Make More of Beginnings: Falling in Love

As writers, we’re so often told that the beginning of our story is make or break. It’s what we show our critique groups, our workshops, and agents when we query. It’s the first thing that readers see; it’s the first chance that they have to fall in love.

I want to look at this idea of falling in love with a story literally. Structurally. Because if it’s true that we fall in love with stories, that can tell us a lot about how to make our beginnings work.

The other night, I was watching the movie Music and Lyrics. As the two characters in this romcom got to know each other, they revealed little bits of their personalities and their pasts, leaving larger questions open. There were little mysteries, patterns, things that we knew would resurface. (Her current employment as a plant waterer had to have a backstory—right? He was definitely going to do the cute eighties dance move again—right?) These two wanted to know more about each other. They had to see each other again, to find out what happens next. Every time the characters talked to each other, they were building a relationship, and even within the neat timeline of a romcom, they couldn’t do it all at once. They were leading each other forward, step by step. That’s not just how we fall in love with each other. That’s how we fall into a fictional world.

At the beginning of a story, a writer can’t unload everything on the reader all at once. That results in dreaded info dumps. Instead of thinking of the beginning as the place where you have to makeeverythinghappenrightnow, try thinking of it as a first date. I think there are two elements of a successful first date that mirror the balance that we strive for in a story opening.

First—there’s what you put in to your beginning. That’s like the first date itself. The events (plot), the chemistry of the people involved (characters), the conversation, (voice), the physical attraction (maybe that’s about genre, or premise—I don’t know, but I could do this extended metaphor thing all day!)

How do we make the all-important decision of what to put in, though? This is where the individual story comes in, as well as writing style and taste. Often when we hear the “rules” of how you’re supposed to start a story, they feel flat, prescriptive. Imagine if you tried to follow the steps in a first date manual in order to find true love. The process has to be organic and personal—it’s about what you and your story bring to the table that no one else can. Focus on what makes your story unique. I’ve heard a hundred times never to start with a long description of setting in kidlit—and then there the opening of Tuck Everlasting. We’re often warned to get straight to the story, but there are so many great books that start with character-focused monologues. Anything can work—if it’s what makes your story special, what pulls the reader in and leaves them enchanted, delighted, a little bit in love.

And then there’s the second element of the date, which is a little more intangible. It’s what you’re leaving out. The more I read, the more I’m convinced that we are sucked into stories by little mysteries. This is the not the mystery genre I’m talking about—I mean any question that the narrative plants in our minds. The same is true with people. After the first date, we might like what we know—but we have to want to know more!

Recently, I read an interview with the YA author Laini Taylor, author of the Daughter of Smoke and Bone series. She admitted that when she started out writing about her main character, she knew that Karou had blue hair and hamsas on her hands, but she didn’t know why. She was writing to find out what happened next. The beginning was about what Taylor didn’t know—and now those same questions pull readers into her story in huge numbers. (And yes, get them to fall in love!)

Make Your Prose “Pacey”: How to Engage with Expectation, Silence, and Surprise

“The prose needs better pacing, better rhythm” How do you begin to solve that kind of intangible issue? If chunks of your prose feel dull or plodding, consider Ze Frank’s words about the “rhythmic trinity.” Ze Frank is not a writer, but he is an endlessly creative maker and humorist. His groundbreaking 2006 vlog “The Show” profoundly influenced current mega-hit vloggers like John and Hank Green. In Ze’s 3:23 video about “the rhythmic trinity of expectation, silence, and surprise,” he talks about how that trinity helped his music–and how it applies to humor in the classic joke’s setup, pause, and punchline:

“Watching younger comics, you can learn a lot by seeing what’s broken. They might be good at building expectation and delivering surprise, but they haven’t figured out silence yet, and they blast through their lines so fast you don’t have room to laugh. Or they’re all surprise and pauses without building any patterns for the audience to relax into. When it’s all surprise, it stops being a surprise. The craft of it is in the matter of all three: expectation, silence, surprise.” 

Writers use expectation, silence, and surprise to create rhythm on both the micro, sentence-to-sentence level and the macro, story level. I’ll save story for a later blog. Right now, I’ll talk about how the rhythmic trinity works on the ground, in your actual prose.

Expectation: Ze says that creating expectation means building patterns for the audience to relax into. So that might mean

• A stretch of quick-paced dialogue popping along
• A series of sentences of similar length, which can create a nice train-wheel rhythm
• A series of short action paragraphs
• A series of brief descriptive passages that take us (for example) from the exterior of the house to the interior
• Any of these creates a certain expectation, one you can then have fun disrupting.

