Hard Start - Openings in Novel Writing

A Most Important Aspect of the Novel: Opening Pages ^ Establishing Shots
                           by Robert W. Walker

The following advice comes from my How-To book entitled DEAD ON WRITING.

Writing is like shouting in the dark at stars too far to hear; like shooting in the dark at targets we don't always see, and once in a while we get lucky and hear a report back. We've hit our target. When first starting out, we do it not knowing enough about the tools at hand, or if we are holding our mouth right, or if the weapons we wield are loaded or sharpened. That is until we begin to practice and hit our stride, and soon writing, like firing off shot after shot, comes progressively easier on everyone, including the innocent bystanders we call readers-nice people who we don’t want to send screaming away from us for all our unintended results.

CRAFT & EXECUTION BEGINNIGS & ESTABLISHING SHOTS

This is about making the right opening moves in your story…no matter what setting you open with. First lines and first paragraphs which establish character and much more are absolutely crucial. True whether you begin with the weather or a cobra about to strike.

When you open a story, you really have to rework it and rewrite it so that those opening moments are pure gold…as pure as you can make them. Clear as you can make them as well as exciting as you can make them (excitement does not necessarily mean fireworks or car chases). Think of every good film that has SET the stage in the very first seconds and minutes of the film. These first shots establish time and place along with tension and character. Perhaps you might have a page or two to interest the reader in a character or the actions being taken by a character, but this can’t possibly happen if your story opens in a miasma of confusion in which we know nothing whatsoever of the setting, the time, the character, perhaps his or her occupation, where his or her hands are at the moment, what action(s) the character(s) are currently occupied with…what pie they have their hands in. HANDS are so important to characters; about as important as LEGS and FEET.

To become proficient at opening successive chapters beyond Chapter One, too, you’ve got to establish the basic Five W’s of Who, What, Where, When, and How or at least four of the above. With each new scene this job’s got to happen. All this has to be repeated over again with each geographical shift, point of view shift, time shift. Such shifts have to be carefully “glued” together by comforting road signs as with a time word or two such as since, before, then, now, when…

To become proficient at openings, read the back jacket copy of every paperback you can get your hands on, and tell me how many of these “interest” grabbers appear in paragraph one or two: Time period, setting with place names, character’s names (names have resonance), occupation of main character, chief tension or problem (the how and why that keeps us turning pages).

Take a lesson from the back-flap writers. In fact, become adept at writing your own “flap” to place in your query letter and synopsis. They say never judge a book by its cover, but when the flap is well written, go ahead—judge a book by its synopsis. Learn to write the most important short story you will ever need to write—the story of your story in its most elemental form, my dear Watson.

You can also use this in pitch sessions—the back-flap you write for your own book! You may want to begin with the word WHEN—as in:

Just when Inspector Alastair Ransom had cut off the head of one snake slithering about the gas-lit streets of Chicago in 1893, a second fiend raises his ugly head to mar the prosperity of the city and the success of the World’s Fair.

In one fell swoop, one sentence, you get the name and profession of the main character, the time period and the location and a teasing tension. Write the copy you’d like to see on the back of your book!

An opening line and paragraph and page ought to engage the reader and excite his interest, of course, but it also ought to plant the reader’s feet firmly in place, square into the moment, square into the story. But no beginning is of any use no matter how spectacular if the story fails to move forward and a plot or at least a series of engaging episodic events do not occur. A plot must become evident and fairly soon. To this end, a good faith attempt at writing a rip-snorting ghost story or mystery or at least a men’s adventure yarn is a great and wonderful tool for a writer to learn the craft of plotting.

I hope you will leave a question or comment and Write to Sell --
rob walker, Dead On Writing, Amazon Kindle or in paper at http://www.wordclay.com/

Never Polish the First Chapter Until the Final Draft is Done

by Jean Henry Mead

I’ve rewritten a first chapter many times before progressing to the second, only to find that it had to be rewritten to fall in the line with the rest of the novel. I finally learned to write it once and forget it until the first draft is done.

I’ve never been able to outline a novel because I literally give my characters free rein. And they rarely submit to what I’ve planned for them. They have minds of their own and I wouldn’t want them doing something out of character. In my current Logan & Cafferty series, my feisty 60-year-old senior sleuths surprise me by doing things I’d never consider before sitting down to write. Dana Logan and Sarah Cafferty live with me 24/7 while I’m writing about them and they have their own plans for what should happen that day. Sometimes I have to retreat to chapter one to include some of their "brilliant" ideas.

In A Village Shattered, Logan and Cafferty gather their friends to discuss the serial killings taking place in their retirement village. Out of that meeting came many new ideas about who the murderer might be and why he or she was on a killing spree. Until the third quarter of the book, even I didn’t know who it was, and I was forced to return to early chapters to flesh out the killer by adding inner monologue.

In the second novel, Diary of Murder, due out early next spring, I take my sleuths out of California and place them in a motorhome in the middle of a Rocky Mountain blizzard. Fortunately, that had happened to me, so I could write convincingly about the life and death experience. The blizzard starts the novel off with a bang, but they face a similar situation later in the plot, so I had to swap some snowy details between the first and later chapters so that they didn't appear too similar. Weather plays a lage role in any northern state, and gives the plot an element of danger.

In A Village Shattered, the opaque San Joaquin Valley tule (too-ley) fog hides the serial killer, but I didn’t even think about the fog until I was writing chapter three. Having lived there for a dozen years, I know the horror of trying to drive in pea soup fog, so I switched seasons and went back to chapter one to add it to the plot. In doing so, it tied all aspects of the story together. 