So, when I was young, my best friend’s dad worked for himself. In retrospect he was an example of a man who turned his hobby into a career, and he must have been fairly successful because he raised 12 kids and his family took expensive vacations.
But as a kid, I got none of that. Just that he had an office into which we weren’t supposed to go and that therefore the office was irresistible, though it wasn’t worth the grief of TOUCHING anything. (We, because I lived more than half time at their house across the street, to the point her family referred to me and best friend as “the twins” on more than one occasion.)
Anyway, his business was in lures. He bought and sold lures, and also suspect tested them, involving a lot of traveling (often with his wife. Best friend was number 11, so there were lots of older kids ready to babysit.) In retrospect? Well done, bonus dad on amazing skills for building a job from your mildly autistic fascination with lures and fishing.
That office was amazing. Not coming from a family of anglers — my family’s efforts at filling the larder concentrated on hunting. Until I was in my twenties, I thought it was normal to watch for lead pellets while eating quail. And later on various family members were part of sharp-shooter teams to bring down wild boars which had become a danger to populations or crops — I had a vague idea you baited a hook with a worm. But, oh, deary me, no. These lures — I could spend hours walking slowly and staring at his samples — mimicked various insects. They were made of feathers, plastic, and materials I can’t begin to identify. Sometimes they had notes on them, like “bait for marlin.” (Does gesture of aversion to banish plot bunny who now wants to do a short with “Bait for Merlin.”)
Anyway, and all that–
Taking this into writing, like every type of fish has an ideal bait, your goal is to appeal to as many “fish” as possible.
So, for instance, if you’re writing a romance and you start with a description of a hot male, this probably won’t translate well into science fiction unless it’s a subgenre (romance or erotica) of science fiction. In the same way –though it’s not my favorite poison, I do occasionally read it — starting off by spitting someone’s rank and what type of mission he/she’s on finishing with a sentence like “This was going to get complicated” might pack them in for mil sf. BUT it will leave those of us without a military background, even those who do read science fiction, staring and blinking in some puzzlement.
All of which is to say: you want to bring in the “sometimes I read this” as well as the hard core readers.
Which is to say your bait might — and likely should — be targeted to your genre, but let it wiggle enticlingly at everyone.
What this is in the name of: I’m trying to pull myself “up” from reading only fanfic for over a year, and am trying to read the space opera out there, since that’s my main poison. 90% of them I can’t get past the first chapter. I work far too hard to get to the end of the first chapter.
Some I can see are just flawed. As in, I have no clue what I’m reading, or about whom the story IS. The others…. have a good number of five or four stars ratings, so it must be enticing to specialized fish, but leaves me completely cold.
Oh, also, and I could be wrong, but the one book I’ve now got to the middle of and will probably read the series, is PROBABLY a serial-numbers-filed version of Warhammer which accounts (probably) for hooking people a lot earlier than it hooked me. I struggled through the first three chapters, and almost looked at the end to resolve the one thing that kept me going (the puzzle being setup) before the characters started to grow a personality in chapter four. I could be wrong, of course. I don’t play games and only know about them from what I catch in the air. BUT– Um…. I don’t think I am. In that case, I realize I’m in the minority, but still, realize there’s a number of readers who just don’t play games, and reel them in as well.
Anyway, this is why I’m doing this, yet again.
Keep in mind I WANT to find books — preferably first in series — to fall into for a few days. I’m willing to work a little. I’m just not willing to work so hard that it’s homework just to get into your world.
(And yes, SF/F are a special case for this, since you have to create a whole, plausible world. Even if we’re willing to overlook “Um…. you never explain how this could mesh with that.”)
And 90% of the books are still losing me in the first chapter.
So, I’m going to list a few of the things kicking me out:
1- Vagueness: you’re not describing a world/place in any way I can possibly picture it in my mind.
This has two forms:
a) hitting me with a lot of made up brands/makes for things. Yes, I know, that’s how people talk. But since they’re made up, I can’t see them. And using terms like “very” “big” “small” ‘Shabby” ”Luxurious” — if it’s in the future, I don’t how that translates.
b) Blind cat syndrome. You’re talking about the flooring, the drapes and the light fixture, but I have no clue if the room is a ballroom, a church or a bedroom.
2- The information is out of order: I’m getting that the character’s shoes pinch, but I don’t know how many feet the character has. Or if it’s human, vegetable or mineral.
