Tag Archives: tips for writers

February 28, 2016 · 11:42 am

Commas Control Emphasis. Here’s How!

I have been thinking about the inordinate power of commas.Comma 1I intuitively understood this power from my own writing, but I credit Martha Kolln’s Rhetorical Grammar with making concrete what my instinctive ear told me: how such a simple little mark can help communicate precisely what we want readers to hear.

Grammar books and various grammar web sites, of course, lay down the kinds of apparently sacrosanct rules that drive real writers crazy. “You must, must, must put a comma there because the rules say so.”

Comma 2On the one hand, not necessarily. On the other, it’s important to understand how certain principles governing things like punctuation have consequences for writing. I’ve worked hard not to be the natural Grammar Curmudgeon I am, one who smacks other people’s writing around for rule-breaking, but by golly, punctuation is a tool!

We’ve all seen those fun exercises where simply moving a few little marks around completely changes meaning. A simple example is “Woman without her man is nothing,” which, with just a few tweaks, comes to mean its opposite. (Can you do it? Give it a try!)

But punctuation also controls rhythm and emphasis, and commas are tough little drill sergeants, lining up every word in its place.

Take emphasis. Read this sentence aloud:

  • There is in fact a reason for what happened.

Comma 3Now, in my view, whether or not we should set off the “interrupter” (“in fact”) with commas, as the grammar books instruct, is a judgment call. Leaving out the commas is fine. But when you add them, something happens. Listen:

  • There is, in fact, a reason for what happened.

To my ear, and Kolln substantiates this, the commas change the intonation and emphasis. In the first sentence, without the commas, I hear

  • There is in fact a REASON for what happened.

In the second sentence, the commas do what Kolln and my ear say they do, shifting the emphasis onto the words before the commas. So the sentence now reads

  • There IS, in FACT, a reason for what happened.

The meaning hasn’t particularly changed, but the way we hear it has. We shift our attention to the “facticity” of the claim. We get a beat on the FACT of this utterance.

Comma 4

But that’s not all that happens. The commas break up the flow of the sentence in ways that reinforce meter. In this case, it’s our old favorite, iambic pentameter, the most ubiquitous meter for English speakers (Shakespeare’s meter). And that change not only asks us to hit “is” and “fact” with extra emphasis, but also taps “REAson.” So that the sentence reads,

  • There IS, in FACT, a REAson for what happened.

Comma 5And as a bonus:

In addition to illustrating one of the functions of commas—to reposition emphasis—these examples also illustrate how breaking one of those apparently sacrosanct rules we all hear again and again can actually give you an additional tool to control emphasis. How many times has someone told you to strike out “there is” and “there are” every time they crop up? But if you try to get rid of the “there is’ in this sentence, the emphasis on “reason” that persists through all three versions withers. Compare

  • I can tell you a reason for what happened.
  • The facts reveal a reason for what happened.

Nothing wrong with these sentences. But their message—that what seemed random or accidental is actually the result of some cause that the speaker is about to explain—is flatter, more subtle. That’s fine. But if you want to be assertive, if you want to firmly refute the idea that the event is random, accidental, then “There IS, in FACT, a REAson” is your go-to choice.Comma 6

And there is, in fact, a reason why.

Both the “there is/are” and “it is” force emphasis on the words that immediately follow them.

  • There is NO POINT in not liking asparagus.
  • It is TRUE that I liked asparagus when I was a child.
  • It is SAD that I don’t like asparagus now.

This effect holds for the contraction forms of these constructions —”it’s” and “there’s”—as well.

The bottom line: Punctuation and sentence structure choices give you more control over how readers “hear” what you write. Don’t ignore the rules; just recognize how understanding the flexibility they offer can leverage the power of your writing. Don’t want to emphasize ‘FACT”? Leave the commas out. Want to hit hard on “REAson”? Hang on to that much-maligned “There is.”

Buble quote speech on cloud space for text

Do you have examples of how commas and sentence structure control emphasis in your own writing? Decisions you’ve made about how to re-organize sentences to take advantage of this little power tool?

 

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February 21, 2016 · 1:12 pm

Is the Hypercorrectness Troll Gobbling Up Your Grammar?

