Through the looking glass
My missus is half-German and speaks to our kids mostly in German. Recently, she’s been reading to them from Cornelia Funke’s Hinter Verzauberten Fenstern – literally, Behind Enchanted Windows, a book about entering magical worlds through the windows of an Advent calendar.
The kids absolutely love the book. It’s probably beaten Roald Dahl in the race to favourite-ever story.
Part of what they love is precisely that portal fantasy element – entering a magical world from this one. That portal element is so central to kids’ enjoyment that you can think of a load of books which place that portal front and centre: Through the Looking Glass, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Tom’s Midnight Garden, for example. Even where the portal isn’t there in the title, it’s still often one of the central emblems in the book. Just think how important Platform 9 ½ is to the symbolism of Harry Potter: on one side of that platform is – just London. One the other side – everything magical and wonderful and dangerous and strange.
Those transitions are critical. You can’t mess them up. One of our editors, a much-published and acclaimed kids’ author, Brian Keaney, used to advise writers of portal fantasy that they write the first draft of that key transition scene in poetry, before remastering it in prose. His idea was to make sure that the magic of the moment was captured properly, before you started working on all the boring detail.
First poetry, then prose.
As a practical idea for me personally, that idea has never worked. I’d feel too self-conscious about the poetry to really let rip. And, contrariwise, my prose never worries too much about playing by standard prose rules, so I don’t feel especially constrained to avoid the strange or the magical.
Also, of course, I don’t write portal fantasy for kids and young adults, so the idea didn’t really relate to me.
Or so I first thought. But the advice stuck with me, because I came to realise that almost every book worth a damn has a portal scene of some sort in it. Books start with some kind of status quo. Then some inciting incident comes along and – another world beckons. Not a magical one, necessarily, but one whose rules and possibilities have that glitter of danger and possibility. If you don’t have that kind of moment, it’s questionable what in heck’s name you think you’re writing about.
And the essential quality of the key portal scene is still the same, no matter what you’re writing. It’s to convey the transition from workaday (safe, known, stable) to magical (dangerous, unknown, unstable, replete with possibility.) That transition will have a specific quality to it, a quality that comes close to the essence of your story.
Here, for example, is a key moment from my The Deepest Grave. Fiona is at a murder scene. The woman, an archaeologist, has been decapitated and spears plunged into her chest. This is already no ordinary murder, but then we get the first flicker of portal:
Charteris’s empty eyes are turned towards the wall, where there hangs a piece of framed text, in that hard-to-read medieval script. I take a photo of the text for later reference, but try to read it anyway. It says, I think, something like this:
Agitio ter consuli, gemitus britannorum . . . Repellunt barbari ad mare, repellit mare ad barbaros; inter haec duo genera funerum aut iugulamur aut mergimur.
—Gildas, De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae
I don’t understand Latin—though ‘Britannorum’ and ‘repellunt barbari’ presumably mean something like what you’d think they mean—but I feel the tug of that ancient world, its torments and darknesses. Perhaps there, in that tug, is an important part of Gaynor Charteris herself.
That’s not quite a wardrobe you can step through – but this isn’t a fantasy and it’s not written for kids – but it comes close. That phrasing ‘the tug of that ancient world’ is, clear as a day, an announcement of the magical world that will dominate the pages of this modern police procedural.
Over the next dozen or so pages, that first flicker firms up into something more definite, more certain. Fiona soon comes back to the murder scene, but this time in the company of an archaeologist (Katie) capable of reading the Latin. Here’s how the portal moment comes again, but more strongly this time:
I point her to the medieval fragment hanging on the wall. The one Charteris was looking at.
‘Oh, that? It’s Gildas. The groans of the Britons.’
I don’t say anything, but my face probably does a ‘Gildas who?’ kind of look.
Katie: ‘Gildas was a sixth century monk. A saint, in fact. His writing is one of our earliest sources for the period.’
And, reading the Latin, she translates:
‘To Agitius, thrice consul: the groans of the Britons . . . The barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us to the barbarians; between these two means of death, we are either killed or drowned.—Gildas, On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain.’
‘And the barbarians in question . . .?’
‘Northern tribes. Modern day Scots and Irish basically.’
She answers the question, but the words drop noiselessly, pebbles vanished in a well. We both share a sudden sense that it is almost disrespectful to be talking about these long ago conflicts when what we are dealing with is a very twenty-first century corpse. It’s strange how this investigation, young as it is, keeps getting tugged under by the past, and the deep past at that.
Stolen Dark Age finds. Iron Age spears. Gildas and his Latin lament.
That last paragraph gives you, in list form, the disconcerting elements of our portal-world. And notice that our extravagantly murdered corpse is not in herself disconcerting. To Fiona, homicide investigation is part of her day job. The corpse alone doesn’t create the portal. It’s the bits all around it. The parts that don’t belong. That parts that make up the music of this particular book.
When I think of it, probably all of my books have some kind of portal moment. I bet yours has one as as well.
And the advice that emerges from this set of thoughts? Simply this: notice the magic. Notice the music. Write in poetry first, if that idea appeals. But if it doesn’t, bring the poetry in anyway. This is the place where the music of your book sounds its first true notes. The rest is preamble. This bit matters. Make sure the music pushes through. Do that, and your book already has the glitter of something that the reader wants to read.
