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May 8, 2017 By Martha Conway Leave a Comment

The Cold Open – Get Scary!

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE Stephen King to start your narrative with something scary. You don’t even have to be writing a horror story. Maybe you just want to grab your reader’s attention right away. Starting with a scary scene or description not only grabs a reader’s emotion—which is a wonderful way to keep them on the page—but also creates a compelling visual image in the reader’s mind. An alley where the dumpsters are overflowing with garbage. Footsteps. A sudden cold breeze.

This technique works well with certain genres, such as mysteries, thrillers, and, of course, horror stories. But it can and has been used with literary novels and contemporary up-market stories as well. Maybe the scene you write is a misdirect — at the start it seems as though a boy is about to get killed by a stranger, and then the stranger turns out to be the boy’s mother. But guess what? In that first page you’ve already done some of the heavy lifting of writing: establishing the characters and time and place in an interesting way.

Even if you don’t want to start with a fright, you can get the same effect in other ways. Because what I’m really talking about is setting a specific, compelling atmosphere. Setting up a specific atmosphere—whether it’s scary, eerie, bucolic, festive, exotic, or other-worldly—is a great way to captivate your reader. It also gives you almost instant style.

“The primary thing you must do is encourage your reader to think about your situation in such detail that she can’t help but keep thinking about it. This what compelling, picturesque, and vivid details are for.”
(Jane Smiley)

You can evoke the Christmas spirit by beginning your novel on the day before Christmas, or the Halloween spirit by beginning (where else) on Halloween. You can set your novel in a foggy swamp (evoking mystery, possibly danger) or an eighteenth-century cove (innocence, romance, or maybe danger if it’s a pirate’s cove). The immediate sense of place does much more to anchor a story than almost anything else.

The setting also draws readers in. As we read we like to paint pictures in our minds, and the more specific the picture, the better. This coupled with a strong emotional pull may not guarantee that every reader will stay with you, but it puts the odds up quite a bit.

So get scary (or romantic or bizarre or exciting). Play with your readers’ emotions. Be manipulative. Start fast and then slow down. This is not the only way to begin, but it’s a tried and true technique.

And after that first scene, you can draw a breath and begin to spin out your story more slowly. You’ll have your readers’ attention now, and that’s exactly what you want.

Other posts in “The Cold Open” series:

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October 8, 2016 By Martha Conway 4 Comments

The Cold Open – In Media Res

STARTING A NOVEL, writing that very first sentence, is as exhilarating and intimidating as riding a bicycle for the first time without training wheels. Many writers think they need to explain a good deal more than they need to explain. They think that the first chapter is about laying a foundation so that the story — the real story— can begin in chapter two.

They could not be more wrong.

In this and in the coming weeks, I’ll be writing a blog series about those hooks—different techniques writers have successfully to capture their reader’s attention.

In media res, or “in the middle of things,” drops your reader into the middle of the action with no warning. In other words, the action of the story began off stage, before the very first sentence, and the reader must play catch up. A great example of this is from “A Room with a View” by E.M. Forster. Here are the very first lines from Chapter One:

“The Signora had no business to do it,” said Miss Bartlett, “no business at all. She promised us south rooms with a view close together, instead of which here are north rooms, looking into a courtyard, and a long way apart. Oh, Lucy!”

“And a Cockney, besides!” said Lucy. . . “It might be London.”

Yes, the reader will be confused at first, and in fact that’s what you want. Whenever you put a question in a reader’s mind, the reader is more likely to keep reading so she can find out the answer. Of course, too much confusion results in a book thrown across the room in disgust, but usually this doesn’t happen on the very first page. When you open using the “In Media Res” technique, there is an implicit promise that whatever you are throwing your reader into will be explained. But not quite yet.

This logic also addresses the worry that readers won’t know (and care) enough about the characters to be sufficiently interested. Readers are generally patient for a few paragraphs or a page or maybe even a whole chapter, if you’re lucky. We want the writer to make us interested; that’s why we opened the book!

I’ll talk about another technique in the next blog post, which can be used in conjunction with “In Media Res”: starting at the last possible moment. And don’t worry, it’s not a pitch for procrastination (most writers don’t need that pitch, anyway).

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September 28, 2015 By Martha Conway Leave a Comment

Daydreaming Your Novel

A PARENT IN MY child’s school recently forwarded me an 11-minute video about skills we’ll need for the 21^st century. What really stuck with me was the bit about creativity:

“Most creative thoughts happen when your mind is left to wander: daydreaming; doing the dishes; exercising.”

Sunset in the city. You can see the ocean where all the houses end; I like how it looks like part of the sunset.

This rang true for me. My last novel, Thieving Forest, had a lot of plot components that needed careful coordination, and in many ways these were cerebral exercises: how long would it take someone to walk through the Great Black Swamp, south to north? How long would it take someone to canoe up the Maumee River? How could these two characters from these two places meet up, and where?

I made a lot of lists, and I did a lot of calculations. When I wondered how a Potawatomi would greet someone, I looked it up on the internet. When a character reminisced about her childhood in 1790, what might she say? All in all I spent a lot of time reading and writing things down.

But when I got stuck, I went to the beach.

Whenever I walk along the beach looking at the sand dunes and the ocean waves and the little tiny black specks of surfers braving the cold Northern California waters, and I think about my current work-in-progress, my imagination begins to sort of hop from scenario to scenario. I picture characters doing this or that, saying this or that. It feels a bit like playing. There are times when nothing stands out, but most often I have an “Ah-ha” moment. I imagine something happening, or a character saying something, and I think, That’s It.

I can’t think my way into this place, I just have to sort of imagine it.

Daydreaming is an activity that doesn’t seem to get a lot of buzz lately. Ever since the Puritans came up with their eponymous work ethic, we’re all trying to get a lot more done in a lot less time. I’ve heard podcasts targeted for writers trying to speed up the process of getting a novel finish so that they (we) can write a lot more books. There’s a definite business model for writers that is based on producing as many books as quickly as you can.

However, taking a softer approach is also a worthwhile model. Time away from the keyboard is not necessarily time wasted. Daydreaming, wool gathering, trying out various scenarios in your mind while you walk the dog or do the dishes—all these can make for a much more complex, interesting story.

Don’t get me wrong, you still need to put words on paper or screen, and that requires discipline. But taking some time to not write can be very productive.

How do you dream your stories?

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