Writer with questions I remember one of the humorist Dave Barry’s satirical “Ask Mr. Language Person” columns years ago, in which the all-too-sure-of-himself Mr. Language Person opined that “‘me’ is always incorrect.” Barry was referring indirectly to an example of the phenomenon of “hypercorrectness,” which I’d argue leads to almost as many grammar slips as does its opposite, carelessness. I say “almost as many” because these slips are so common!

In a nutshell, a writer slips into hypercorrectness when he or she isn’t gut-sure about what is correct and inoculates him- or herself by making a grammatical choice that sounds just a teeny bit “fancy” and thus “must” be what an educated writer ought to opt for. Books and ladder

As with all grammar choices, whether or not a hypercorrectness slip will hurt you with that editor or agent you hope to impress, or whether it will get your prose chewed up in red in your business report, depends on whether or not your particular audience knows the difference or, for that matter, cares. I’ve seen so many kinds of errors, including just plain careless ones, in so many “erudite” places that I know it can be a toss-up whether your slip costs you an acceptance or gets ignored.

But I argue that knowledge is the power to choose with confidence. The “correct” choice sounds funny to you, so you’d rather go with the “incorrect” one because it feels more natural? Go for it. But it’s really nice to make that choice because you know what you’re doing and why you want it that way.

Free runners sport concept illustration

The single most ubiquitous hypercorrectness error, as Barry recognized, may be the prejudice against poor little “me.” And the single most common example of that prejudice is “between you and I.”

What? That’s wrong? Well, if you’re a purist, yes—for the same reason it’s wrong to write “the zombies were chasing George and I.”

Why? Because, in both cases, the pronouns are “objects” and should be in the “objective case”: that is, “me.”

There’s really a simple test. Strip out or move the proper name or problematic pronoun and see what you have:

  • Between I and you
  • The zombies were chasing I

See?Explosive set

Case two: Sometimes what sounds natural is better. E. g., the who/whom conundrum

I’ve suggested in a prior post that if choosing between these two options leaves you sweating, go with “who.” The situations in which “who” won’t work for almost all readers are rare: say, when you’re inverting the sentence or inserting the pronoun behind an actual preposition:

  • To whom are you speaking?
  • This is the person for whom I was waiting.

If you are writing Downton Abbey fan fiction, okay, you’ll have to master these forms. But in most cases

  • Who are you talking to?
  • That’s who I was waiting for.

will pass muster with almost everyone, even if they are technically incorrect. But as I wrote in my earlier post, the correct forms,

  • Whom are you talking to?
  • That’s whom I was waiting for.

Sad Editing!can actually sound more jarring in many contexts than the errors.

 

 

But the troll of hypercorrectness comes charging out from under the bridge when a writer gets paranoid and decides that “whom” sounds like what a smart person would say. Then we end up with

  • He didn’t say whom would be going to lunch.
  • Don’t give money to whomever asks for it.

cartoonguns

In both cases, the correct choice—and the more unobtrusive choice regardless of what’s correct—is “who.” (For those who enjoy these kinds of things, the rule is that the case of the pronoun is governed by its role in its own clause, not the clause in which it’s embedded.) You can actually apply the same test as for the “I/me” choice: you wouldn’t write, ” He didn’t say her would be going to lunch.” It’s clear you need the subject case.

Case 3:

I came across this usage (though not this exact sentence) in a self-published book just the other day:

  • Our worries lied in the way he was behaving.

emoticon face

Obviously, I can’t know what prompted the writer to make this choice. But I suspect it’s another instance of hypercorrectness, based on the Mr.-Language-Person-type precept that, in this case, “‘lay’ is always incorrect.” We’ve heard and heard and heard that people don’t “lay,” chickens do. So it must follow that anywhere our uneducated ears order us to say “lay,” we must really need “lie.”

Uh, no.

Confused business man, short term memory loss

There’s really no test or easy fix for this one. If you aren’t sure but really want to be, you have to look it up. I will say that the use of “lay” as in “I’m going to lay out in the sun for a while” has become so universal that many an otherwise persnickety person will read right past “lay” in this usage. They’ll probably read past “we laid out in the sun yesterday” (yes, “lay” is the correct past tense of “lie”). But I suspect that most readers would hiccup at “We lied out in the sun yesterday.”

