Questions and cutlasses

The first act of a novel – the first 20,000 words, let’s say – can be hard to get right.

Your readers don’t yet care a lot about your characters – they don’t know them yet. The story situation is not yet very tangled or involved. Why does a reader need to read your book when they could be mowing the lawn or emptying a dishwasher or watching AI slop on YouTok?

And, OK, there are two basic answers to that question – and an essential prerequisite.

The prerequisite is that you have to get your readers to believe in your world: a place that feels real, characters who seem authentic. Without those things in place, there’s nothing you can do in terms of story-creation that is going to engage the reader. If the reader isn’t on board your train, it doesn’t matter how much coal you chuck into your story-furnace. The reader will still be left behind on the platform.

So, creating a real-feeling world matters. After that, there are two basic tools of story propulsion. They are:

• Creating events that are striking
• Creating questions that are adhesive.

Most writers (including probably even me) think firstest and mostest about that first bullet point. Creating story, on that view, is mostly about getting to fights or revelations or corpses or marriage proposals.

But most books don’t start with a fight. They do, nearly always, start with a question.

Who is this person? Why are they wearing that? Why have they just told a lie? What is it that sends them scurrying to the port at this dark hour of the night?

And both engines always matter.

If you’re only about fights, your book quickly starts feeling like just a succession of fists and guns. Why care? If there’s not a bigger question that looms over the action, we’ve got no big reason to give a damn.

On the other hand, questions (such as those I just listed) need, at some point, to connect with a hard-edged reality. The questions don’t need to start with the big stuff – love, death, injury, risk – but they need to pull towards it. If a book forever paddles around in the shallows, readers won’t give a damn – and they’d be right not to.

You don’t even have to get to the Big Fight quickly, you just need to make sure there are increasing hints to the reader that, oh boy, things are getting spicy. You have to build a world where the fight seems inevitable.

And the balance?

Well, look, I don’t know.

Yes, genre plays a role. The more mass-market your book, the more Events are likely to take priority over Questions. The more upmarket your book, the more Questions are likely to dominate.

But that doesn’t really seem like a helpful comment.

What I personally do is stick a few tentpoles in the ground. These are my Big Events. They’re the fights, the massive revelations, the moment of danger, the big, memorable set-piece type scenes.

I don’t necessarily need a lot of tentpoles. Two big ones is fine for a book that might run to 110,000 words. There will, I suppose, be some smaller tentpoles too, but really not very big ones. In one of my books, the two Big Tentpoles are (i) a caving trip that goes badly wrong, and (ii) a (weird) fight-to-the-death type scene at the denouement. Apart from that? Well, yes, some memorable scenes: a night alone with a corpse, a trip to see a strange man (and possible killer), meeting the grieving parents of the dead person.

But those things only just make it to the level of Big Events. Mostly, they’re just generating questions. (Why is the corpse there? Who is this man, and is he good or evil? Why do these grieving Ukrainian parents have a daughter dead in remotest Wales?)

Now, I’m probably at the skinnier end of things when it comes to tentpoles. Your book quite likely has more poles – and it’s OK if it does.

But Events and Questions?

No matter what you write or how you write it, you need both.

Always. And characters that the reader cares about.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / The Ultimate Start Lesson Three / Big Event tentpoles

Two FFs this week. For those of you following our much-beloved The Ultimate Start course, it’s:

• Rewrite your opening 500 words, this time really focusing on voice. Post your reflection 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?

When you’re ready, upload your work here.

And for the rest of us, a different sort of FF.

How long is your book (in words)? What Big Event tentpoles do you have? What questions do you start the book with and how do those things change and enlarge as you progress? Does all this feel like it’s about the right balance?

That’s a really hard FF, by the way – so don’t worry if you get a bit of brain-ache doing it. The reward of doing it is that it should REALLY clarify your book’s journey. Your editing will get much more rigorous and attuned to what your readers’ needs really are. Good luck! When you’re ready, post to the forum here.

Til soon.

Harry