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. And, as I've harped about before, there's no more important time to sprout questions than when your novel opens. I thought a look at how some of the pros do it might be helpful. 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.

I was enthralled by Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. Here's how it drew me in…

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.

J.K. Rowling launched an incredible career with this opening from the first Harry Potter story, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone -- the chapter was titled The Boy Who Lived:

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense.

I like openings that involve you with the protagonist right away. Here's the opening from The Footprints of God, by Greg Iles:

"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 plotwise; 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 how she will deal with it.

One more from a published author. Harlen Coben begins No Second Chance with this:

When the first bullet hit my chest, I thought of my daughter.

At least, that is what I want to believe. I lost consciousness pretty fast. And, if you want to get technical about it, I don't even remember being shot. I know that I lost a lot of blood. I know that a second bullet skimmed the top of my head, though I was probably already out by then. I know that my heart stopped. But I still like to think that as I lay dying, I thought of Tara.

Okay, now I'll put myself under the microscope with the opening of my novel in progress. A version this of this has appeared here before, but this is what I'm happy with today.

Despite the trudge of two hundred and seventy-three days, the death of my Graeme pierces me more now than the moment he died, the random victim of a crazed homeless man.

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.

What do you say? Are you ready to put the book down? (Lordy, I hope not. How embarrassing.)

So how does the opening of your novel compare to the pros above? It doesn't have to be similar in technique -- these vary widely -- but it does have to rouse questions that are going to itch unless scratched. First, though, figure out a way to distance yourself from it ( some ideas here). If you're too close, still living it instead of able to observe it, you're not going to see the real thing.

Once you've opened your novel, the narrative has to do two things simultaneously:

1. answer some of the questions you raise and
2. bring up new ones -- like a bird following a trail of seeds, the reader sees the next seed just as he eats one…and so the page turns.

The most important times to bring up new questions or twist existing ones, I believe, are at the beginning and end of each chapter. Of course, during the course of the middle smaller questions are continually raised and answered. But you don't want your reader to reach the end of a chapter feeling that this would be a good place to put your book down. There should never be a good place to put your book down.

For what it's worth.

RR

Free edit in exchange for posting permission. You send a sample that you have questions about and of which you'd like an edit. I won't post it without your permission.

© 2005 Ray Rhamey