PS: Upcoming delights for JW members:
If you’re a Jericho Member, just check out your upcoming webinars page to register here. For the self-editing class with me, I want to edit your work, so do send a chunk of it over. Send about 200-250 words. 300 words absolute maximum. Just email me with your name / title / one sentence manuscript description and the text itself. Send all that to info@jerichowriters.com, with SELF EDITING WITH EELS in the subject line. The “with eels” bit is there because I shall have a tankful of six-foot-long black eels next to me, and we shall attempt to improve your text while live-juggling with the eels. It will be messy, but fun. I recommend wearing old clothes for the session.
If you’re not a JW Member, then you must be feeling bleak. Maybe buy a puppy? Or check out the webinars here.
Enjoyed your post about portals, and realised my first novel had a portal to a new and very different life for the heroine and the hero has to actually walk away from his life into hers to enter their future, (so another portal..)
My WIP again has a scary portal…into known hostility.
You are so amusing though seriously packed with useful knowledge! Thanks again.
Hi Harry this is good to hear. My story has a Rat Café where witches and cats can talk!
That’s platform 9¾… (and I’m about as far from Potterdom as one can get).
Thanks Harry! That’s a very efficient way to work on the inciting incident: make it a portal into another world, the world of the story. I think I’ve done exactly that in both my WIPs (a novel and a biographical work).
With the novel, I was writing the middle and end before I had a beginning. I kept asking myself: Where does this story begin? As none of the answers excited me enough, I asked the same question to my protagonist: Where does your story begin? And the answer came loud and clear: It all started when I rang the doorbell. I rang the doorbell and… I had my inciting incident, my portal.
With the bio, the portal into the next “world” is inside a letter: The letter that had just arrived in the post was unremarkable, except for the thickness of the envelope.
Happy writing everybody!
Thanks, Harry. This helps me think how to beef up some of the writing in my realist, non-portalish, novel.
The thing about portals (it would seem) is that their attraction lies in the newness of the ‘other’ world because in a new world we have no responsibility — we have just arrived, it’s our job to explore and enjoy.
Thinking of portals in terms of writing put me in mind of the statements published writers often make on how publication changed their lives. It seems that what they are trying to tell us is that once we cross the magical portal of publication our writing childhood is over. Once we are out in the world we become responsible for the world – its structure, its support, its policing.
They try to tell us ‘enjoy your carefree years’, and much like the pushy-teenagers we undoubtedly are, we sneer at the ‘parents’ who make our sneering possible.
So maybe, just maybe, if we’re in a world where snow is for making snowballs, we shouldn’t be in a rush to cross the portal to a world where there’s only a little bit of snow for snowballs and a lot of slush to shovel.
A PS for all parents: When the kids make snowballs that are too large, mushy, or full of rocks, resist the understandable urge to clout them about the head, and remember when you had toddlers’ fingers.
Square snowballs, anyone?
Or maybe the other way to look at this is that if one still lives in the world where snow is for snowballs, if one hasn’t learned about shovelling sh– I mean, slush, one isn’t ready to step through the portal into the world of being published. (I’m just trying to be nice; if people learned this, agents would receive 90% less submissions in need of rejection.)
I’m pretty sure Rick is referring to the need to master the ‘skills’ of writing before stepping up to the portal, because, in content terms, one person’s slush is another person’s holiday read.
Surely, it can only be a matter of time before an algorithm is written that rejects submissions for agents. It will count ‘ly’s’, measure descriptions, and quantify weasels. Robotic rejection will be no less painful, but it will remove all shades of grey.
Such an algorith has already been written. The authors of The Beseller Code did just that, looking at thousands of elements to determine what attributes best-sellers shared and the other stuff didn’t.
Unfortunately, they aren’t making it available for people to assess their own work before submitting.
Interesting. Reminds me of the book: Nabokov’s Favourite Word is Mauve by Ben Blatt — a fascinating (and surprisingly fun) statistical analysis of literature.
Sorry, for going off Harry’s topic, but if anyone is interested in computerized book analysis, the algorithm Rick mentions is now available online at ‘authors.ai’. It offers many of the same analysis as Autocrit (repetition, grammar, clichés, and so on), but also narrative beats, narrative arc, plot structure. To give you an idea, they show their analysis of THE DA VINCI CODE. They charge $199 (£154 ish a year or about £12 a month) which is less than Autocrit charge. There is also a ‘free’ option, and a ‘per manuscript’ option.
I’d be interested to hear the feedback of anyone who’s tried it, but maybe in a new post, so we stop hijacking this one.
Oooh!
Thanks Heather. I will definitely be giving it a shot once my current manuscript is ready to go.
The amazing Harry Bingham is psychic, as well as all his other talents!! I have spent today wondering about this portal from the quotidien to fantasy (though I wouldn’t have called it that). My current book has a first chapter (7k words) called ‘Doing Normal’, then in Chapter 2 the two protagonists ‘Escape to Far-ness’, the Furness Peninsular descibed as ‘the magical land of Far-ness’. My query is that the Doing Normal chapter is about an eventful. funny family Christmas that ends up being a bit ghastly (which is why they escape), BUT probably gives too little flavour of the rest of the novel which is a slightly techy mystery thriller. Today I’ve altered Chapter 1 to ?prologue? with an option of cutting it out altogether, and started including flashbacks to cover the precipitating events. But it leaves out a lot of the cast and context. Comments?
Hi Janet, I think you may well have the right idea in changing chapter one to a prologue or cutting it altogether. Otherwise you’ve got maybe nearly 7k words of your characters having a mostly nice time? If you feel this missing out too much of cast and context, how about just using the scene where Christmas turns a bit ghastly. Ghastliness is a good hook for a story.