Authority in a pair of jeans

Last week, I said that I thought that genre-communication and authority were the two essential things to achieve in your opening pages. I thought that you were unlikely to miscommunicate genre, in which case your task now comes down to that communication of authority.

A low key opening

So this week: a worked example. I’ve chosen, for that example, what may be the most boring opening page I’ve ever written. But not bad-boring. Just low-key-boring. Here it is:

‘Well?’

Bev runs her hands down her hips and gives me a wiggle.

‘Well?’

I say, ‘Great. Really nice.’ I’m not sure what to say.

‘My jeans. They’re new.’

‘Oh.’

Now I know where my attention’s meant to be, I know how to focus. The jeans are a kind of washed-out indigo. Skinny-cut. Low-waisted, but not ridiculous. Slim dark leather belt, discreet scarlet buckle. The jeans are close-fitting enough that Bev’s phone makes a hard, flat shape in her back pocket. When I did a spell in Traffic, during my first two years in the police, and I was just a regular uniformed copper like everyone else, I remember an accident victim with very tight jeans, who suffered multiple fractures to both femurs. We had to cut her out of those jeans to get at the wounds. One of the paramedics did it with a scalpel, handling the blade delicately enough that it made only the finest pink graze down the girl’s thighs. Two parallel tracks pricked out in dots of blood.

‘New jeans,’ I say. ‘They look great! Where did you get them?’

‘It’s not about where I got them,’ she chides me mildly. ‘I’ve dropped a whole size. These are a ten.’

She gyrates again, and now I know what to say, I say it with enough enthusiasm and repetition that Bev is satisfied. We finish getting changed and troop through to the chirpily upbeat cafe, where we get fruit smoothies and pasta salads.

Thoughts on the above

So: we have two women, talking about jeans. That’s not interesting to a third-party in any context, but it’s certainly a quiet start to a crime novel.

Does this matter? Well, some authors will think it does. That’s why you end up getting those (yukkety-yuk-yuk-yuk) openings where unnamed Bad Guy slowly tortures someone (usually a woman) to death, with the whole thing related in a horribly voyeuristic way.

And, OK – there are plenty of readers out there and they all want different things. But you certainly don’t have to take that kind of (slightly desperate) route in your fiction.

I said my start was quiet, and it is, but it has a crackle to it all the same.

Here’s the opening dialogue again:

‘Well?’

Bev runs her hands down her hips and gives me a wiggle.

‘Well?’

I say, ‘Great. Really nice.’ I’m not sure what to say.

‘My jeans. They’re new.’

‘Oh.’

Bev clearly wants a response from Fiona, hence the repeated ‘Well?’ – not just a question but, in its second appearance, a slightly annoyed demand.

Fiona is clearly clueless. This is a standard woman-to-woman interaction, and Fiona has no idea what to say. She ends up saying something inoffensive, but almost devoid of meaning.

Bev (who knows Fiona and her general uselessness) then feeds her the prompt that other women might not have needed.

Fiona acknowledges this new information and gets ready to re-analyse. Here’s how that analysis proceeds:

The jeans are a kind of washed-out indigo. Skinny-cut. Low-waisted, but not ridiculous. Slim dark leather belt, discreet scarlet buckle. The jeans are close-fitting enough that Bev’s phone makes a hard, flat shape in her back pocket.

That’s all accurate enough and sensible enough, of course … except that (a) this chunk reads like an unnervingly complete police description of an item and (b) completely misses the element that Bev will want to know about: do these jeans look good on me?

Fiona’s human-radar then goes even further awry:

When I did a spell in Traffic, during my first two years in the police, and I was just a regular uniformed copper like everyone else, I remember an accident victim with very tight jeans, who suffered multiple fractures to both femurs. We had to cut her out of those jeans to get at the wounds. One of the paramedics did it with a scalpel, handling the blade delicately enough that it made only the finest pink graze down the girl’s thighs. Two parallel tracks pricked out in dots of blood.

That tells us two things, I think.

The first is that Fiona is obsessed by all things police-y and, perhaps more accurately, all things corpse-y or at least near corpse-y.

The second is that there’s something about a fashion-related conversation (however unchallenging) which does Fiona’s head in. The mental jump to bloody road accidents is her way of self-soothing.

But the next bit of dialogue doesn’t allude at all to the mental processes we’ve just witnessed. Instead, we get this:

‘New jeans,’ I say. ‘They look great! Where did you get them?’

‘It’s not about where I got them,’ she chides me mildly. ‘I’ve dropped a whole size. These are a ten.’

That is: Fiona is blatantly code-switching. She’s learned to keep the weirdness of her actual thought-processes away from others and she does so here. She doesn’t do it very brilliantly. (Her only fashion comment: “they look great!” That’s hardly Vogue-level analysis.) But she does just enough to stay on Planet Normal.

