revision

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.

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.

[social_warfare]

Get Scary!

What? I thought I was done!