Bland but trutful

In an excellent email earlier this week, and in her full blog post here, my colleague Laura Starkey wrote about what our team is actually looking for when we read your first 500 words for our current competition. (Competition details here – but don’t wait around, entries close at the end of the weekend. Oh, and don’t forget you’ve got until Monday to join us as a Premium Member for 30% off. More on that below…)

To summarise, our readers all highlighted slightly different aspects of what they were after:

Verity: “I’m looking for a character I’m going to want to stay with for the whole story – and they don’t have to be a good person! Show me something of who they are.”

Tanya: “I love it when a character shows a bit of vulnerability or their slightly messy, less likeable side.”

Becca: “It’s essential that your reader roughly understands who they’re following and what’s going on.”

Kate: “I want to feel what the character is feeling, while still getting a sense of the plot.”

Imogen: “A clear sense of genre is crucial.”

Jonny: “I’m already assuming the sea is stormy, the rain is heavy … I want to dive straight into the action.”

Kat: “I’m looking for a truly original concept brought to life with exceptional writing.”

Rachel: “I’m looking for ‘sweets’, something intriguing and slightly unexplained.”

Laura: “I need to feel like I’m in a safe pair of hands – that whatever questions an opening provokes are going to be answered, and in an interesting way.”

That sounds like a slightly overwhelming list, but I think it’s doable and doable without the need for huge fireworks. Here’s one of my openings. I think, as it happens, I have a yen for pretty tedious openings, which doesn’t sound like a generally fantastic idea, I know.

Here’s the start of the third of my Fiona books – an opening that revels in its own boringness:

I like the police force. I like its rules, its structures. I like the fact that, most of the time, we are on the side of ordinary people. Sorting out their road accidents and petty thefts. Preventing violence, keeping order. In the words of our bland but truthful corporate slogan, we’re Keeping South Wales Safe. That’s a task worth doing and one I enjoy. Only, Gott im Himmel, the job can be tedious.

Right now, I’m sitting in a cramped little office above the stockroom at a furniture superstore on the Newport Road. I’m here with a DS, Huw Bowen, recently transferred from Swansea. A finance guy from Swindon is shoving spreadsheets at me and looking at me with pained, watery eyes. We have been here forty minutes.

Bowen takes the topmost spreadsheet and runs a thick finger across it. It comprises a column of names, a row of months, a block of numbers.

‘So these are the payments?’ says Bowen.

‘Correct.’

The finance guy from Swindon wears a plastic security pass clipped to his jacket pocket. Kevin Tildesley.

‘So all these people have been paid all these amounts?’

‘Correct.’

Tax deducted, national insurance, everything?’

‘Yes. Exactly.’

The only window in the office looks out over the shop floor itself. We’re up on the top storey, so we’re on a level with the fluorescent lighting and what seems like miles of silver ducting. The superstore version of heaven.

Bowen still hasn’t got it. He’s a nice guy, but he’s as good with numbers as I am at singing opera.

I bite down onto my thumb, hard enough to give myself a little blue ledge of pain. I let my mind rest on that ledge, while the scenario in front of me plays itself out. I’m theoretically here to take notes, but my pad is mostly blank.

‘And these are all employees? Contracts in place? Bank accounts in order? Anything else, I don’t know … pension plans and all that?’

‘Yes. They are all contracted employees. We have their contracts. Their bank details. Their addresses. Everything. But two of the people – these two,’ he says, circling two names on the spreadsheet, ‘these two don’t actually exist.’

Bowen stares at him.

His mouth says nothing. His eyes say, ‘So why. The fuck. Were you paying them?’

That’s just shy of 400 words, so in the competition I’d get to have another 100 words involving manila folders and payroll audits and the like. Just to be clear: this opening would never win a competition. That doesn’t mean it’s the wrong opening for the book – I don’t think it is. Just that the Competition Opening genre demands a bit more tarantaraa than this one offers, and some books don’t want to do their tarantaraa upfront.

Character

That said, I think that the opening broadly ticks the boxes that wanted ticking. So on character, we said:

Verity: “I’m looking for a character I’m going to want to stay with for the whole story – and they don’t have to be a good person! Show me something of who they are.”

Tanya: “I love it when a character shows a bit of vulnerability or their slightly messy, less likeable side.”

Kate: “I want to feel what the character is feeling.”

We start off with a fairly general paragraph about the police: roughly, “Yes, I like the police, but it can be very dull.” That’s OK by way of character intro, except that you might find at least 50% of coppers saying something similar – perhaps without the Gott im Himmel, perhaps without the “bland but truthful”. But still, this paragraph isn’t one to clinch anything.

250 words in, however, and we get this:

I bite down onto my thumb, hard enough to give myself a little blue ledge of pain. I let my mind rest on that ledge, while the scenario in front of me plays itself out. I’m theoretically here to take notes, but my pad is mostly blank.