Moral? Sometimes it’s better to be technically wrong than hypercorrect. If you really want to be correct, don’t guess. When in doubt, find out!

Magic book

 

 

 

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February 15, 2016 · 10:52 am

Don’t Let “Illogic” Suck Readers Out of Your Plot!

“Illogic” is my number one pet peeve as a reader.

Writer with questions

Well, one of my number one pet peeves: it’s definitely one of the experiences that throws me right out of a story, like hitting a speed bump at 40.

So what do I mean by “illogic”? Well, the most common form of illogic that I see is:

a character behaving in a way that no normal or ordinary person would behave, not for some logic that the writer has deliberately and strategically built into the character, but because the writer needs the character to behave this way to further the plot.

Perhaps other readers don’t share my sensitivity to these bones of a writer’s process, but for me, they can be quite visible, and usually painfully so.

Frustrated man at typewriter

Now let me stop for a minute to assure you: as a writer, I’m not innocent of these glitches myself. Fortunately, my writing group pays attention. More than once, they’ve pulled me out of the path of my own rush to get to the next scene (thank you all yet again!).

One common form illogic seems to take: the information dump.

A writer needs to convey certain information to his readers. So the story slams to a halt and characters are plunked down in illogical situations that give them a chance to tell readers what the writer needs them to know.

Scenario I (details have been obfuscated):

A character has just undergone major, major surgery and has just been wheeled into the ICU. A second character manages to wheedle his way in for just a few minutes to—one would suppose—convey his well-wishes to the surely woozy patient.

But no. Because the next plot point requires the well-wisher to perform a particular action that needs some justification:

a) the recently anesthesized patient is able to carry on an extended (three-page) coherent conversation, using formal, complex syntax, without even an expression of discomfort;

b) the well-wisher lingers for these three pages exchanging complex information with the patient even after having been ordered from the room by a nurse;

c) the nurse conveniently twiddles her thumbs, giving the conversation exactly the time it needs to wind to the necessary close.

Sorry, I don’t buy it.

emoticon face

 

This scene could have been made more palatable by a simple recognition and acknowledgment of the limits of the situation. And a strategic use of them! A patient who must gasp out garbled instructions, a well-wisher who must struggle to make sense of the incoherent drug-slurred communications in the seconds (not minutes) before the nurse storms back in—now the well-wisher has more mental work to do, and the reader’s sense of mystery is deepened, not thrown off track.

A second common form of illogic is the coincidence, the accident that somehow sets up a vital scene—just a little too helpfully for my taste.

Scenario II (this is from a best-seller; you may even recognize this scene, or one like it):

The protagonist and her ally face a violent confrontation with the evil, evil and physically powerful villain. The ally pulls out his cell phone to call for help—and he’s forgotten to charge it. It’s dead.

Speaking of convenience.

Beautiful sexy girl with gun

Folks, cell phones have presented a whole new raft of challenges to mystery/suspense/thriller writers. Those of you who have grown up with cell phones will not recall the days when you could manipulate events by the simple act of preventing your character from finding a handy pay phone. And there were times when few people had answering machines and no one had caller ID. It was waaay easy to make sure someone missed out on an urgent message.

No more. And it’s not fair to exploit the plot devices of the old days by disabling the realities of the present.

Now, if a villain snatches a cell phone and smashes it, that’s one thing. If you must get rid of that phone (and I can certainly imagine, and have needed, scenes where that darn phone creates a real problem), have it happen that way. Or find some clever way to make the phone play a role in the deception.

Here’s my own biggest illogic temptation: in my mystery/suspense novels, it’s often really tough to keep the characters from simply going to the police. But if they go to the police and tell all, the story’s over! I admit to not always being completely convinced I’ve explained away a character’s decision to keep things to him- or herself so the plot will keep to its prescribed route. I’ve tried to build the decision into the characters’ ambivalences, their failures to be completely honest with themselves about their motives, and to make that ambivalence a driving force in the story. I think I’ve had mixed success.

Romantic woman using laptop

What kinds of illogic throw you out of a story? What are your own most insidious temptations? How have you solved the need to pass along information or keep the suspense logical in your own work?

