Archives for April 2008

I’ve been critiquing first paragraphs for the last few days here and today I’ll do the next one in the list, Ginny’s. Before I do that, a few comments and answers to questions.

First the comments:
1) Be aware that I am not actually infallible (at least not yet, though I’m trying to get approved by the relevant authorities 🙂 ) and so some of my critiques may be wrong.
2) Dissent is good. If some of you disagree with my opinion, I don’t mind at all. Feel free to say so (as many of you do already). In most cases, because of space and time constraints, I can’t continue discussing points where we disagree. I’d like to, but I generally want to keep moving forward.
3) I’m not able to critique material that’s emailed to me. As you can imagine, if I ever started doing that, I’d be unable to do anything else.

Now the questions:
Pam asked:

Should you start with the main character’s POV or can it be anyone’s?

Randy sez: It can be anyone’s.

Daan posted a new version of his first paragraph. As several of you noted, it is much better because now we’re experiencing it through the eyes of a character. Waytogo, Daan!

Camille asked:

Do you find yourself rereading first paragraphs in books after you’ve read a bit because it doesn’t really click until you get a little more info, or is it just me?

Randy sez: It’s just you, Camille. 🙂 OK, I’ll admit that sometimes a first sentence is just incomprehensible to me. Then I have to decide whether I want to keep reading or put it back in favor of an author who is willing to be comprehensible in the first paragraph.

Also, Camille, nice job on tweaking the first few paragraphs of the submission that I critiqued last week. I think it reads better now. I also think you have a potential winner here.

Mary asked:

Could you comment on when to use Italics for thoughts? I’ve heard conflicting advice.

Randy sez: The trend is to use italics as little as possible. My own personal style is to write a lot of deep interior monologue that is clearly in the voice of the character. And I don’t see any reason to use italics for all that.

Sina’i asked:

My technical question is: the way your blog is set up, do you see comments for older entries as they come in, or do you only look at the comments for the newest entry?

Randy sez: I CAN look at the most recent comments, but when there are a LOT of them, I don’t necessarily read the ones that are responding to posts written long ago. I do try to read every single comment for the most recent post. I have not yet read through all the one-paragraph submissions from last week (there are 83 of them right now, and last week was Xtremely busy). Of course, I read all the spam, and some of is, um, amazing. 🙂

By the way, this blog had its first birthday last week! It whizzed past without me noticing or buying a birthday cake or anything like that. So Happy Birthday to the Advanced Fiction Writing Blog, and thanks to all of you who’ve made this place a really fun place for me to hang out. I appreciate all of you!

On to critique Ginny. She posted this first paragraph:

The seven astronauts stood stunned and silent in the command room of the International Space Station, Galaxy Gaia. But it was not the explosion that held them frozen in disbelief. The blinding flash below them, over in a nanosecond, hadn’t even registered. It was the video monitor that held their attention. A split second ago the screen had been filled with the contorted face of the earth’s first great leader, the speakers blasting his strident, triumphant voice. Now they stared at a dark screen, and the shock of his announcement, cut off in mid-sentence, reverberated off the cabin walls. The invisible flash and the blackout had come at once.

Randy sez: You have a terrific scene in the making here. I think we are coming in on it too late to have the emotional impact that you want, though.

Have you ever come across a horrifying accident on the freeway–there’s a burning Volkswagen Bug upside down with its roof crushed in; there are bodies being loaded into an ambulance. And you crawl past it in stop-and-go traffic and think, “Wow, that’s horrible!” And then, because you don’t know these people and because you can’t stop and go back, you just drive on. And every couple of years, you remember it and wonder who those people were and what happened and what their story was.

That’s a little bit of what I’m feeling here. Something incredibly awful has just happened to this planet, and I don’t know the people involved enough to care. And now I don’t want to get emotionally involved with them because I know they don’t end well.

So I would suggest that you start the story a little sooner. Your location is fine. Your characters are fine. Pick one of those astronauts and put us inside her head. Show us her excitement at the forthcoming speech. What are the stakes? What’s she feeling? What does she want to happen? Build it up for five or ten pages. Make a whole scene out of it. Give us time to develop feelings for these characters, their hopes, dreams, loves, hates, their future.

THEN yank the rug out from under them. Show us the screen going blank. Show us our POV character’s confusion. Show us the crew racing to fix the glitch. Show us their horror as they realize that this is not a technical problem–this is the destruction of a planet (I think it is). Show it to us blow by blow and bit by bit and make us feel how awful it is.

When you do that, you’ll have a very fine disaster for your first chapter and you’ll have your reader RUNNING to the checkout stand at the bookstore to take this baby home, because no way is she going to stand in the aisle reading another chapter when she could be enjoying this book at home.

One technical note: I’m not sure what kind of explosion we have here, but it’s unlikely to literally be over in a nanosecond. Light travels only about one foot in a nanosecond. I forget the timescale for nuclear explosions, but I’m pretty sure they are quite a few microseconds. You could look it up. If you do, then don’t put it in the book, because you are telling the reader something the POV character doesn’t know.

