Monday, March 18, 2024

Why Does This First Sentence Work?

 “The Friday before winter break, my mom packed me an overnight bag and a few deadly weapons and took me to a new boarding school.”  THE TITAN’S CURSE, Rick Riordan.


The first line of THE TITAN’S CURSE stopped me in my reading tracks.  


I studied it to figure out why such a simple declarative sentence grabbed me.


A few words told a huge amount about the narrator.  “My mom.”   “Winter break.”   “A new boarding school.”  Obviously a modern kid below the age of driving.


Then the juxtaposition of the common-- a boy having his bag packed by his mom to go to a new boarding school, and the uncommon--a few deadly weapons.  The mundane juxtaposed with the dangerous.  


Since this was a young adult fantasy adventure, I knew I wasn’t reading about a mass murderer family on the way to massacre some kids.  Some adventure was beginning.  


In just one sentence I was given enough information to get a sense of the book and the main character, and a surprise within that information.  


I’m also given several questions I want answered.  Why the weapons?  Why the new boarding school?  Why is his mom not upset with deadly weapons?


All this will keep me reading.


Now, that’s a good first sentence.

Monday, March 11, 2024

The Emo Dump of Horror

The heroine is grumpy.  Her cab driver is paying too much attention to the weird birthmark on her wrist although anyone who has seen it does the same thing so she should be used to it.  She is grumpy about this for several pages.  She gets out of the cab and spends several more pages thinking about how miserable the hot weather is, and how stinky her arm pits are now becoming.  

After finally paying attention to her location, an office building, she acknowledges to herself how stressed she is with little specifics for several more pages, then how she dreads seeing Mark for several more pages.  


She really misses her dead mom for about five pages.  Then she walks into the building.  Then another eight pages of minor info dump backstory about how her mom worked here, and how she really, really misses her mom.  Mark, Mom’s boss, shows up and apologizes that she must deal with being at her mom’s place of business.  She weeps on his chest for another bunch of pages.  We are now a long chapter into the book and nothing of real importance has happened.


But we know that the heroine who is supposed to be a kick-ass heroine in this urban fantasy is an emotional mess about bloody everything from the weather to her mom’s death. We also know that the writer doesn’t know spit about pacing and how to intersperse emotion with action.  


Readers, at this point, are stuck in the emo dump of horror where everything is too, too much to deal with.   


At this realization, most readers will decide that they don’t care to spend hours of their lives with this mopey, poorly written mess, and they won’t go forward with the book.


Sadly, this opening is from a book I just tossed after the first chapter, and it’s the third one with an opening emo dump in the last few weeks.  


And, yes, I know losing your mom is hard.  I’ve been through it, and I sympathize, but dumping loss across many opening pages like so much emotional sludge is poor writing.  It’s the equivalent for the reader of being forced to read a hormonal teen’s diary about how horrible and dramatic her life is.  A mother’s death and stinky armpits have the same level of drama.


Emotion, like information, needs to be given in little bits and pieces, particularly at the beginning of the story.  It also should be inferred by what the character does.  That heroine could have felt a tightness in her chest as she entered the building, straightened her spine, and forced herself forward.  The mother’s boss could have mentioned the mother’s death, and the heroine could have lost it for a few minutes.  All this is shown in action, not by a long inner monologue about being really, really sad.  It also makes the heroine appear strong despite her pain, and the reader would have sympathized instead of wishing that the drama queen heroine get a grip and move the story forward.


We want our readers to connect with our main character, sympathize with her, and admire her a little in that opening scene.  We don’t want them to take one look at a weeping drama queen and run far, far away.  

Monday, March 4, 2024

No Prologue Needed, Beginnings

 You want to start a novel at an exciting moment that involves the main character which will draw the reader into the story to see what will happen next, but you can't give too much information too soon.

Instead, you give the reader just enough information to understand what's going on.


For example, the main character faces an angry goblin in a dark alley of some big city.