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January 30, 2016 · 12:28 pm

Why I Quit Reading Your Book

Sad Editing!I just abandoned another indie book.

It always breaks my heart to do this (fortunately, I’ve only done it a very few times). The act sets me to thinking: Was I just being a persnickety grouch, or do I have legitimate things to say about what makes a book work? This question is particularly cogent when I bought this book—two by this author, in fact—on the strength of a glowing review.

Obviously, my reaction isn’t the only one that matters. So is there anything of worth in trying to lay out what went wrong for me?

Writer with questions

I think so. After all, I’ve raised the question of whether we really serve each other if we don’t at least try to explain why a particular element of a book led not to a mild critique but to abandonment, even if we can do so only in generic terms lest we embarrass a fellow writer. And my thoughts here are not idiosyncratic; practicing writers have heard versions of them before.

So. . . .

It took three strikes to force me to turn off my Kindle this time around. Looking at these three strikes, I realize that I would have probably let two of them slide if the third had been in place.

The first of the two strikes I might have forgiven was a plot twist I didn’t buy into. But I’ve persevered, even if grumpily, past what seemed to me far-fetched plot devices before.

The other strike involved some bizarre inaccuracies in the author’s depiction of the setting, which I happen to know intimately. But I’ve hung in through (and enjoyed!) stories that present that setting in ways that don’t completely jibe with my experience.

In both cases, I could have been seduced into accepting or ignoring these slips. It was the seduction that wasn’t there.Eyeglasses and pen

Because the writer lacked voice.

In other words, had this book had voice, the pleasure of voice could have overridden my complaints.

But what in the world do I mean by “voice”?

Writing teachers talk about voice all the time. They know it when they see it. But ask them to give you a formula for acquiring it? They try. Oh, do they try.

Typewriter with questions marks

Like most people, whether you know it or not, you already have many voices. You know how to sound different when writing a Facebook post and an office memo. No one has to teach you that.

But “literary voice” is a little different. You learn the voice of an office memo by writing the way people write office memos. Literary voice, on the other hand, isn’t something you copy outright. There’s learning involved, what rhetoricians call imitatio. But from this learning, it’s something you create.

Here, I’m offering three dimensions of what was missing in the book I abandoned. These do not constitute the ultimate definition of voice. They’re just my attempts to put into “voice” a few of the qualities that make prose come alive for me enough to carry me past plot glitches and other slips. Typewriter and flowers

 

Voice is what says you have moved beyond “the rules.”

In the book I’m discussing, I could see the author conscientiously and visibly filling in the various checklists for what a writer ought to do. BUT: The essence of voice is riding those rules down the road where you want to go.

In this book, the rule that ruled the writer was a common one: Bring readers into the scene! Lots of sensory details! Make it come alive! Think of creative ways to say what you want readers to know!

But in this book, too many details, piled up on top of each other, slowed the action to the point that I skimmed ahead in frustration. You don’t want to confuse readers, but you don’t have to race them through every doorway, show them every blow to your hero’s head. Choose the most necessary, the most telling details. Don’t just pile up information because the rules seem to say you should.

Voice serves the story, not the writer. Book with heart for writers

In the books I’ve abandoned, writers often convolute their prose as if they must sound original—be a unique SOMEBODY—at all costs. But these choices may be robbing the English language of the power of its basic formula: Subject-verb-object. Someone doing something to someone. A basic sentence can have a modifying clause before it or an absolute phrase behind it, but English narrative dodges all sorts of pitfalls when it follows this basic pattern. For an excellent discussion of why this pattern works, try Joseph Williams’s classic Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. Let people do things. Some of the most powerful prose in the world aspires to no more than this.

Still, voice means surprising the reader—just enough.

Your characters, your settings, your scenes, stand in a line-up with the characters, settings, and scenes from every other book ever written in your genre. When what you’ve put in your book could just as easily pop up in somebody else’s book, you probably lack voice. In the book(s) I’ve abandoned, I felt that I could predict every move, every sentence. I was looking at what we used to call “stock”—characters, settings, and prose off the shelf.

How can you move beyond stock?

What do you know about your character that no one would expect from a generic description of his age, ethnicity, occupation, etc.? What do you see in your setting that tells a whole story but that everyone else would overlook?

