Barking at readers in a muddy field

Last week’s Feedback Friday asked for opening pages and (I’ve counted) about a quadzillion of you presented your openings.

And, as ever, there were good and bad and brilliant and baffling submissions across every genre and every possible topic. Also, as ever, a few themes came up for me as I ran my hands through this abundance.

One theme was: too fast, too fast, too fast, too fast!

Another was: too little, too little, too little!

I’ll get to what I mean in a moment, but first let’s remember what we want from that opening page.

We’re asking a busy person with 10,000 things in their head to leave the Real Actual World they live in and start to think about a person who never existed in a situation that never was. That’s a pretty loopy thing for anyone to want to do and they’re only going to want to do it if they care a bit about the character you’re presenting them with.

And yes, for the reader to care, they’ll need to know the story situation. (Aerobatic pilot engaged in a complex manouevre? Roman boy-king on the run for his life? Escaped witch hunted in a forest? Or whatever else.)

But before the story situation even matters, you have to do something else. You have to get the reader to believe that your person is real and that the world on which they tread is real. You have to start to grey out the reader’s Real Actual World and create one that is – or feels – more real.

So, creating a bond between reader and character: that’s the first thing.

The second has to do with establishing story, yes … but, right now, your entire project is a wee, fragile thing. You’re planting out your sweet-peas in early- or mid-May, a touch early, and the risk of frost (or a reader putting your book back on its pile in the bookstore) is still acute. So your story moves at this stage are careful, not huge. A foal can’t carry the load of a five-year-old hunter.

The typical story move for your opening section is therefore pretty small, pretty careful. Your main job here, lighting this candle, is simply to watch that the flame takes. The win here isn’t that you have a raging bonfire at the end of page one. The win is that the wick takes the flame and the flame establishes. Once it’s done so, you can make bigger, bolder moves in the confidence that the reader moves with you.

But that’s not quite all we ask from our openings.

The first-page reader is a sacred beast. The page-two-hundred reader? Pah! You can treat her like a fatted calf, to be pushed, prodded and barked around a muddy field. You can play rough games with that reader. She won’t mind.

But the first-page reader? Ah, this person is sacred, because they hold a bank card in their hand and they are trembling on the knife edge of desire. Will they buy or will they decline? They need to feel, somehow, from this opening page or two, that the story will deliver all that they want from it. And yes: this reader already has several sources of information. The way you’ve been shelved in a bookshop or on Amazon. The cover design. The title. The blurb.

So yes, those things help support a buy decision, but the opening page is the thing you ask to clinch it. So we need (A) the promise of a story big enough and moving enough to get the reader to part with some cash but (B) no moves so big that they break the developing relationship between reader and character.

Now that sounds like a contradiction, except that the reader is a skilled and subtle beast. They divine Big Story from tiny clues. And your third task with your opening page or two is: foreshadow the story that is to come.

The foreshadowing can certainly be oblique. It can reside in a mood, a sentence or two, a trivial incident, a handful of words. But (done right) you’ve passed a token from writer to reader: ‘I, the author, promise you that I will deliver on the story that you intuit (in some semi-conscious, hard-to-define) way. You can trust my future story, because my moves right now are so confident, so fully in control, you know I’m not going to mess up down the road.’

One very nice piece from Feedback Friday had a woman see a car that she recognised. The woman enters a pub to find its owner, but walks out again having not found him. That’s the very tiny (very newborn-foal-friendly) movement we start the novel with. But that tiny non-encounter nudges the character to remember her old tutor lying back in his seat and listening to the blues. The passage ended “I’d seen those eyes shut a few other times. I retract that he didn’t teach much; he taught me a thing or two.”

And poof! Even the dullest reader, even a clod with a headful of pudding, will intuit that there’s a love story here. And not too chaste either: we have blues music and sex and long afternoons with tumbled sheets all here … just barely mentioned.

That’s perfect.

So the too fast, too fast observation I started with comes down to writers hurrying to get their Big Story down on the page before the reader is really ready – before the reader has fully bonded with the character. The trouble with that hurrying speed is that the Big Story tends to crush the reader-character bond under its wheels. And the reader-character bond has to come first. Without that, nothing else exists or matters.

As for the too little, too little observation: there I want to say that some openings don’t do enough to gesture at the story that’s to come. They offer a Dramatic Incident, yes, but that Dramatic Incident doesn’t really do enough to guide me as to the shape of what’s to come.

And all this sounds complex, but it’s easy enough to do. Here, for not much reason except that the novel was to hand, is the opening of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited:

When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning. We were leaving that day. When we marched in, three months before, the place was under snow; now the first leaves of spring were unfolding. I had reflected then that, whatever scenes of desolation lay ahead of us, I never feared one more brutal than this, and I reflected now that it had no single happy memory for me.

Here love had died between me and the army.

As the prologue continues, we learn that the narrator is a captain in the British Army of the Second World War. He’s about to move out of a Scottish training camp with his men.

That’s the bare situation and, yes, it’s interesting enough to sustain us and, yes, small enough that we don’t feel overcrowded by too much story too soon.

But look at those underlinings.

“Paused and looked back”: this whole book is a looking back, a reminiscence. Any novel written in the past tense is, technically, a reminiscence, but BR revels in its nostalgic gaze – makes a feature of it. (The time-of-war narrator looking back at his time-of-peace past emphasises the change in the world between Then and Now.)

“No single happy memory … loved had died”: this tells us that there’s a love story here, but an unhappy one, a failure.

That sounds rather bleak: why would you fork out for a book that’s all set to depress you? Except that I think there’s one more bit of (really lovely) foreshadowing which complicates that simple story. Because Waugh also says, “three months before, the place was under snow; now the first leaves of spring were unfolding.” That’s not a movement from happy to bleak; it’s the exact opposite.

So Waugh has given us two contradictory messages here. The most overt one is, “This is going to be a very bleak love story, with plenty of reminiscence.” But the secondary, almost hidden one is, “this is a story of growth, and bloom, and hope, and life.”

And, darn it, but that’s exactly what this book is: a sad love story (Ryder + Sebastian, and also Ryder + Julia) but also a very hopeful one (Ryder + God.)

Now, I wouldn’t suggest that writing a sad love story about God is a brilliant way to make sales in the 21^st century, but your story is what it is. Foreshadow that. Do it with wit. Do it obliquely. Do it with a sentence. Do it with an image. But do it gently. Don’t break the plant that hasn’t yet put down roots.

Got that? Good. Now execute.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Opening page

Same exercise as last week.

If my yipper-yapper in this email has struck a chord, then revise that opening page. Upload that first 250-300 words (with title + genre) and write a line or two about what you’ve changed and why.

And you know what? Even if you’re dead happy with your opening, go ahead and edit that. Post in Townhouse here.

And remember:

1. Create the bond between reader & character
2. Move gently
3. Foreshadow the Big Story.

That’s enough of my yipper-yapper. Now up and at em.

Til soon.

Harry