3 – Your character is bored. The observers are bored. The spaceship is bored. The reader is bored.
DO NOT start with someone being bored. At best you can say something like “Boom. Well, that made a break from boredoom. Now what the heck was it.” Boredom should always be in the past.
4 – That’s okay, but why am I reading it?
I’ve heard, but didn’t do this myself until after I was published, and I plead “I was very ill” that beginner writers often start a story 40 pages too early. (Darkship Thieves. It started in the ship, well before there was a man in her cabin. WELL before. Lots of information. Nothing happening.) I’ve been seeing this again and again, which is why I stick to the end of the first chapter and might skim further before giving up.
PLEASE go to your first major event. Give me your necessary info (and you’ll be amazed how little there is that’s essential) in tiny, targeted flashbacks, as the plot rolls forward.
There’s a subset of this called:
5: Get your pencils and paper and take notes! There will be an exam.
I.e. the boring beginning is packed with information. You tell her what happened in the Izzcandan Empire 3000 years ago, and which queen fell because she had an affair with a spaceship pilot, and then the assassination of her son–
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. Your reader is asleep and drooling onto her kindle.
But that is all vital information, you think, because those events shape and echo in your narrative.
Okay, sure. But sticking it all up front means that the reader has no reason to care about it. And it feels exactly like sitting in a classroom hearing which Habsburg married which. Only there’s no requirement I know this stuff to graduate.
Again, essential information for each stage of the story is less than you think. We don’t need to know the main character’s ancestress played naughtybits with a spacenaut, or what happened to her son. We need to know your character is a queen who is on the run from assassins/lawyers who’d depose her, and then give us the details of “this happened before in–” in little bites.
And yeah, yeah “textured, deep world” etc. Sure. But you can give that as a side note later on, when someone makes a joke, or sings a bawdy song, or…. You can even use that as a distraction when you’re imparting vital but not very interesting knowledge. We don’t need it all up front, but more importantly, no one will read it all up front.
6- Your character has no life. No, seriously. You gave us his name, and something that happened 6 years ago, but not why we should care.
It actually took me till chapter 3 to figure out what the problem was: this character had no goals, no intentions. Oh, wait, he wanted to get rich and retire comfortably. But since he’s about 22, this is a looong term goal, and I fail to see what it has to do with the current situation. Oh, sure, the current job contributes to that. Distantly, but…
Look, you can write a short story about someone doing “just another little job for a distant goal” but for a novel? Pfffff. And even in a short story, you need to give him an intermediate goal. Sure, he needs to save for retirement. BUT right now, he needs a new xzygg which is like a cell phone with better capabilities, because his current one died, and how is he going to order galactic eats? He can’t fly to the restaurant. if he doesn’t get a xzygg he’ll starve.
This makes your character come to life, because we ALWAYS want something. And for a character that should be short and visualizeable.
So, once again (with ceiling) from the top, make sure this is in your first page. Certainly in the first two pages (unless you’re writing an immensely interesting panning-in introduction, but even then… And those should be short, by the way.):
Who, Where, What?
Who is your main character? We don’t need a description, maybe, this early, particularly if first person, but male/female/other and such helps. If you can cram in a feel for age/status it helps. And always “what do they fear, what do they want” as concrete and near term as possible.
Where? I don’t need the quadrants of the space station. In fact, please don’t. But knowing the character is in a space station, and whether in an airport-concourse (for shortness of description for me, not you) type of area, or a back corridor that’s crusty and rusty is very helpful. Same if you’re in a lush forest to indicate if it’s Earth of Left Side of Far Cowhide. Throw in a detail that clarifies that, or at least makes us suspect it. “I heard the craw of the flying serpents above.”
What? What on Earth is your character doing there. And if you say “killing time, while observing” I’m going to throw things at you, until you fast forward. So, “Running from the bar tab. He’d been sitting down having a pint and observing the passerbyes, until he realized his pocket had been picked.” But then I expect you to open with “Whoring Queens of a Thousand Star Systems. Who had picked my pocket?” And then describe the seedy bar, the two bioed waiters bearing down on him, before taking off running.
BUT in the next paragraph, kindly tell us why he was there, and what he’s trying to do in the near term. He might be working for galactic peace, yes, but in fact, what he meant to do was board the Cow of Antares spaceship, in order to go talk to the grand poobah of the space empire, and–
The goal is so near he can taste it, and what in heck happened to his credits?