Woman writing

To create such vision, try these two steps: 1) Brainstorm. 2) Cull.

Exercises abound in books, workshops, blog posts, to help us generate details we might or might not actually use in our books. Here’s the place to go for the crazy stretch. Don’t censor. Outlandish is okay!

Then cull. Set aside your exercises as long as you can. Come back to them to see which ones jump off the page. Pick one. Maybe two. Be strict! Only the best. Only the ones that nail something readers really need to know but would never suspect.

And if you can, work toward honoring that famous dictum from Mark Twain (here tweaked because my version sounds better): The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

Lightning, green field

Prose that captures lightning. not in every line but in carefully chosen moments of flash, has voice.

And I’ll forgive a lot if you give me voice.

What have I left out? What is voice to you? Send along examples of writers whose voice you admire.

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January 28, 2016 · 10:52 am

8 Words to Seek & Destroy in Your Writing

A great reminder post1 So important to double-check these words to make sure they actually do work in our sentences before letting them stand. I echo Orwell’s advice, though, especially about the various forms of the verb “to be” (was, is, am, are, etc.). I always ask myself whether I can find a strong action verb rather than a being verb when I’m tempted to fall back on one. Yet I’ve also seen sentences where writers twisted themselves into knots trying to avoid “to be.” Once in a while, the shortest distance between two points is a nice little linking verb!

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January 17, 2016 · 11:19 am

6 qualities of Bad Writing via Marcy Kennedy

Found on Chris The Story Reading Ape this morning: What do you think? Are these YOUR fatal flaws? Which ones have you recently forgiven, and which ones have caused you to stop reading?

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Source: 6 qualities of Bad Writing via Marcy Kennedy

Typewriter with questions marks

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January 14, 2016 · 10:41 am

10 things that red-flag a newbie novelist.

This is one of the best compendia of guidelines for troubleshooting a novel-in-progress that I’ve recently come across. My own constant struggle is the interior monologue, wherein my character thinks through her motives. Some of this is necessary, but in my current very rough draft I’m noting again and again, “Too long! Cut!” Fortunately, I have an excellent writing group that will call me out on this sin.
I’m working on a post about what has stopped me from finishing some of the books I’ve been reading in my quest to understand the indie landscape. Hamilton’s list captures many of the problems that I’ve encountered (and fight like crazy not to commit): 1) Lack of a story arc–in a couple of cases, everything seemed to be resolved mid-novel; why keep reading? 2) Detail-heavy, clunky prose I had to wade through. 3) Pages and pages of setting and character-building before anything happens. I love the comment that we all should wish to see ourselves as others see us! Hooray for honest readers. May they long thrive!

Kawanee Hamilton's avatar

THE PUBLISHING BUSINESS, WRITING CRAFT

10 THINGS THAT RED-FLAG A NEWBIE NOVELIST

Red_flag_waving.svg

by Anne R. Allen

Beginning novelists are like Tolstoy’s happy families. They tend to be remarkably alike. Certain mistakes are common to almost all beginners. These things aren’t necessarily wrong, but they are difficult to do well—and get in the way of smooth storytelling

They also make it easy for professionals—and a lot of readers—to spot the unseasoned newbie.

When I worked as an editor, I ran into the same problems in nearly every new novelist’s work—the very things I did when I was starting out.

I think some of the patterns come from imitating the classics. In the days of Dickens and Tolstoy, novels were written to be savored on long winter nights or languid summer days when there was a lot of time to be filled. Detailed descriptions took readers out of their mundane lives…

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January 6, 2016 · 12:46 pm

Show, Don’t Tell: Try the Screenplay Exercise

Typewriter and flowersWe fiction, memoir, and essay writers are all bombarded—understandably—with the need to SHOW, not tell. The temptation to tell rather than show—at its simplest level, to write “he felt sad” rather than letting his actions and dialogue reveal his reactions—haunts us all. It’s easier: We don’t have to hunt for ways to describe expressions and behaviors. And after all, “he felt sad” takes up a lot less space than “The room around him seemed to darken, the sounds of cheerful conversation to slow to dirge-like rhythms.” And hey, will readers interpret such descriptions the way you intended? Maybe the guy is just having a heart attack.