I think you have the setup for a very strong story, here. Take advantage of it and give us the full power of it, Ginny! If you want to post another shot at your first paragraph, go right ahead and do that.

We’re continuing to critique first paragraphs of my loyal blog readers which were posted here as comments a couple of days ago. Yesterday, we critiqued Patty and John, and there was a question worth answering from a reader today on that:

Andra asked:

I have a small comment. I found starting with 2nd person then jumping to 3rd person a bit jarring. Maybe that was the intent?

Randy sez: The first sentence was the following:

Balancing a live goat on the back of your bicycle has its challenges

This is not actually second person. Instead it’s simply an observation that is a truism, and using this form is common. We are zooming in to the POV character from the author’s POV, so this actually is in danger of being authorial intrusion. I’m OK with it however, since it’s fairly common to do this at the very beginning of a novel. Janey Austen did it in Pride and Prejudice, and it still works, as long as you keep it short. I think it works here, which is what really matters.

Now, let’s critique Camille. Here is her first paragraph:

Ian MacLean nearly escaped.

He made it to the edge of the lamp-lit street with only four hard strides bridging the gap between him and his freedom: Maggie’s farm truck. Even in the pallid streetlight, his Granny’s old rattletrap never looked so good.

“That’s far enough!”

Randy sez: This is a pretty strong opening. The first sentence hooks us right away in only four words, telling us who the POV character is and setting up the first part of this scene by telling us in advance that Ian is going to fail. That’s normally a little dicey, but you have to jumpstart a story somehow, and it’s common to “cheat” a little at the beginning.

However, I think Camille is “cheating” a bit too long. We need to know pretty quickly who or what he’s escaping from, and we don’t. The modern reader is impatient. You can hook her curiosity and make her ask “Huh?” but you are not allowed to be coy with her. If Ian is “escaping” then we need to know (from within his POV) what he’s escaping from. We don’t need the whole meal, of course, but a little snack would be good.

OK, so Ian is striding along, which is good, but now we get two more characters introduced in quick succession: Maggie and Grannie. Or are Maggie and Grannie the same person? It’s not clear, and clarity is what you need here.

Understand that there is a time and place for being slightly mysterious and obscure. But references to people is not the place, and the first introduction of characters is not the time. We need to know RIGHT NOW how Maggie and Grannie are related.

I’m reminded of an example from an old Writer’s Digest that spoofed a Tom Clancy novel, in which a particular scene had somewhere between 2 and 7 characters. It wasn’t clear, because the author kept calling them “Mr. Smith” and “Chuck” and “the Executive Officer” and so on, all in an apparent attempt to avoid repetition. But lack of clarity is worse than repetition. Clancy often lacked clarity on this score.

Final point: The closing sentence really needs a tag. Is it Ian who speaks? That is the normal convention when you have an unattributed quote–the dialogue is understood to refer to the last character shown in action, (in this case, that’s Ian).

But a moment’s thought immediately tells you it can’t be Ian. Somebody is talking to Ian, and we need to know who it is. Why? Because we barely know this character and we’re confused, and dad-gummit, there are 99,999 other books in Barnes & Noble, and if THIS book is fuzzy and unclear, well the one next to is likely to be better. So that first paragraph better be a snapper.

I won’t revise this opening. It’s quite strong, but it needs a bit of sharpening to bring it into focus. I will say that I read the first 20 pages of this book on the plane coming home from my last writing conference, and I thought it was stellar writing. So it sharpens up pretty quickly. Good job, Camille! Go ahead and post your revision here if you get it sharpened up.

Now, we’ll turn to Daan’s submission:

11 February 1990 – Thousands of people were gathered outside the gates of Victor Verster Prison just outside Paarl, a town surrounded by the vineyards of the Western Cape. The air was filled with excitement and anticipation as Nelson Mandela was about to be released after he was sent to prison 27 years ago.

Randy sez: I’m delighted to see that Daan is writing what he knows. Daan lives in South Africa. It makes great sense to write a novel about one of the most influential South Africans of all time–Nelson Mandela. At least, I hope Nelson is a key character in this novel. Since this is all I’ve seen, I’m going to guess that he is.

First point that needs rethinking: This paragraph is “telling.” One can get away with “telling” if it is excellent. See the beginning of A TALE OF TWO CITIES or HARRY POTTER #1 or countless other books that start off with a fresh and new way of “telling.” But this example isn’t.

How can Daan improve this? There are a thousand ways to “tell.” Here are a couple:

Focus on Place. One simple way is to focus on interesting and unique details in the place itself. The scene in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS in which Clarice Starling visits Hannibal Lecter is a prime example, in which the prison comes alive in stark detail. Tom Wolfe brought the world of aeronautical engineering alive in THE RIGHT STUFF by doing this also–beautifully rendered detail.