Got it? Get it. Go forth and sin no more.
I need series to read.
Mad Genius Club 
45 responses to “By Hook And Crook”
So, currently reading my way through James Cooper’s The Spy, for research purposes. The first, I kid you not, 80 pages are a monument slog. The enigmatic stranger is staying with the blockhead family while it rains, and they just keep talking. And the enigmatic stranger demonstrates his competence at subterfuge by shutting the bleep up, for 80 pages.
The *only* reason In made it to the Continentals, then the Redcoats showing up on their doorstep (at about the same time, cue chaos) is because it’s apparently one of the foundational works in spy novels. Research. Now that the actual story has started, it’s really good: the enigmatic stranger and the smarmy peddler may both be spys, and I have no idea which side they’re working for. Also, at least one of the Continental Dragoons has a cast iron obsession with catching the peddler, who may actually be working for the rebels, or the king. I can’t tell yet. And one of the block head daughters is engaged to the Dragoon’s commanding officer, and her brother is a redcoat, who being a blockhead, thought it was a brilliant idea to visit them in disguise, and get caught.
Granted I want to slap some sense into the brother, but the future brother in law has my sympathies, because he’s literally going to have to plead “he’s not a spy: he’s a *moron* and I’m going to be related to him if you don’t hang him.” to his own superiors.
But 80 pages, even in a 400 page book is just *way* to long to set that hook.
On series, did you ever run into Leigh Brackett’ Skaith trilogy?
Basically Conan the Barbarian vs the Hippies of Hoth. He’s looking for his father, who vanished there.
Okay, here I should explain: What I say applies to CONTEMPORARY novels.
Nineteenth century novels were much, much slower, and often had someone telling a largely unrelated novella in the middle, and–
Look, I grew up in a society largely without modern media, except for radio. And books were EXPENSIVE. So we tolerated a lot more boredom in a novel, before getting “to the good part.” Now?
Ah, heck. We have a kindle, and it buys at the push of a button. And I tend to download samples, rather than buy blind. So…. yeah. different market.
Oh absolutely. That’s part of why I stuck through it. It is apparently one of the earliest spy novels and one of the first American novels. It is foundational.
But it definitely is not a novel I would have just picked off a shelf and finished without that.
The funny thing is, it took me until the arrival of the Continetals to even figure out why it was such a slog; I’d initially thought it was the language, but once things actually started happening, that wasn’t the issue. It really was that he doesn’t plant a hook until then. Everything before that point is ground work with no immediate stakes.
In a way it’s like analyzing a master work Viking sword. There are things we’ve learned to do better since then, but there are also fascinating methods used we’ve forgotten and can and should learn from.
And I can even see why all of the setup is there, and I’m not sure if it could have been done otherwise either. I’ll have to finish it and see.
“[T]he enigmatic stranger demonstrates his competence at subterfuge by shutting the bleep up, for 80 pages” is really delighting me at least in your description.
James Fennimore Cooper and Sir Walter Scott both had problems with beginnings, even accounting for differences in the fashions of the time.
It took me six attempts to make it past the first 75-100 of Dune before it finally clicked that Paul Areides and Muad’Dib and the Lisan al-Gaib and Kwisatz Haderach were all the same guy. Very confusing. Once I got past that hurdle, I plowed through all six (at the time) books without stopping.
Skaith… you made me buy it. 🙂
Well, The Spy was written about two centuries ago, and like Cooper’s Leatherstocking books, written for a far different audience. It was also part of a genre which has never been explored before, teh greta American novel.
This hits home because I am still a noob at structure and have heard dim rumors of something called three acts…
I have an opening that is fast paced but is not from the POV of the main character (although since there are two title characters…ow, ow, my brain!)
Structure (said the structural editor) is best learned by consuming lots of story. Theory comes best only after you have a solid feel for it intuitively.
Three act structure comes from Aristotle, and can best be summed up in several ways. Here are two:
Act One: Chase your protagonist up a tree.
Act Two: Throw rocks at him.
Act Three: Figure out a way to get him out of the tree that will satisfy the reader, so the reader does not throw rocks at you.
Act One: What’s the situation?
Act Two: What happened to change it?
