Flogging the Quill

A writer critiques how I open my novel. Did I practice my preaching?

Last post, I illustrated a point about rewriting with the following opening from my novel in progress:

I was there. I was more than there. If only I had…if only I had not…the if-onlys pillory me. It is said that pain diminishes with time, but I can testify that the ache of guilt does not. It grows until it eats your life.

Today it gets its last bite of mine.

The timepiece on my wrist informs me that it is four o’clock in the afternoon, marking another anniversary of the hour my life began to end. Despite the trudge of a year of days, the death of Graeme, the man I expected to love for the rest of my time on this sorry earth, pierces me even more than the moment I lost him, the random victim of a homeless man crazed by an insane culture.

No, not random. If only…

A sharp-eyed blogee noticed that, after all my harping on giving pictures and setting the scene, my opening gave no more than the time of day. He sent this comment:

“Enjoy your posts. I'm wondering, however, about your novel in progress. You seem to be contradicting the very point you just made in your prior post, ‘Writing for Effect--setting the critical first scene.’

“’I was there.’ That's a pretty sparse, isn't it? And the rest of the paragraph doesn't add much. I don't think it should be used for the opening paragraph of a novel.

“I'd also be careful about switching from present to past tense, especially so early on. Maybe changing tense after the first paragraph makes sense in the broader context of the whole story, but with only seeing the first few lines it tends be distracting at best, confusing at worse.”

Great food for thought. Good question, too…do my bloggy pontifications and personal writing agree? My response went something like this:

You raise a good point although, at the end of that post, I advocated involving the reader in "the opening scene of the story and/or the mind of the character."

My thinking is that the opening immerses you quickly into the character’s mind. As for setting the scene, I’ll share what follows. I’m going for a distinctive mood and tone as well as a sense of “where.”

The wind whips my long coat in a fierce, futile attack. Named the Hawk by the people of this city, it thrusts icy talons under my skirt, greedy for my warmth. Perhaps it wishes it were a summer breeze instead of a harbinger of death. But it takes nothing from me, for I do not face January in Chicago truself. In the manner of my Celtic ancestress, I use lledrith, the energy of life, to warm my body. Frustrated, the wind swirls away in search of a defenseless target.

I let my gaze drift for a last look and take in the artless eighty floors of the nearby Amoco Building, one of the glass-and-steel blights that mar the skyline around me, gigantic buildings erected by the lessi for their myriad, scurrying purposes. Where I stand once opened a meadow cloaked with pure white snow, its future a summer of green grass and golden flowers. Now it is an asphalt street and a massive pile of stone called the Chicago Art Institute, shrouded with snow the color of ashes, its future void of life or spirit. Through that meadow, I have walked a deer path through a wood to a lake that seemed as vast as an ocean. The lake is there still, but it now lashes at concrete revetments instead of spilling onto a sandy shore, its waters no longer crystalline blue, but the color of metal.

You’re right about being careful with tense changes… but only the first two sentences in the first paragraph of the opening are past tense—the third goes to present tense (pillory) and the narrator stays there. I think the net effect is that she is in the present but referring to a past event.

At least that's the way I see it today. This is a work in progress, though, and I hugely appreciate your providing "other eyes." Here's my philosophy on this: I MUST reconsider what I’ve done when considered under the fresh illumination of a criticism, whether at first blush I agree with it or not. And so I will do with your thoughts.

Quickly, you’ve learned that a woman suffers from something she’s done and may be suicidal, it’s a cold January afternoon in modern-day Chicago, she has some kind of power we don’t have, and she was in Chicago before it was a city. I’m hoping by this time you’re thinking, “What’s up with that?”

Compelling? You be the judge. After all, you’re the reader.

I gotta tell you, getting feedback from you out there is great! Thank you, and please keep it coming. A dialogue is much more entertaining than a monologue.

If I can help you with a question about your writing, email me and I’ll apply a beady eye to it. Tell me if I can share it in a post or if you want a “private consultation.”

All contents © Ray Rhamey 2004.

By way of a thank-you to my Other Eyes

My novel-in-progress once opened this way:

The timepiece on my wrist informs me that it is four o’clock in the afternoon, marking another anniversary of the hour my life began to end. Despite the trudge of a year of days, the death of Graeme, the man I expected to love for the rest of my time on this sorry earth, pierces me even more than the moment I lost him, the random victim of a homeless man crazed by an insane society.