She can hear a police siren which, unfortunately, is moving away from where she is. Mentally or aloud, she cusses her luck for choosing a job like this.


The goblin knocks her gun out of her hand, and it lands in the sewer drain so she lifts her hands, whispers a spell, and flames shoot of her hands, but the goblin doesn't go down. The injury makes him even angrier. 


We now know she's a magic user of some sort, the modern world is ours or isn't ours by little details, that magical creatures can enter here, and it's her job to stop them.  She is also in seriously deep poo because she is now defenseless against a furious goblin.


Later, you'll tell the reader about her role as a guardian of normal Earth and, later still, about her home on a parallel magic world, but you'll do it in bits and pieces like clues to a puzzle the reader is trying to understand.


Having these clues of the world and trying to understand it is as important a puzzle for the reader as the plot, and it's as enjoyable. Don't cheat the reader by giving away too much.   

Monday, February 26, 2024

Others' Goals

Last week, I told you about a first chapter I read, and I talked about the danger of having a Scene Stealer Secondary Character at the beginning of your novel.  


To remind you, here’s a plot summary of the first chapter.


The heroine enters an expensive restaurant and sits down at her father’s table.


He complains she is late, which she is not, and proceeds to berate her for various failings, none of which she thinks she has.  They share a prickly conversation full of personal history subtext and anger.


He tells her that his corporation is having financial troubles, and he’s arranged to have a corporate investor meet him on his private estate for the weekend.  He wants his beautiful daughter there to entertain the corporate savior and show a positive side to his personality.


The heroine has her own financial success thanks to her own hard work and acumen, and she has less than charitable feelings for her father who threw her and her mother out so he could marry a trophy wife and have the son he wanted to inherit the business.  She agrees, however, because she’ll get a chance to see her much younger half-brother whom she adores.  


In the next, much shorter scene, the handsome corporate investor, aka the hero, arrives at the estate in his private plane.  Rather than the limo and the designer clothes her father wanted, she shows up in the caretaker’s Land Rover and she is wearing riding clothes.  Despite this, sexual sparks fly, and they share a bit of banter.  They head to a meeting with Daddy Dearest.


What’s the second major error in this first chapter?  The only person with a strong goal in the first chapter is Dearest Daddy.  The heroine refuses to buy into this goal.


At best, one of her goals is to see her little half-brother which is fine on the small scale but hardly strong to carry a chapter, let alone enough to carry a whole novel forward.  


Her second goal is to annoy her father by not helping him gain the funding.  This goal could carry the whole novel forward, but it isn’t a worthy goal and makes her a heroine the reader can’t root for.  If anything, this goal makes her appear remarkably immature and unworthy of either the hero or the reader’s interest.  


The main character must have a worthy goal that the reader can root for.

Monday, February 19, 2024

Beware the Scene Stealer

Here’s a plot summary of a first chapter I read recently.


The heroine enters an expensive restaurant and sits down at her father’s table.


He complains she is late, which she is not, and proceeds to berate her for various failings, none of which she thinks she has.  They share a prickly conversation full of personal history subtext and anger.


He tells her that his corporation is having financial troubles, and he’s arranged to have a corporate investor meet him on his private estate for the weekend.  He wants his beautiful daughter there to entertain the corporate savior and show a positive side to his personality.


The heroine has her own financial success thanks to her own hard work and acumen, and she has less than charitable feelings for her father who threw her and her mother out so he could marry a trophy wife and have the son he wanted to inherit the business.  She agrees, however, because she’ll get a chance to see her much younger half-brother whom she adores.  


In the next, much shorter scene, the handsome corporate investor, aka the hero, arrives at the estate in his private plane.  Rather than the limo and the designer clothes her father wanted, she shows up in the caretaker’s Land Rover and she is wearing riding clothes.  Despite this, sexual sparks fly, and they share a bit of banter.  They head to a meeting with Daddy Dearest.