In practice, her attempt is still not good enough. Fiona has failed to notice the thing that Bev has been desperate for her to notice, so Bev has to offer still more guidance in an attempt to get what she needs.

Fiona then has enough data to do what she should have done from the very first and this episode closes with the pair of them going to the ‘chirpily upbeat café’ in the gym:

She gyrates again, and now I know what to say, I say it with enough enthusiasm and repetition that Bev is satisfied. We finish getting changed and troop through to the chirpily upbeat cafe, where we get fruit smoothies and pasta salads.

Observations

Things to notice in all this:

1. Genre

There’s not a massive allusion to genre here, but there’s enough. That allusion to the road accident victim already puts blood on the first page – and there’s a clear hint here that there’ll be plenty more to come, and not just via a non-crimey road accident. Given that readers already basically know what kind of book they’ll be reading from the title, cover, blurb, etc, the genre indicators here can be really quite low key.

• Elevator Pitch

My books are about a detective with a – uh – complicated mental life. This first page already establishes that just fine. Most women can talk about jeans without thinking about broken femurs and scalpels. Fiona can’t. That fact is established without much fuss. We don’t need fuss. We just need the smell of that core pitch very early. And here it is, neatly tied off in those ‘parallel tracks of blood.’

• Dialogue

The first “authority indicator” comes in that opening bit of dialogue. The whole opening bit only amounts to 30 words, but we already feel the pull (of Bev’s desire for praise) and the push (Fiona’s blank failure to understand what she needs to deliver.)

That push-pull – tiny and inconsequential though the conflict is – tells the reader This author knows what he’s doing when it comes to these trivial things. You can probably bet that he knows what he’s doing when the stakes get bigger.

• Character complexity

Another “authority indicator” comes in the presentation of Fiona. We have here – in only 250 words – at least four different versions of our heroine:

1. Person attempting to engage in girly dialogue, albeit badly
2. Hyper-professional police officer, able to instantly deliver an accurate and complete description of clothing
3. Nutcase, who gets troubled by (a) and whose comfort-place involves rather gruesome traffic accidents.
4. Nutcase who, knowing she’s a nutcase, keeps the loopy thoughts firmly trapped on the inside as she valiantly attempts to re-enter the scary world of Girly Chat.

And that’s it. For me, that opening page is low-key but perfectly sufficient. Any reader reading this will be reassured that this is a crime novel, and will have confidence in my ability to tell the tale.

To be sure there’ll be plenty of crime readers who really don’t want this book. Maybe they want something more immediately violent – or more immediately cosy – or written with less authorial fol-de-rol. And good: you don’t want readers who don’t want you. They won’t finish your book. They won’t give it good reviews. You don’t want to sell to people who aren’t going to be all in for you.

And yes, a low-key opening is OK – really OK – a don’t-worry-about-it OK. But you do need to ramp up before too long.

In the next scene, Bev and Fiona meet two male police officers, one of whom Bev massively fancies. The one who Bev fancies suggests they all go out for a drink, and they do. (‘I’m thinking, ‘No, absolutely, definitely not,’ but Bev is saying, ‘Yes, that would be lovely, wouldn’t it, Fi?’ and throws me her female-solidarity look hard enough that it’s probably sticking out between my shoulder-blades.’)

Then (1800 words into the book, or about 5 paperback pages) one of the officers gets a call that he has to respond to. Fiona’s the only cop there who hasn’t had a drink, so she volunteers to give him a ride. Before too long, they get to a massive hoo-hah near Brecon. (Overturned chemical lorry, with lots of very yukky smoke coming out.) And, better still as far as Fiona’s concerned, a corpse found in a remote village (2500 words into the book) … and, with all the local cops busy with their burning chemicals, it’s Fiona’s job to go and attend the scene.

So the opening page itself is low-key, but:

1. The genre is clear from the off
2. The elevator pitch is also immediately present
3. The authority signals (for “my” sort of readers) are also clear
4. The reader still only has to read 5 pages to get a sense that the story is now properly underway … and maybe 7-8 pages to find out what that story actually is.

That’s it. That’s all you need. Now go away and do the same.

Or, better still, take The Ultimate Start course, and do the same.

FFEDBACK FRIDAY / Conflict, stakes and reader curiosity

This week’s Feedback Friday task is from Emma Cooper, one of our tutors on The Ultimate Start. It’s this:

Share the scene in which your inciting incident takes place.

When you’re ready, post your work to the forum, then read and comment on the thoughts of at least two of your fellow writers. Can you learn anything from their observations? 

Til soon. 

Harry