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May 8, 2017 By Martha Conway Leave a Comment

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.

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October 23, 2016 By Martha Conway Leave a Comment

Start at the Last Possible Moment

THERE IS A MOMENT WHEN, in your story world, everything has changed. The stranger has come to town, the father has died, the mother has left, the best friend has announced that she’s moving to Pakistan. And that moment is a great place to start your novel. Forget backstory, forget building up to it—just lay out the stakes right away.

Like In Media Res, in which you begin in the middle of the action, this technique relies on triggering a reader’s curiosity. The world has suddenly changed. What will happen now? That’s the question you want in the back of your readers’ minds at all times, but especially at the beginning.

Some examples: In The Lovely Bones, it is the moment when Susie, a teenage girl, gets lured into a neighbor’s secret bunker. In The Hobbit, it is the moment when the wizard Gandalf appears and talks to Bilbo, then leaves a mysterious mark on Bilbo’s front door. In The Light Between Oceans, this is when the childless couple manning a lighthouse finds a baby in a lifeboat.

This technique answers the question of why a reader should care by creating drama immediately that will result in—what? We want to know what. If you start big, you can afford to fall back a bit afterwards, a least for a bit. Layer in some characteristics; maybe even give a bit of back story. You have won the first battle: getting the reader’s attention.

Starting at the last moment possible allows for a dramatic chapter one, which is great, but it raises the stakes. Your reader will probably want more of the same. Of course, it would be difficult for the writer and tiring for the reader to have constant, building drama. There is an ebb and flow to everything, even our attention. Down time is important—but not too much. The writer needs to create enough sparks in chapters two, three, and so on to prepare for the next dramatic moment without losing readers.

And a dramatic moment doesn’t have to be a natural disaster or a gunfight; it can be as small as one character’s timely decision. Drama in the Greek means “Action.” Think of how many kinds of action there are in life! So don’t worry if your novel begins not with a death, but with a simple decision to write an anonymous letter. That’s an action. That’s drama. That’s starting at the last possible moment.

Other posts in “The Cold Open” series:

In Media Res

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September 7, 2016 By Martha Conway 2 Comments

What? I thought I was done!

IT’S BEEN SIX MONTHS or more since I looked at my last novel, the one that was “done.” That novel is gearing up to go into production now, and I have a few notes from my editors, stuff to change. As I read through the manuscript for places to cut back or to develop a character more, I am getting re-acquainted with my protagonist and her dilemmas. She hasn’t changed. The problem is, I have.

I’m six months older; some things in my life are different, some aren’t, but it all goes into what I want to write about—what I think is important.

The good news is, there are a few problematic scenes that, six months later, I don’t feel as tied to as I used to. Great—get rid of them. And I have a better sense of how other people are reading the novel, not just me. I still have my own secret story of what the novel is about, but once you put a book out to the public, it becomes something else, as well. One reader might think The Great Gatsby, for instance, is all about social change; another reader might lean more toward the personal relationships depicted therein. No doubt Fitzgerald had his own views (that should go without saying!), but after a while, weirdly, his work is no longer just his.

So as I go through and cut or expand, I’m thinking about what other people have said about my story, and how I felt about it when it started, and how I feel about it now. It’s a bit overwhelming. Here are a couple of things I’ve been telling myself:

To quote Shakespeare: “The play’s the thing.” The best guide for how to change your novel is the novel itself. Sure, I didn’t start out thinking I would write about slavery and the underground railroad, but that’s what it’s turned out to be about. Go with it. Every story has its own logic, and the best stories are the ones that stay truest to that.
Not everyone will agree with the changes, but I have to agree with them. I can always tell when, on re-reading my work (even six months later), I’ve written something just because someone else told me I should. Whatever you add has to fit the scene, the character, the tone. If it doesn’t, find someplace else to add whatever it is that agent/editor/beta reader wants. And if you can’t find a place, don’t add it.
Take more breaks. Re-reading with an eye to re-writing is basically all about making decisions. Is this okay as is? Is this? Is this? Decision after decision after decision. That’s hard on a psyche. Time to order in and watch a twenty-minute sit-com, get on the elliptical, or take the dog out for a walk. Decision-making muscles (I swear those exist) have to take rests, too, in order to work well.

A wise teacher once told me, “The hardest thing is keeping everything else out.” Like probably every other writer, I have a lot to say, and I’ll just never say it all in this novel—nor should I. When you start writing, the experience of feeling idea after idea come along is exhilarating. But unless you’re Thomas Pynchon, not all of those ideas will work themselves into your plot. And that’s a blessing for your readers, who probably just want a good read.

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April 26, 2016 By Martha Conway Leave a Comment

What are the Best Rules for Writing?

“Good stories have a quality of authorlessness. The better they are, the more authorless they seem. . . They give a sense of being out there, like facts.” (Janet Malcolm)

I have this quotation in front of me on my writing desk, and every once in a while I read it and ponder once again how I can apply it to my work. Clearly it is meaningful to me (why else would I give it such a place of prominence), but like every writing rule, it’s not going to be helpful to every writer. I cannot imagine Zadie Smith or Lauren Groff, both talented writers, being moved by this rule. Their zingy sentences show imaginations hard at work, whereas the novels of Michael Chabon, another writer I admire, display a kind of genius for creating multi-dimensional characters and plot without so much sentence zing.

There are so many ways of writing a good piece of fiction, and just as many ways of failing to do so. This must be why writers collect rules. At times I’m astounded at some of the rules my colleagues put forth — “Never use parentheses (or semi-colons, or dashes) in fiction” or “Never go into a character’s head or heart” or “Always remind the reader of your character’s physical presence” just to name a few.

New writers are particularly susceptible to rules, and I always like to warn students away from trying to follow too many. At the same time, rules are there to keep writers alert to possible pitfalls, usually ones that many others have fallen into before them. Rules also serve to keep us attentive. The same teacher who told me never to go into a character’s head or heart (advice I ignore), also taught me to look at each sentence carefully. Really carefully. Like it was under a microscope. Even if you’re writing a 1,000 page epic, every sentence counts.

My rule (or one of them) is to look at writers you admire, writers who write fiction that more or less falls within your wheelhouse, and study how they do what they do. When I was writing short stories, I once took a short story by Rick Bass and re-wrote the first paragraph using my character and my situation and my setting but his sentence structure, just to see how he moved a story along. When he wrote about the weather, I wrote about the weather; when he wrote a facial description, I wrote a facial description. It was illuminating. Of course, I couldn’t use that exercise as my story’s opening (much as I wanted to), but it taught me some interesting techniques. (A revelation: you don’t always need to use connecting sentences to go from one image or action to another. Just make the leap.)

Here’s another note card I have propped up before me: “Character is action. Action is plot.” Paraphrased from David Mamet, who paraphrased from Aristotle.

Virginia Woolf would not abide by that rule.

The answer—my answer—to what are the best rules for writing is this: you must compile your own particular set of rules, and follow them. Study writers you admire, think about craft, pay attention when reading to what you enjoy and what you don’t. Think about your reader. Think about writing. And when you write, follow your rules.

As it turns out, following your own rules is basically called style.

What rules do you follow? Which do you ignore?

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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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