Silence:

• Slow down prose with a lingering descriptive passage,
• Give any moment more air and breath by using a longer sentence, especially one that follows a series of short, brisk sentences of roughly the same length.
• Insert a sudden break into the dialogue, in which one person literally falls silent

Surprise: 

• Sometimes breaking a short sentence out in its own own paragraph makes it more arresting
• Zoom in on a tiny physical detail—or zoom out suddenly to a bird’s eye view of your scene
• Insert a bit of new information that turns the scene on its head 

How It Might Work (A Brief, Highly Simplified, and Pedestrian Example)

He said, “I tried.”

I said, “Not hard enough.”

He said, “But I can’t try harder.”

I said, “Well, you you have to.”

He said, “You’re asking too much.”

I said, “I’m asking for what you promised.”

[So now we’ve set up the expectations.]

And then, without warning, as if something had just occurred to him, or as if he’d had a sudden and interesting idea, he frowned and glanced up at the ceiling.  for a moment, his eyes rolled up even higher, till I could see their whites. [that string of clauses functioned as a kind of silence or hesitation] 

Then he fell face down on the table, quite dead.

[there’s the surprise element, made more surprising by the new paragraph]

More on using the rhythmic trinity on big story issues in my next blog. Meanwhile, I’d love to hear more ways you play with rhythm and pacing in your sentences.

Make More of Setting: Affordances

If there is a gun over the mantel in the first act, by the end of the play it should go off. If you put something into your fictional world—especially if you draw attention to it—you should think about its affordances, and make the most of them.

As a writer and an editor I often find myself staring at a scene where the character is stuck in a blank space—thinking without acting. How do we get ourselves out of these habits? How do we find more potential for action?

A lot of times, I think we’re told to go back to our plot (What is the next story event? How do I make that happen?) or character (What does the protagonist want? What will she do next to try to get it?) While these are both good options, I know that sometimes they work better in theory than in practice. Sometimes I go back to my plot and my character and still surface an hour later, not sure what to actually start writing. How to start building a scene.

In this case, I’m going to recommend going back to setting.

One of the helpful terms that I’ve stolen from a psychologist friend is the idea of affordances. An affordance is the potential for action inherent in an object. A doorknob affords turning. A glass of tea affords drinking. A setting is filled with objects, and each object has many affordances—possible actions.

Look around at the setting you have created. What is there for your character to interact with? How many different possibilities are inherent in the same object? What would it show us about your character if, instead of drinking the glass of tea, he threw it at the wall? Offered it to someone he thought needed it more than he did? Used it to tell someone’s fortune?

If you’re working in a world that has different parameters than the real world (magical realism, fantasy, etc) ask yourself if anything in your setting has different affordances.

To create action, first you have to create the potential for action. How can we get the most potential from our settings? The most interesting potential? The most telling potential? The most explosive potential? The most unique potential?

The idea reminds me a bit of the Chekovian bit of wisdom that is often repeated in theater circles: If there is a gun over the mantel in the first act, by the end of the play it should go off. If you put something into your fictional world—especially if you draw attention to it—you should think about its affordances, and make the most of them. In my favorite brand of storytelling, the gun will be used by the end of the story, but not in the way we expect.

When I go back to my wandering, floating, not-quite-doing-anything character, and sketch in a few more details of the setting, things immediately start to happen. Keeping plot and character in mind, I follow these small actions to see what they can tell me, and to see where they lead.

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Amy Rose Capetta is the author of Entangled (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Kids) and its sequel Unmade (forthcoming in 2014). She holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has previously worked for the Writers’ League of Texas, and served as assistant editor for the Children’s and Young Adult section of the literary journal Hunger Mountain. In addition to her novels, she has written screenplays, the most recent of which debuted at the Toronto ReelHeart International Film Festival. After calling Austin her home for several years, Amy Rose now lives in the Midwest, where she focuses on writing and editing fiction.

Areas of Specialty: Narrative work for middle grade, young adult, and adult readerships. All genres welcome. Particular areas of interest: fantasy, sci-fi, dystopian, supernatural, genre-bending fiction, creative nonfiction, literary fiction, LGBTQ fiction.

Available For: Manuscript critiques, content editing, developmental editing, first chapter critique and edit, synopsis review and edit, private writing coaching.

Want to hire Amy Rose as your editor or writing coach? Click here!

Banish Stick-Figure Writing: How Concrete Sensory Details Make All the Difference in Fiction

Thin, generic description is the literary equivalent of drawing with stick figures. That’s a problem—because your reader’s imagination will only engage if it’s convinced what’s happening is real. And if their imagination won’t engage, their emotions won’t engage, and they’ll puts the book down and find something fun to do.