Hardest of all may be recognizing when we’ve slipped into telling. In my writing group, we all get called on it regularly.

One exercise I’ve found extremely useful in helping me recognize telling is the SCREENPLAY exercise: convert a troublesome scene to screenplay format.

Typewriter with questions marks

Why does this work? For me, it works because, unless you allow yourself the indulgence of a voice-over, filmgoers must rely on action and dialogue to interpret characters’ moods and thoughts and to understand what’s going on.

The rules are simple: at no point in the conversion of your scene can you indicate in your stage directions that “he thought” or “he worried” or “he felt—afraid, tired, hopeful, disappointed.” You may never enter your character’s mind. After all, your audience can’t. They can only see and hear what’s on the screen.

Too stifling? Surely in a mystery, for example, the character has to speculate internally about the meaning of clues. In a romance, the protagonist has to tell us of her ecstasy. Well, maybe. The screenplay exercise can clarify just how much telling we really have to include.

For a sense of what this exercise can contribute, here are a few lines from my novel King of the Roses and the corresponding lines structured as a screenplay. running horseNote that I converted the whole book, a choice that requires me to scrutinize every word because screenplays are radically length restricted (a 358-page book becomes a 100-page play). But casting individual scenes can provide some of the same benefits.

Set-up: A criminal who demands that Chris hold the Derby favorite finds Chris alone in a restaurant and escalates his threats. The criminal speaks the first line.

From the novel:

“I tried to get a hold of you last night. Why didn’t you answer the phone?”

“I was out.”

“No you weren’t. You just didn’t answer the phone. This isn’t a little romance we have here. This is business. What about it?”

Chris felt his spine crawl as if he were already dead, with demons dancing on his grave. The man stared at him steadily, tilting his head a little so that Chris could see his white, speckled scalp where his hair thinned on top.

“So when would I get paid?”

“You jocks is all the same. Money, money.”

“I haven’t seen any money.”

The man’s lower lip went on curling, but his eyes hardened. He stood up suddenly, clutching his overcoat to his paunch.

“I’ll tell you one thing I bet you have seen,” he said. “I bet you’ve seen what a jock looks like when he falls off in a race and gets his face stepped on. I bet you’ve seen that. Huh?”

From the screenplay:

BALDING MAN

I tried to get hold of you last night. Why didn’t you answer your phone?

CHRIS

I was out.

BALDING MAN

This isn’t a little romance we have here. This is business.

CHRIS

So when would I get paid?

BALDING MAN

You jocks is all the same. Money, money, money.

CHRIS

I haven’t seen any money.

The man stands, clutching his coat to his paunch.

BALDING MAN

I tell you one thing I bet you have seen. I bet you seen what a jock looks like when he falls off and gets his face stepped on. I bet you seen that, huh?

So what has this exercise done for me? Above all, it has forced me to look really hard at the inner reactions I’ve chosen to include in the prose-narrative format. Obviously they aren’t essential to meaning. I get to ask myself whether they add enough to justify the departure from action, from showing.

So the conversion allows me to see where my dialogue on its own takes readers. It also forces me to find the actions that express the characters’ reactions. I have to convert feelings into motion. Once discovered, these motions and actions can go back into my prose.

Again, you don’t have to go this spare. But you might make decisions about where to cut and where to add with more insight if you’ve tried the bare-bones telling that screenplays require.

You don’t need fancy software to do this. For the actual screenplay, I used Microsoft Word’s “styles” to create the various format patterns screenplays require. (The formatting didn’t translate directly into this blog post.) By the way, learning to use “styles” helps when you convert your Word document into the format for various e-publishing contexts. The important thing, however you structure your exercise, is to remember: no “feelings.” Just things viewers can see: action and dialogue.bloody rose finished

Do you have strategies for detecting “telling”? Share!

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December 4, 2015 · 10:31 am

Battle is Lost!

A sad day for grammar purists: The Washington Post will allow “singular they”!

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December 2, 2015 · 12:45 pm

Which is Most Important: Character, Conflict, or Crisis?