After I read this chapter, something was bothering me, and I stopped to analyze my feelings.  Sure, this first chapter was pretty standard and cliche-ridden with a I’ve-read-this-more-than-once feeling, but something else was wrong here.  


The first scene was much too long, and this is a romance where the hero and heroine should meet as soon as possible, but, beyond the length, I recognized a greater problem.  In the first scene Daddy Dearest and the heroine’s conversation is filled with emotional subtext, anger, and past history.  Daddy leapt off the page.


In the next scene, the hero was the standard and well-written sexy hero, but he was a flat character in comparison to Daddy Dearest, and the heroine was more about annoying Daddy than she was about the sexy hero.  


Daddy Dearest is a classic example of the Scene Stealer Secondary Character--the character with the interesting past history or the personal swagger and background to make him far more interesting than the main character or characters.


Scene Stealer Secondaries aren’t necessarily a bad thing, they can liven up a story at times, but they should never be one of the first characters introduced, particularly if the hero hasn’t been introduced.


Here are a few other examples.


In the original STAR WARS movie, what if Han Solo with his sexy swagger, sneer, and interesting history had been introduced before callow farm boy Luke?  


What if in the first PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, Captain Jack Sparrow had been introduced before Orlando Bloom’s character Will?


In both cases, we’d have had less connection and emotional attachment to the main character, less of a sense of who is the hero of the story, and less desire for the main character to reach his goal, not the secondary character’s goal.   We’d be undermining our main characters and pulling the reader away from the story we wanted to tell.


So, beware the Secondary Scene Stealer because he can also steal your story’s successful telling.


In my original example, Daddy Dearest isn’t the only problem with this first chapter.  In next week’s blog, I’ll discuss the other failure in this first chapter.

Monday, February 12, 2024

A Rewrite Checklist

It’s always good to have a checklist at hand when you are ready to rewrite your story.  Below are a number of questions you can ask yourself as you work.  


As you learn your weaknesses as a writer, this list can be changed to include questions that focus on your problem areas.


This list is also a good start for critique partners.


THE FIRST CHAPTER


Do I have a hook in the first few, or better yet, the first page?


Have I shown the main character’s goal, short-term, or better yet, for the whole novel?


EACH CHAPTER


Does this chapter advance the story?  


Tell more about the characters?


Give plot information?  


Does it work with the chapter before it?


PLOT  


Do the characters and plot work well together, or is the plot 

just pasted on?


Does it make sense?


Does one thing lead to another?


Has the story started at the right place?


Does the action escalate?


Are more plot questions asked before a plot question is resolved?


Does the plot fit genre boundaries?


CHARACTERS


Does each character sound different?  Do they have a voice of their own?


Are the characters doing what they as characters and personalities should be doing, or are they being moved around for my convenience?  


Will the reader understand why they are doing certain things?


Does each major character have a strength and a weakness which will be affected by the plot?


In the romantic relationship, is their emotional conflict strong enough 

for the length of the work?  Will it take more than one long talk to resolve their conflict?  Does their romantic relationship work with the action plot?

In the action plot, is the conflict between the hero and his opponent strong enough?  Is the opponent strong enough to really push the hero to his limits? 



POINT OF VIEW


Is the proper point of view maintained in each scene?


Would a scene work better from another character's viewpoint?


Is there only one viewpoint character in each scene?

INTERIOR MONOLOGUES


Does this interior monologue slow the scene too much?


Could this information or emotion be expressed in dialogue or action?


Am I telling too much? 

SENTENCE STRUCTURE


Do the sentences vary in length?  


Does the language fit the actions? Long sentences for leisurely, more introspective moments?  


Short, terse sentences and words for action scenes?


LANGUAGE


Am I intruding, or am I invisible so the story can tell itself?  


Does cause and effect happen correctly?  


Am I showing rather than telling?  



WORLD BUILDING


Is the world building well thought out?


Is it logical?


Did I break my own rules?


If a myth or fantasy element is changed from common knowledge, is it a logical or understandable change?  Is it explained? (a vampire who can survive daylight, for example)