So how do you flesh your stick figures out?

In 1979, a revolutionary book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain pinpointed why so many adults and older children can’t draw. It’s because they aren’t drawing what they see—they’re drawing what they know.

In other words, they’re drawing a category, rather than the thing itself.

I “know” a face is oval and has two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, so that’s what I draw. Then I’m surprised that it looks like a stick figure, not a human face. In reality, depending on the way a face is angled and the way the light falls across it, a real face may not be oval, may not have two (visible) eyes, may have only part of a nose, etc.

I “know” a tree has a thick trunk and at the top some branches and leaves—so I draw a stick-figure tree instead of the wild living thing flinging out arms and fingers in front of me.

The same thing can happen in writing. “A dog stood under a tree. A girl ran past.”  But “dog,” “tree,” and “girl” aren’t descriptions; they’re labels for abstract concepts. Was it a tiny mutt or a graceful Great Dane? An aspen or a cottonwood? A 6-year-old Latina or a willowy white teenager?

A few fleshier alternatives:

• A twenty-foot cottonwood, heart-shaped leaves turning lazily in the breeze
• A mutt with a smashed-in boxer’s face and lolling tongue
• A small girl with tangled dark hair, wiping her nose on a dirty coat sleeve as she runs past.

Now a little of this kind of description goes a long way. Be judicious: you don’t want to force-feed your reader a whole box of chocolates. If I were editing myself here, I’d decide which was the most important element for the reader to focus on. Let’s say it was the dog:

“The mutt stood under a tall cottonwood. He turned his smashed-in boxer’s face, tongue lolling, to watch a small, dark-haired girl run past. He did not give chase.”

We’re humans, we live in bodies. That means our minds won’t believe, our imaginations won’t be convinced, without plenty of concrete sensory details. Banish the stick figure. Make your writing juicy with life, and allow the reader to fall in love with your book.

We All Need Community: The Benefits of Critique Partners and Beta Readers

I talk myself out of editing jobs all the time. A new writer will approach me about a project. We’ll get to talking. And I’ll end up advising that writer to wait to spend money on a professional editor. I’ve blogged about this before in various ways, I suppose. And now I’m going to do it again because it bears restating. Writers are stubborn. Sometimes we need to be beaten with an idea for a bit to grok it.

These writers I talk to shouldn’t be spending money on editing yet. A lot of times their contact with me is the first they’ve had with a fellow writer. Sometimes it’s the first time they’ve shared their work at all, which is a monumental moment. They’ve figured out they can’t do the writing thing on their own like they once believed. They’re beginning to understand they need a community.

I usually tell them to seek out critique partners and/or beta readers. And if they’re not already reading in their genre, I strongly advise them to do that, too. So far I haven’t heard back from any of them. I take that as a good sign, a sign they got the deeper message: they need to build themselves a place in a writing community.

I’m talking about more than a writer’s need for critical, constructive feedback here. Or the need for mentors and compatriots, fellow writers who are discovering or have discovered how to make a go of the writing life. A writer needs a few fans, even at the beginning. Maybe it’s just one coworker who stops him in the hall to say how much he loves reading the writer’s blog. However it takes place, that kind of out of the blue validation helps build much needed self-confidence. And knowing there are people reading what you write makes it harder to justify blowing it off.

By the way, I’m deliberately leaving family out of this discussion because family is different. The people who live with writers have to buy in on a whole other level.

I recently had one of these quasi-fan experiences. As you may know, I’m a theater technician as well as a writer and editor. One of my day jobs is as a carpenter at the Texas State Performing Arts Center Shop. Not only do I build scenery there, I usually work on my writing and editing projects during my breaks, sitting on an air-compressor in a secluded corner of the tool cage. While I was gone on my recent vacation (if you want pictures, click here), the scenic painting professor made and installed a sign above my little space between the shelves.

She’s not a writer. As far as I know she’s never even read my writing. I’ve known her for less than a year. But she sees me in there with my computer in my lap. And she’s an artist; she understands. She gets the yen to make something as good as it can be. So she surprised me with her little sign. What I don’t think she understands is how much that small act inspires me every day, how it makes it easier to go into the noisy solitude of the tool cage and write, how she’s a big part of my writing community. I should probably tell her all that, huh?

And that’s why I talk myself out of so much editing work. There’s a lot of great things a freelance editor can offer a writer. But a hired editor can’t offer that fundamental, made-to-fit writing community every writer needs. We writers have to build that kind of support network for ourselves.