No, not random. I was there. I was more than there. If only I had…if only I had not…the if-onlys pillory me. It is said that pain diminishes with time, but I can testify that the ache of guilt does not. It grows until it eats your life.

Today it gets its last bite of mine.

I labored over that opening. Critique group members read the first two chapters and said they were hooked. I figured I had it nailed. Then Bharti added that she thought the second sentence in the second paragraph might be a better opening. Oh, yeah? Hmmm…  And then Leslie pointed out that the "Despite the trudge"  sentence threw her--too much. So I rethought the opening and came to this...

Despite the trudge of a year of days, the death of my Graeme pierces me even more than the moment he died, the random victim of a homeless man crazed by an insane culture.

No, not random. I was there. I was more than there.

If only I had…if only I had not…if-onlys torment me. It is said that pain diminishes with time, but I can testify that the ache of guilt does not. It grows until it eats your life.

Today it gets its last bite of mine.

If only…

I think it’s more intriguing this way. What do you think? I think I’m going to go with it.

Further up the river of my writing, a critique group member caused me to ditch the first chapters in a coming-of-age novel titled The Summer Boys*, set in 1958. The original started out this way (apologies in advance for all the “telling”—apparently I hadn’t quite got the hang of it back then):

The girl didn't look like a cause of death, although she was giving Jesse Carver heart palpitations. He figured her for fifteen, but she was already one of those girls a boy instantly undresses with his eyes. Jesse had a year on her, but he would have been stumped for what to do with her once undressed. He was willing to imagine, though, so he did.

She was an unexpected pleasure. Neither he nor best friend Dudley had seen love or peril on the horizon when they left Dallas five hours earlier for a summer job on the Box 8 ranch. They'd roared down the highway toward the hill country west of Kerrville in Dudley’s old ’53 Cadillac, radio bellowing rock and roll and no parents to yell "turn down that noise." The new Jamies song had said it all ...

"Well shut them books and throw 'em away

And say goodbye to dull school days

Look alive and change your ways

It's summertime summertime sum sum summertime

Summertime summertime sum sum summertime summertime

“It's time to head straight for them hills

It's time to live and have some thrills ... "

They had headed for hills but expected no thrills—not as junior ranch hands working for room and board. To a couple of suburban kids who dreamed of being ranchers, an invitation to work on a real ranch was like a pass through the Pearly Gates.

(Seems to go on and on, all that telling, doesn’t it? Baby steps.) When my critique group got to chapter 3, Richard said, “The story starts here. You should cut the first two chapters.” Was he kidding? All that material? All that exposition? The Summertime song? All that stuff the reader just had to know? No way.

But he was right. It took a few months to sink in, but finally I achieved enough distance to cut the first two chapters and weave in expositional info from them into the new beginning. Now the novel opens with…

The air was as still as it was hot; only the whir of a grasshopper’s flight disturbed the quiet. Jesse Carver felt like an overcooked chicken, his meat damn near ready to fall off his bones. Mouth so dry he didn’t have enough spit left to swallow, Jesse croaked, “That guy tryin’ to kill us?"

Dudley Miller’s answer took a while coming. “I’m beginning to wonder.”

Jesse and Dudley rested in the meager shade of a live oak tree in the south yearling pasture—wherever the hell that was. A half-dozen red-brown Hereford yearlings, broad white blazes down the centers of their empty faces, grazed on parched, yellow grass. Jesse had tried a friendly moo, but they had paid him no mind.

Jesse said, “Doesn’t seem a foreman would be leavin’ people stuck out here with no water.”

“He’s not much older than we are. Maybe Buddy ol’ buddy doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

“Oh, he knows. You hear him laugh when he drove away?”

Dudley said, “You mean right after he said, ‘You ain’t troubled by snakes, are you?’”

“Yep.” Jesse tossed a stone at a clump of prickly pear cactus the size of a bushel basket. From it came a dry rustle that faded away after a few seconds. “You hear that?”

“Yeah.“

“Think it’s a rattler? “

“Sounds like it.“

Better, right? I did the rewrite, but it took someone else to see the opportunity.

And then there’s Dan the agent, whose comments led me to come up with an overarching conflict to open my speculative thriller, We the Enemy* and thus hugely improve the story throughout.

So thank you Bharti and Leslie and Richard and Dan, and Laura, and Lynn, and Deb, and all the others who have helped me see better things in my own writing.

