One foot on the train

The things writers do, right?

A couple of days ago, a bunch of Jericho members and I got together to co-edit some text. The text came from the members themselves. We had dozens of submissions, but we had time for just five or six chunks of text, each of about 250 words.

And then – we edited. Live online. I shared my screen, so people could see me editing the text and hear my thoughts as I did so. Meantime, everyone commented on what I was doing – or what they thought I should be doing – via the live chat.

The webinar was a proper experiment, one that could easily have gone either way. After all, live editing a Word document for an hour and a bit wouldn’t strike most people as a brilliant way to spend an evening. But writers aren’t most people. And (in my view at least) the thing was a real success.

The best part? It felt utterly authentic. I deliberately hadn’t prepared my edits or my comments in advance, so I came to the text very much as I would do with my own work:

Hmm. What do we have here? What’s working? Yes, that bit’s OK, but this strikes me as wrong. How can I fix that? Well, let me see. Here’s an easy, obvious edit. But something extra needs to go here. Don’t know what yet. I’ll put something in square brackets and move on …

If nothing else, I hope it shows that what looks like a fairly slipshod, make-it-up-as-you-go-along process can end up delivering polished, professional text. Perhaps, if you’re lucky, it can even deliver a little bit of magic too.

Now there’s probably a lot else to talk about (and I’d love feedback from anyone who attended), but I did want to pick up one point, because it’s one I often come across in manuscripts by newer writers.

The point is this. Short, sweet and simple.

When you’re starting a book, your very first task is to get readers to board the damn train.

Getting them onto your train is the single hardest thing you do as a writer. When the reader has even a scrap of investment in your character, even a morsel of interest in your story, their default inclination is to read on. You actually need to do something horrible to stop them. (Like being boring. Or writing terrible prose.)

But when the reader is on chapter one, page one, paragraph one, they have no specific impulse prompting them to read on. At this stage, they liked your cover, they maybe heard something from a friend or a blogger, but nothing else. No attachment to character, no germ of story.

And in fact, the situation is worse than I’ve just made it sound.

To make any progress with your story, your reader has to do some serious work.

They have to understand who your character is. What her world is. What her relationships are. What her situation is. They have to start piecing together a huge amount of information from the fragmentary information that you offer.

For sure, that chore never entirely goes away. New characters arrive, new emotions swirl, there’s always new information to digest. But that labour starts from a much different base. Sure, we may not know everything about the Luke Skywalker / Darth Vader relationship, but we know plenty about the basic world they inhabit. We can add new information to a generous existing stock.

Not so at the start. The start of your book is the most perilous moment. The read-on incentives are at their scantiest. The work you are demanding is at its peak.

So: you have to get the reader on board your story-train. That’s the first thing. The first and most important.

So don’t overload them. Don’t:

• Start one paragraph in 2020 then leap back ten years in paragraph 2
• Start one paragraph with Character A, then immediately start telling us about character B
• Have a quick sequence of short chapters with each one starting with a new character and a new place. (There might be some counter-examples here, but be careful.)
• Introduce too many characters too fast
• Tell us about place A in one section and, almost immediately, tell us about place B
• Throw too much new-world information at a reader too quickly. So if you are writing a book set on a different world, then use one settled not-too-weird situation to start out in. Same thing applies if you are writing about our world, but an unfamiliar corner of it (say, 1890s Manhattan). You need to start with some simple vignette that gives place and time and situation, then start expanding from there.
• Introduce more than one big mystery. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, the opening scene is atmospheric all right, but not too weird … or at least, not until you get to the line ‘The king was pregnant.’ And boom! Le Guin has unwrapped her Great Big Mystery. Most of the rest of her world-building could simply wait.

And really, all these exhortations amount to just one:

Be gentle with the reader. Don’t encumber them with too much baggage while they are still boarding your train. One light satchel and a sandwich containing some sustainably caught fish. That’s plenty for the start of the journey.

Once the reader is on the train and rattling comfortably towards their story-destination, you can get as baroque and as over-the-top as you like. Throw that sustainably caught fish and serve them a banquet featuring smoked oysters in aspic. Tip that satchel out of the window and bring in a set of matching leather valises along with a couple of smartly dressed footpeople.

But not yet. Not while your reader is still boarding the train.

Be gentle. Get them on board. Then gather speed.