That “little blue ledge” is unique to Fiona. The fact that she injures herself to cope with the tedium. That way of phrasing it. Tanya wanted something “slightly messy” – and boof! This character’s mess involves totally pointless self-harm on the very first page. We know the character’s feelings immediately and we already know they’re going to be an interesting one to watch.

Story

In relation to story, we also said:

Kate: “I want to … [get] a sense of the plot.”

Imogen: “A clear sense of genre is crucial.”

Jonny: “I want to dive straight into the action.”

And? 

Well, the clinching bit here is the last bit of dialogue:

[Bowen’s] mouth says nothing. His eyes say, ‘So why. The fuck. Were you paying them?’

And that’s the book, right? – or at least the first part of the book. An ordinary furniture shop in a Cardiff retail park has been scammed into paying out £38,000 to two non-existent employees. That’s hardly a corpse on page 1 – it’s a tedious fraud on page 3 – but we have action (kinda), we have genre, and we have the first indication as to what story lies ahead.

And of course, you can rely on readers here. Absolutely no one is going to think, “My word, this is going to be a boring novel. Our hero-detective is going to spend 400 pages analysing spreadsheets until she finds the white-collar culprit behind this minor scam.”

On the contrary, they think, “Uh-oh, this is going to lead to some kind of murder and there’s going to be some much bigger crime here and Fiona’s going to get in over her head and there will be Shenanigans. She’ll probably explode something or sink something or throw someone over a cliff.” They think that because they can read the promise of the cover, and the blurb and their knowledge of what a crime novel is. That’s why most of my books don’t actually start with a corpse discovery. They don’t have to. Readers know what’s coming up and they love the tease. A sense of the plot (Kate’s phrase) is more important than an opening that has bullets flying. (Which is also perfectly fine, but optional.)

Sweets and safety

Our readers also demanded:

Kat: “I’m looking for a truly original concept brought to life with exceptional writing.”

Rachel: “I’m looking for ‘sweets’, something intriguing and slightly unexplained.”

Laura: “I need to feel like I’m in a safe pair of hands.”

And honestly? I don’t think I’ve delivered for Kat. There is, I think, a properly good idea underlying this book, but it doesn’t show its hand in that opening 500 words. That’s why the First 500 is a bit of an art form in itself. It is a good way to find the best opening; not necessarily a good way to find the best book.

But the Rachel / Laura ideas here are interesting – safe pair of hands + a couple of sweeties. I especially like that idea of sweets: Raymond Chandler used to type his novels on fairly small bits of paper and he demanded of himself that each page contained one little spill of magic. It’s a good discipline.

In my view, the magic offered can be relatively low key. That ‘little blue ledge of pain’ counts. I think the final line or two (“Why … were you paying them?”) offers just the right amount of bite for this stage of the story. The ‘pained watery eyes’ – well, that’s not quite a spill of magic, but it tells us quite a lot about who we’re with and what we’re doing. We know without being directly told that poor old Kevin Tildesley is not very masculine. He’s a man of spreadsheets and watery eyes and plastic badges. Bowen is a man of thick fingers, sweary eyes and limited comprehension.

We also understand Fiona’s predicament: she’s understood the numbers (which Bowen hasn’t) and she’s a woman of action who’s not afraid of the fraud (unlike Tildesley, who is.) And she’s been there for 40 minutes. And this is a cramped little office shoved into the roof of a furniture store.

Most of all, when I reread all this, I think: “Yes, I’m confident in this author. I can tell – from those character details, some word choices, the dialogue – that this author has confidence in the story they’re about to tell. In fact, they’re confident enough to start with an overtly boring opening: one that talks quite a lot about how unexciting this all is.”

And for me – when I’m choosing a book to read, not when I’m judging a first 500 competition – I look for two things.

Confidence is the first. Anything to tell me that I can trust this author with the next few hours of my time.

Clarity, or something like it, is the second. I want an author who is going to make it easy for me to immerse myself in his or her world. I want that the author to serve me and my needs. I don’t want to read a book where I’m meant to be admiring someone else’s wonderful art. (I mean: I’m happy to admire great writers. But I’ll only admire them if they reward my reading.)

An opening is a joyful thing. It’s a table full of objects, concealed by a black velvet cloth. The author catches the reader’s eye, winks, and removes the first of those objects… or perhaps only reveals an edge, or some dimly lit surface. The game is fun, because what else lies beneath the cloth? That first glimpse is a clue – a tease – but we are still far from whisking away the whole cloth.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Openings

OK: bit of a weird one this. We’ve been talking about openings, so I’m going to ask you for an opening. But I don’t want to tread on any first 500 toes.

250 words or so. Let me have it. When you’re ready, log in to Townhouse and share your work in this forum.

Til soon.

Harry