Act Three: How did it all come out?
Or you can get a bit more specific. Screenwriter Bill Martel says that the best screenplays have a protagonist who has to solve two problems — an external conflict, and an internal one. Act One establishes both conflicts. Act Two has the hero try to solve the external conflict while avoiding the internal one. Act Three shows the hero solving the external conflict by resolving the internal one.
This is perfectly exemplified by Die Hard. John McClane has two problems: his estrangement from his wife, and terrorists taking over Nakatomi Plaza. He keeps trying quick solutions to fight the terrorists, but it’s only after he realizes that he is the main problem in his relationship, which enables him to appear to surrender (i.e., make himself vulnerable) so he can save his wife and gain the upper hand in the climax.
As to your opening… POV switching may not be the best thing to do in your first novel. But write it out, and see if your beta readers balk at it.
Three act structure is largely a good start, but is meant for plays. There are things much more complex for books.
I started out doing a three part structure. Because that’s all I’d learned. You STILL find hints of it in DST.
In U.S. public schools, you wouldn’t know there was anything besides three act. I got a glare in high school for asking about 1-hour tv drama structure.
This was with a masters in literature, hon. But from Portugal.
“since there are two title characters…ow, ow, my brain!”
Okay. Since you’re talking about structure, here’s a thought: Is the center of the novel about these two people and their (not necessarily romantic) relationship? That’s going to help later, when you’re trying to determine why some sections work better than others—if you pull focus away from your center, the novel falls apart. If those two characters are the main part of the book, every part of the book should relate to them.
Just a random thought, since that’s not always obvious to a newer writer.
Thank you, that IS helpful. I will review my draft with that in mind.
Lots of works start with a point of view that vanishes entirely after the opening. For instance, because the character gets killed, to set the stakes.
Other reasons are to create dramatic irony (by presenting information that the main character does not have), to set the stakes without having the character involved, or to ease the reader into the story because the main character’s point of view is very odd.
Yep.
Well, I hope i managed to do that in my first in the series. the main character gets off the shuttle into the lounge on distant world, meets his contact. He is distracted, tired and sent off to bed. He looks into the mirror and i get to describe him. He starts his mission, immediately senses trouble – go from there. I got 6 whole reviews. 4.6 stars on amazon. Not much sales as I have had no money for ads and have a positively brown thumb when i comes to marketing.
I have been guilty of the “killing time by observing” opening, and my only excuse is that the observer also killed time by practicing his psionic swordplay and trying to talk to stars. 🙂
Once, while experiencing a surfeit of ambition and having nothing else of interest to do, I sat down with the unabridged version of Les Miserables. 1500+ pages. But what the hell, I liked the musical, and I was bored.
The first 90 pages were devoted to a bishop, whose name I don’t remember. In fact, I don’t even remember if he had a name other than “the bishop”. Apparently it was vital that I understand his motivation for giving a pair of silver candlesticks to an ex-con in the process of burgling his residence. (The ex-con, of course, was Jean Valjean.)
90 pages. For literally an encounter lasting all of five minutes.
Other delights followed. When the barricade that JVJ is hiding behind is overrun by the French Gendarmerie. He makes his escape via crawling into the sewers. Victor Hugo very helpfully stops the action to devote EIGHT CHAPTERS to the history and design of the Parisian sewer system.
Eight chapters. Fascinating read, but seriously? Dude needed an editor.
And don’t even get me started on the elephant.
“How to tell the author was paid by the word” for $500 please, Alex.
Having read the unabridged original translation cover to cover four times, I feel it necessary to respond.
Yes, there is bloat in Les Miz. The opening bio of the bishop, however, is a brilliant character study and also what the novel is about. The entire book is about not just injustice, but the lack of mercy, in French society at the time. Jean Valjean’s life is transformed by that one simple act, and so examining why this man was merciful, where virtually nobody else is, is important.
The chapter on the history of the Parisian sewers was, in my memory (and to be fair, it’s close to 20 years since my last read through) one chapter, not eight. A long one, to be sure, but also thematically vital to the novel, as the sewers are a metaphor for the underlying strata of society. (Also, it’s really interesting stuff that may not have been documented anywhere else.)
Next you might as well complain about M. LaBeouf, the old-bookist. Important to the plot? No. An utterly delightful minor digression from the story? Absolutely, and also the passage of the book that contains possibly the greatest sentence in the entire novel: “The Champs-Élysées was full of glare and dust, the two elements of glory.”