Moral of story: if you don’t have “Other Eyes” for your writing, find some.

Please let me hear from you. If I can help you with a question about your writing, email me and I’ll apply a beady eye to it. Tell me if I can share it in a post or if you want a “private consultation.”

* The Summer Boy and We the Enemy are represented by TriadaUS. All contents© Ray Rhamey 2004.

Writing for Effect--setting the critical first scene

I will tell you this about most of the manuscripts I receive from beginning novelists—one of the number one flaws (several tie for first place) is failure to set the scene effectively--or at all. (Acquisition editors and agents, what’s your experience?)

Some are more like radio scripts than novels. Others are simply underdone, probably because the writer puts down a sparse description that evokes the whole picture in his mind but fails to get it in on paper.

In the last post, I had a character named Jimmy traversing a “cluttered room.” My adjective did little to create a picture. At the very least, we should see what the room was cluttered with, i.e.

Jimmy crept across a room cluttered with shrunken heads.

Ooooo. Tell me more. What about the room? Is it dark? Any smells? Sounds? Is anyone else there? What about characterization? I put on Jimmy’s skin and…

He was glad for the dim light of his candle—all those tiny faces staring up at him was 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.

I invented Jimmy’s adventure to illustrate a point, but what about a real example? Here’s the opening paragraph from a narrative I received for a sample edit (thanks to Greg for permission to use this):

Layton and Jean McElvey hung next to each other in a desolate basement, chained and waiting like tormented animals. Heavy shackles dug into their ankles and wrists and the dry air of Colorado taunted and teased their thirst.

Dramatic and interesting--but no more than a vague sense of the place and the people, and this paragraph was the only scene setting done. I wrote the following comment in my edit:

“Desolate” is an abstract word, doesn’t really give an actual “picture.” Are they chained to a wall, or hung from the ceiling/rafters? Are their hands above their heads or not? Do they face the wall or away? Is it dark, or is there a light on? Are there windows that let light in if it’s not? Basically, this is “telling” versus showing. I’ll bet that if you stood in Layton’s shoes and looked out at that basement you could describe what “you” see and feel. I suggest you focus in on Layton’s point of view right from the start. (In hindsight, I wish I’d also mentioned that the adjective “tormented” was a do-nothing stand-in for something that needed to be shown.)

In the sample edit, my comment went on to include a thought-starter for improvement. Offering “a rough look at what I mean,” I wrote (it has been honed a little since then):

Steel manacles bit into Layton McElvey’s wrists as he and his wife Jean hung, chained like animals to the basement wall. Daylight had come again; paled by a single dirty window, it showed their captor’s footprints on the dirt floor. The dry Colorado air taunted Layton’s thirst. He tiptoed in an attempt relieve the torment from his upraised arms and aching shoulders. The only sounds were the clink of his chains and soft moans from Jean. Time crawled. He gazed at dense cobwebs that filled deep shadows between the rafters and wondered if he would ever see another sun set over the mountains.

In addition to enlivening the picture with visuals and sounds, I brought the point of view down from omniscient to close third person. My belief is that in the close pov you can give the same information and gain the benefit of involving readers with the protagonist. I think my suggested changes evoke instant sympathy for Layton McElvey.

A word about the suggestions I make in an edit: I do not tell a writer what to do. Comments like the above serve to exemplify what I think the writer needs to do. What I offer is his to heed or disregard, to adapt, use or lose.

Opening scenes are s-o-o-o-o critical. Sol Stein, in Stein on Writing, writes this of his observations in a bookstore:

“In the fiction section, the most common pattern was for the browser to read the front flap of the book’s jacket and then go to page one. No browser went beyond page three before either taking the book to the cashier or putting the book down and picking up another to sample.”

You must immediately involve the reader in the opening scene of the story and/or the mind of the character. A reader needs to co-experience what’s happening to the protagonist, and to do that the reader has to see the context in which the character is operating. Even in radio, there are sounds and word pictures to pull the listener into the scene.

To write for effect, wedge your head into the skull of your character, look around and set the scene with sights, sounds, smells, thoughts and emotions.

Please let me hear from you. If I can help you with a question about your writing, email me and I’ll apply a beady eye to it. Tell me if I can share it in a post or if you want a “private consultation.”

 “Writing for Effect” ™ Ray Rhamey All contents © Ray Rhamey 2004.