Last week\u2019s Feedback Friday asked for opening pages and (I\u2019ve counted) about a quadzillion of you presented your openings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One theme was: too fast, too fast, too fast, too fast<\/em>!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another was: too little, too little, too little<\/em>!<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ll get to what I mean in a moment, but first let\u2019s remember what we want from that opening page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We\u2019re 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\u2019s a pretty loopy thing for anyone to want to do and they\u2019re only going to want to do it if they care a bit about the character you\u2019re presenting them with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yes, for the reader to care, they\u2019ll 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.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n But before the story situation even matters<\/em>, 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\u2019s Real Actual World and create one that is \u2013 or feels \u2013 more real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, creating a bond between reader and character<\/strong>: that\u2019s the first thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second has to do with establishing story, yes \u2026 but, right now, your entire project is a wee, fragile thing. You\u2019re 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\u2019t carry the load of a five-year-old hunter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The typical story move for your opening section is therefore pretty small<\/strong>, pretty careful. Your main job here, lighting this candle, is simply to watch that the flame takes. The win here isn\u2019t 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\u2019s done so, you can make bigger, bolder moves in the confidence that the reader moves with you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But that\u2019s not quite all we ask from our openings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019ve been shelved in a bookshop or on Amazon. The cover design. The title. The blurb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019ve passed a token from writer to reader: \u2018I, 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\u2019m not going to mess up down the road.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s 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 \u201cI\u2019d seen those eyes shut a few other times. I retract that he didn\u2019t teach much; he taught me a thing or two.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n And poof! Even the dullest reader, even a clod with a headful of pudding, will intuit that there\u2019s a love story here. And not too chaste either: we have blues music and sex and long afternoons with tumbled sheets all here \u2026 just barely mentioned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s perfect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So the too fast, too fast<\/em> observation I started with comes down to writers hurrying to get their Big Story down on the page before the reader is really ready \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As for the too little, too little<\/em> observation: there I want to say that some openings don\u2019t do enough to gesture at the story that\u2019s to come. They offer a Dramatic Incident, yes, but that Dramatic Incident doesn\u2019t really do enough to guide me as to the shape of what\u2019s to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And all this sounds complex, but it\u2019s easy enough to do. Here, for not much reason except that the novel was to hand, is the opening of Evelyn Waugh\u2019s Brideshead Revisited<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back<\/u> 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<\/u> for me.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Here love had died<\/u> between me and the army<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the prologue continues, we learn that the narrator is a captain in the British Army of the Second World War. He\u2019s about to move out of a Scottish training camp with his men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s the bare situation and, yes, it\u2019s interesting enough to sustain us and, yes, small enough that we don\u2019t feel overcrowded by too much story too soon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But look at those underlinings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPaused and looked back<\/em>\u201d: 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 \u2013 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.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNo single happy memory \u2026 loved had died<\/em>\u201d: this tells us that there\u2019s a love story here, but an unhappy one, a failure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n