The section that most needed cutting was the extended set of essays on the Battle of Waterloo. As important to the history of France as it was, the only real relevance it had to the book was where it ended, placing a character there and then following him back into the main story.
Nope, instead get started on Moby Dick, and whaling 🙂
The Mechanics of Whaling and The Only Part of the Whale We Don’t Use is honestly one of the best parts. That and the characters looking for symbolism in the doubloon nailed to the mast and finding what they want to see.
My favorite example from that book is how he devotes an entire section about how Napoleon lost Waterloo, with extensive description of the terrain and the players, just so he can have a page and a half of Thenardier robbing corpses.
I mean, I love reading the digressions on their own merits, but there’s a reason such a large novel can have a single musical *actually get most of the plot to fit*.
(Incidentally, the entire first section of The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a beautiful piece of architectural snark. Given that the whole reason he wrote that book was to save the named cathedral from demolition, it’s actually pertinent.)
Hear, hear! I was too young the first time I tackled Moby Dick (10-ish) but by 13 I was delighted by all of it, fiction & non-fiction alike.
I’ve also seen versions of the “running around actiony stuff, no explanation forthcoming” thing go on for four chapters before I bailed. It was the first in a long-running, high-ranking SF series, so obviously it worked for a lot of people, but if you hand me a Bourne Identity type protagonist and a Bourne Identity type cold open, you need to be either amazingly imaginative at action scenes or you need to start laying the trail of breadcrumbs addressing the whole “Identity” fairly quickly.
Properly done, action is character. If it’s just things going boom, and not revealing anything about the character(s), it needs to go.
Key words there being “properly done.” Most people don’t understand properly done, they understand “start in the middle of things. Keep the action going.”
It’s like the people who are told, “oftentimes adverbs are not the best possible tool for describing events,” and hear “Adverbs Bad.”
> …and that was how the adverbs were mostly,
> but not completely,
> defeated.
The Pareto Principle always applies. But it never hurts to point out the correct way of doing things.
I’ve read James Scott Bell’s “Write your Story from the Middle,” which I find amazingly helpful in getting to the point, but one issue I have run into is giving *enough* of an “ordinary world” before inciting incident, without it being boring leadup that turns the reader away.
I think the solution is, as you say, changing motivation. In the opening scene, it could just be a desire to finish one’s meal in peace, without work interruptions. Or to get this one particular fish to bite, and then suddenly the light out on the water much further away becomes an incoming alien craft. Small motivations that lead to larger ones.
You really do not need to give the ordinary world. It can be a paragraph, or a flash back half a page from the beginning. I don’t know who got this idea!
It’s part of the standard outline structure or beat sheet that you see advertised everywhere in “how to write” books. “This is the character and who they are before Big Things happen to them. This is their world before it changes.”
Yeah, but you don’t need it. Not in modern books. A paragraph is enough and it can be after big boom
I may have to message you tomorrow or this weekend about that, because I’m pretty sure that the pacing issue with my story is all bound up in this question and I may need more of an explanation.
You need to read a lot of openings. Go look at MHI, for ex. Or Butcher. There’s no lengthy “normal world”
That would be Jim Butcher, not James Butcher.
One of the things I really like about urban fantasy is that it takes place in the ordinary world and just reveals a hidden world beneath. Charles DeLint had some of the best descriptions of why most people never noticed the hidden world.
You are correct. It’s late. I was half functioning. BUT even in urban fantasy you need to establish the ordinary world OF THE CHARACTER. Which is not ours.
I mean, you guys read, right?
as in, my sample of Mirrorplay, today. You see the ordinary world in like the first paragraph.
Sarah’s right. The “ordinary world” stuff does not precede the inciting incident, or not by much, it’s more a case of using the opening act to set the rules of the world for the reader.
As an example, think of the film of The Shawshank Redemption. The inciting incident is Andy Dufresne’s conviction, int he opening minutes of the movie. Then the rules of the ordinary world are laid out once Morgan Freeman starts narrating, and both the audience and Andy learn how things work (even as more and more conflict is going on).
What is worse than not getting hooked properly by a book?
Having a book that got that hook into you in the first place…then something knocked it loose from your mouth and now you’re wondering why you were even interested.