Focus on Character. See Book #1 of Harry Potter, in which J.K. Rowling spends the first page telling about the horrible Dursleys. By the bottom of the page, when you discover that they have a secret that they’re terrified people will learn, you want nothing more than for that secret to make Time Magazine.

Personally, I prefer not to start with telling. OK, honestly, I do it all the time myself, but then I kick myself and fix it in the second draft or the fourteenth, or whenever it is that the fumes of the first draft fade away and I realize that I’m fooling myself and really I should have started this book by showing, instead.

So if this were my novel, I’d focus in on one person in that crowd, show us what he sees, make us hear what he sees, make us feel what he feels. Within a few paragraphs, I’d let my reader know what my POV characters desperately wants. I’d show why he can’t have it, and isn’t likely to get it. And the story would be launched.

That’s what I’d do. Daan, what are you going to do? I’ll be interested to see if you can turn this from “telling” into “showing.”

Yesterday, I challenged you, my loyal blog readers, to submit the first paragraph of your novel. Right now, there are about 72 comments piled up, so I’m going to start working through them and critiquing them in order. Today, we’ll look at Patty’s and John’s submissions:

Patty wrote:

Balancing a live goat on the back of your bicycle has its challenges. Tia stood on the pedals and pushed uphill toward the market as the young pygmy bleated and kicked against its bungee straps.

Randy sez: There is a lot to like here. The first sentence is strong because it’s different. You know instantly that this is not a novel about angsty, affluent America. In fact, the novel is set in Togo, Africa, a country Patty knows well. But she doesn’t tell us that right away, which is good. She tells us a small amount of information and then gets straight into showing the action. This is also good.

The second sentence immediately shows us our lead character in action–Tia riding her bike. This is good, because now we know who to root for. It’s always important to show your lead character for the scene as soon as possible. Readers don’t care about the scenery. Readers care about people.

One small issue I see right away is that we don’t know if Tia is a he or a she. I have inside information, so I know that Tia is a girl, but it would be good for Patty to let the reader know that ASAP. “Tia stood on her pedals…” would do the trick.

The other issue I see here is also a small one, but I believe it’s worth pointing out. In the second sentence, we have two characters taking action. One is Tia, the POV character. The other is the goat. I prefer to alternate the active characters by showing them in separate sentences. The reason for this is subtle, and is explained in detail in my article Writing the Perfect Scene, so I’ll leave you to read it there.

Finally, there is a reference to a “pygmy”. Presumably this is a pygmy goat, but there is just a chance that the reader might thing it’s a human pygmy. Not a high chance, but it might be better to make it clear.

I would revise the paragraph just slightly this way:

Balancing a live goat on the back of your bicycle has its challenges. Tia stood on her pedals and pushed uphill toward the market.

The young pygmy goat bleated and kicked against its bungee straps.

Please bear in mind that there are a thousand ways to write a paragraph like this, and it’s not clear which is best. Patty’s was pretty good to start with, so there wasn’t a lot I could do to make it better.

John submitted this entry:

Jeffrey threw the screwed up report at the maglift floor. Another attempt to recreate his experiment, another laboratory explosion. He punched the wall. He had made a successful shunt once. Why couldn’t anyone else?

Randy sez: This starts out pretty strong, with an action sentence. We know right away that our POV character is Jeffrey and that he’s unhappy. That’s good–we’re leading with conflict.

The second sentence is slightly problematic. Is it interior monologue? Sort of, but it doesn’t have the feel of a real person’s thoughts–the language is more formal than most people think. It feels like there is some authorial intrusion here–the author is working in a chance to feed the reader some information. I think it would be stronger here to put it more fully in Jeffrey’s words, and to not be quite so clear. Let the reader know part of the reason for Jeffrey’s frustration, but maybe not the whole thing.

The third sentence reverts to straight action–Jeffrey punches the wall. This tells us clearly he’s frustrated, so this is good.

The fourth and fifth sentences are again a mix of “almost interior monologue” but mixed in with a small amount of “author’s voice”. The key issue I think is this: “He had made a successful shunt once.” When people think about themselves, they usually don’t do it quite this way, in fact-oriented terms. They tend to color it with a bit of emotion.

I’m a little confused here about one thing. It seems that the failed experiment was somebody else’s screw-up, not Jeffrey’s. But we don’t quite know who is responsible. On first reading, I actually thought it was Jeffrey, but now I’m pretty certain that it’s somebody else. Unfortunately, I don’t have anything specific about that somebody else, not even a name, so I’m not quite sure who to be mad at. This is nit-picking, of course. The paragraph has a lot to like.

I don’t have a specific revised version to suggest for this paragraph because I don’t know the answer to a key question: Who screwed up the experiment? If I knew that, then I’d know who Jeffrey is angry at, and the interior monologue would write itself. I don’t think Jeffrey is angry at the situation–he’s angry at the incompetent imbecile who can’t reproduce his experiment.

Again, I’ll add a caveat here that this is just my opinion and there is always a chance I’m wrong.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at the next couple of sample paragraphs that were posted today.