Book with heart for writersAs I’ve been reading around in the Indie-verse, I’ve found a couple of books I’ve decided not to finish. As both a writer and a reader, I’ve thought about what triggers me to abandon a book.

One feature that has stuck as a cause for my reaction can be summed up in advice Brian Klems of Writer’s Digest provided at the Writing Day Workshop I attended in Indianapolis in October:

Begin with conflict, not crisis.

Typewriter with questions marks

In other words, writers I’m deciding sadly to give up on often begin with their characters in crisis. But Klems’s advice reminds me of a cruel but vital truth:

If I don’t know your character, I don’t care about her. If I don’t care about her, I honestly don’t care if she gets her brains blown out.

Sorry, but there it is.

Gangster with gun

When these writers begin their books, they have three Cs to deal with: Crisis, Character, and Conflict. It may sound counter-intuitive to state that, of the three, Crisis is the least important!

I know, I know: begin in medias res. But not when the folks in medias are just names on a page.

Can you pile on character, conflict, and crisis in opening scenes? I thought I’d try an experiment to find out.

Consider:

Sally found herself staring down the barrel of a gun. She stumbled backwards. He fired. The shot narrowly missed.

Crisis, big time. And a couple of what Paula Munier calls “micro-story questions,” the elements that help to deliver what she calls “narrative thrust.” Who’s shooting at her? Why? Will she escape the next shot?

cartoonguns.jpg

Okay, I’d read on to the next bit. But if the following three pages consisted of her efforts to flee his escape, I’d be flipping ahead to see whether things got more interesting than an abstract flight-and-pursue.

What if, instead, you read:

Of course Mark was going to pull the trigger. When he threatened, he always delivered. Sally flung her hands up, stupidly, since they wouldn’t stop a bullet, and sprawled on her butt on the wedding dress jumbled on the tack room floor behind her. The gun went off in a brain-numbing explosion, the bullet slamming into the row of bridles hanging just above her head.

Beautiful sexy girl with gun

Take that, Mark, you scum!

We still get to the crisis pretty fast, but now we have many more micro-story questions. First, we’ve got conflict: these people have a history. It’s not just a question of why he’s shooting at her, but what between them has happened before to trigger her recognition that this isn’t a joke. “Why and who?” becomes “How does she know this about him? What has he done to make her think this now?” There’s a whole history of people in those queries.

More importantly, that wedding dress. Wedding dress? How in the world did a wedding dress get in the floor of that tackroom? And why a tackroom? We now know that these people somehow connect with horses, and that someone (Mark? Sally?) has just been through (or approached) a wedding. And he’s the determined sort who shoots first and asks questions later, while she’s (at present) a bit reactive and self-derogatory (calling herself “stupid”). Conflict and character as well as crisis—leading to a cornucopia of story questions! And all in the same number of sentences, four.

Some of my writing group colleagues are absolute minimalists and would opt for the first austere and abstract version. But to me, pure action is not nearly as engaging as action involving people I know or people I’ve been made deeply curious about.

An experiment like this leads to me be suggest that if you must demote one of the three Cs, let it be crisis! What? Start flat, with just characters in conflict? Well, yes.

Torn up drafts

As Stephen King argues, narrative tension arises not from wild, boisterous action but from people in “situations,” where they must react to each other and to the problems their situation presents.

True, you can’t spend pages on this development. It has to happen in that medias res moment, through careful pacing and selection of details.

As an illustration of how little we need a doomsday crisis, consider these opening lines from Suzanne Rindell’s The Other Typist:

They said the typewriter would unsex us.

One look at the device itself and you might understand how they—the self-appointed keepers of female virtue and morality, that is—might have reached such a conclusion. Your average typewriter, be it Underwood, Royal, Remington, or Corona, is a stern thing, full of gravity, its boxy angles coming straight to the point, with no trace of curvaceous tomfoolery or feminine whimsy. Add to that the sheer violence of its iron arms, thwacking away at the page with unforgiving force. Unforgiving. Yes; forgiving is not the typewriter’s duty.

Typewriter publish

We’ve got character, even though we haven’t met the speaker. We’ve got conflict: That nameless “they” is already on trial! I haven’t yet read this book Will I? If it lives up to this crisis-deprived opening, you bet.

 

 

 

 

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