking at my book with a critical eye, and asking them to spend money for it, I wanted to make sure that it was as good as it could be. I needed fresh eyes. Highly professional fresh eyes. So I, an editor, hired an editor, Lou Aronica, the aforementioned editor and publisher of bestsellers for a couple of top publishing imprints.
His critique exposed shortcomings in both character and plot, and he gave me guidance for lifting the novel to a truly publishable level. One problem was a primary antagonist. Lou said he wasn’t strong enough or smart enough to be an interesting character, and I finally understood that he was right.
I wrote this book five novels ago as of this writing, and I’ll admit that the bad guys were created just to be bad, just to attack the good guys. I didn’t like the bad guys, and I didn’t want my readers to like them either. So all of their characteristics are unlikeable—they are weak, corrupt, greedy, cowardly, dishonest, arrogant, and not all that bright.
Cartoony, to be honest, but I couldn’t see that then. So there I was, faced with what to do with this cartoonishly nasty, inept, cowardly guy.
How do you make a guy you really don’t like appealing?
An “aha” experience arrives
Finally it hit me. I needed to treat the antagonist like a protagonist. After all, he’s the protagonist in his story, right? He believes in what he does, and that he’s doing the right thing. It doesn’t matter that I disagree with him or that the things he will do are evil. What matters is that for him they are the right thing to do, and that his cause is just.
We’re all like that, aren’t we? Even when we do something we know is wrong, we do it anyway because, at that moment in our lives, it’s the right thing to do. Think of that last piece of chocolate cake you knew you shouldn’t eat. . .
Bad guys don’t think of themselves as bad guys. They’re the heroes. So a narrative that intimates this person is bad and what he’s doing is nefarious isn’t true to character. And it’s character that makes a novel interesting and convincing.
Take Vladimir. He seems t
Here, from the Storytelling section of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells. is “ Creating the care factor”
Readers demand a protagonist that they can care about. Not necessarily like, but care about. Uber-fiction-agent Donald Maass, in his Writing the Breakout Novel book and workbook, tells us that one key characteristic of the 100 bestselling novels that he analyzed is that the authors created protagonists that readers cared about.
Thus it comes to pass that acquisitions editors at publishing houses demand that your manuscript and mine have that characteristic. But how do you make it happen?
Relationships
Lou Aronica, an editor and the publisher of scores of best-selling novels, told me that the number one way to create caring for a character is to show the character in a relationship. This is not, he stressed, to make a reader like a character, but to create empathy, a person-to-person connection that can cause a reader to care about what happens to a character, even one that is otherwise not appealing. We all have relationships, and experiencing one on the page makes the character more “like us.” I read a novel in which the protagonist was a pedophile and killer, and while the character was disgusting in many ways, there were sides of him with which I empathized.
Here’s just such a character: Born-Again Bobby Strunk, who when you meet him, is an obese, slovenly, crude, arrogant, corrupt religious leader. Yet by the end of the novel, you care about him. The caring begins with this:
Bobby rounded a curve and the wrought-iron gate at the Shady Farms entrance hung open before him. Residents were unlikely to run away. The Farms was their haven; they had no desire to leave, except on field trips into town for a movie or an ice cream treat. Bobby parked in front of the converted plantation mansion and regretted leaving the air-conditioned comfort of his black Lincoln to crunch across the gravel parking lot to the main entrance.
Inside, ceiling fans moved the humidity around but created no relief. Sister Mary Agnes, stout in her black habit, came down a sweeping double staircase to greet him. Her somber clothing contrasted sharply with the mansion’s high-ceilinged elegance, but the nun always seemed at home. Smile lines crinkling the corners of her blue eyes, she said, “Reverend Strunk, so good to see you. Sadie will be delighted.”
Bobby thought Catholics had a crazy religion, what with their Latin nobody could understand and a mutilated Christ pinned to the cross. But integrity and devotion radiated from this woman, and that was what he wanted for his little sister. “How is she?”
“Just as healthy and happy as ever. I think she’s out on the shuffleboard court with a couple of our teenagers.”
Bobby found Sadie crowing and clapping her chubby hands at knocking her opponent’s puck off the ten-spot.
He called out, “Little sister.”
She spun, and when she saw him a huge smile glowed. She ran to him, her clumsy gait typical of the short-legged, heavy body of Down Syndrome. Sadie threw herself at Bobby with arms open for a huge hug. He returned it with equal vigor. Comforted and rewarded by her unconditional love, his troubles left him.
Bobby left behind all thoughts of being the man liberals labeled “the leader of the nation’s most volatile right-wing Christian sect.” He was a big brother, happily spending the next five hours with his twenty-year-old little sister, pushing her in the swing, laughing on the teeter-totter, dancing, and playing go fish.
They danced the Twist to ‘50s rock and roll in the rec room. They ate hot dogs and potato salad on the lawn, and talked about her world, a safe pl
Now offering free sample edits.
The free sample edit is of the first five pages for people serious
about an edit. It includes line editing that is much more intensive than
what you see here on FtQ, plus critique notes. For details, please see
the editing services section of my website.
Here, from the
Storytelling section of my book,
Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells. is
“Four ways to create tension.”
We all have plenty of tension in our lives, so why on earth would we
ask—no, demand more? Because it feels good in a page-turner story. What
happens when you don’t deliver a simmering dollop of tension on
virtually every page of your novel manuscript?
The agent sends a rejection.
The acquisitions editor says, “Pass.”
Agents and editors all want to discover an outstanding story. They
want to be compelled to turn your pages. But they see so many hundreds
of submissions that your storytelling needs to be almost perfectly
irresistible to get them to go much beyond page one.
Tension doesn’t have to come from bloody, balls-to-the-wall action;
it can be torment inside a character’s head, or a verbal duel in a
courtroom, or delivering the diagnosis in a doctor’s office.
Nor does it have to come entirely from the main conflict in your
story. Donald Maass talks about using bridging conflict when you’re not
focused on the main pain.
Continuous microtension
Thriller writer Tess Gerritsen wrote in her blog about a talk by
Donald Maass and hearing about his notion of “continuous microtension.”
In a story with a high level of conflict, she says, there’s “. . .an
underlying sense that something important is always about to happen, or
could happen.”
Tess added her take on the technique.
Microtension is that sense that, on every page of the novel, there’s
conflict in the air, or that characters are slightly off-balance. It
needn’t be a flat-out argument or a gun battle or a huge confrontation.
In fact, you can’t throw in too many major conflicts or what you’ll get
is melodrama. But small and continuous doses of tension keep the story
moving and keep the pages turning.
Frustrate your character
In a critique group member’s novel, she created a simple but
effective bit of tension during a question-and-answer session at a
public meeting. The protagonist raises her hand to ask a question.
Someone else is called on. She lowers her hand. She tries this a couple
more times, but is still not called upon. She feels frustration, and her
own tension builds. Finally, after being passed over yet again, she
decides to just leave her hand in the air. The reader thinks that surely
this will succeed. She’s ignored again. Finally she waves her hand and
gets to ask her question. So, while the main tension in the scene was
building at a slower rate, there was still pressure.
Add character spin to create tension
The
way the doc in this cartoon spins the facts reveals his bias and
agenda. Every few years, a political season inundates us with
politicians spinning each other’s words and positions in order to
distort and contrast them. I once hated the idea of spin…until it
occurred to me that spin is a terrific way to create drama in a story.
Spin comes from agendas, the intentions of characters. When characters
want something in every scene and words and actions are guided by
conflicting
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