This is all great, but why am I reading this?

I'm critiquing a manuscript right now that's very good from a technical perspective. The writer knows her stuff, isn't making a lot of mistakes in terms of character or description, could marginally improve on some aspects, and has a firm command of sentence structure and language usage. We've had some exciting passages and characters struggling for their lives. But I have no idea why I'm reading this story.

Authors sometimes develop tunnel vision. To take a shot at an easy target (sigh) one of my critique partners asked me straight up, "What's the relationship between the main character and her mother supposed to be?" What kind of question is that? To me it was beyond obvious how the mother felt about the daughter and how the daughter felt about the mother. To me. It's not properly evoked in the manuscript, and so to everyone else, it was an unsettling bit of vagueness, and my critique partner is correct. It needs to be remedied (do you love my use of the passive voice there? Can you tell I'm reluctant to go back and edit?)

I couldn't see it myself because I knew what I meant. I suspect it's the same for the writer I'm critiquing now, and in case it's the same for you, here are some questions to ask yourself.

Is the main conflict of the story reflected in the first thirty pages? I'm not talking about jumping right in with all the juicy stuff you're rightly holding back until the proper time to reveal, but your actual story question. Let's go back to Star Wars (the first film) where our introduction to Luke shows us someone who feels oppressed by his circumstances, feels restless, feels he could do better, and is being held back by the constraints of the man serving as his father figure. We've already seen the Empire in action. Even without Lucas stopping the film to say "Wouldn't it be great if this restless, ambitious spirit could be put to use helping the Rebellion?" we feel that's the direction the story has to take.

Imagine if you just started with Luke going to town with his friends and drinking a beer, getting into a bar fight, tossing a quarter to an intergallactic beggar, repairing a broken droid he finds by the side of the road, chatting with a space trader... All the while he could be dropping hints that he's restless and his uncle is holding him back, and maybe we'd know there are Stormtroopers around. It could be exciting and well-written, but without the larger context of why any of this matters, we won't have a sense of where Luke is headed, and therefore where the story is headed.

You may think it's obvious what shape the story is going to take, or that your characters are pawns of the oppressive Evil Empire, or that your main character needs to develop self-confidence, but make sure it actually is. Go back into the text and actually highlight for yourself that the clues are there. 

You have to telegraph the main conflict of the story in your opening. Keep it understated, but include it. Your young magician is going to need to overcome his past? Fine. In the opening chapters, show a way in which that unspecified past is holding him back. 

Let's say you're reading a novel that opens with a mom and her seven-year-old child over dinner. There's no father or husband at dinner, and this appears to be their norm. Okay. Well, you can look at the cover or the category and figure out it's a romance, so probably the woman is going to meet someone and fall in love. But you're a bit directionless unless something happens during the dinner to tell us what is the obstacle to meeting someone and falling in love.

Child: "Oh, I forgot. We had a substitute for the afternoon. Mr. Miller got called out all of a sudden."
Mom: "Yeah. Probably fooling around with the school secretary."
Child: "What?"
Mom: "Nothing. Did you like the sub?"

Gee, she's bitter. Is that her past speaking? Was it the child's father who cheated, maybe her own father? Also, she doesn't mind talking right over her child's level of understanding -- was she treated with lack of respect as a child? Or is she just starved for adult conversation?

These are the tidbits we need in order to form a coherent world view within the story. We're also going to need to know how this woman fits into her society, how her situation compares to  those around her, how being single impacts her life and her child's life. Maybe it's beneficial to her to remain single because she's getting a barrel of money every month in alimony -- but show all this. Let us know what's holding her back and what's propelling her forward.

In Save The Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need, Blake Snyder goes one further, and suggests you state the story's theme in the opening scene. We need a signpost so we know where we're headed. And yes, this works with my general aversion to opening a story with an explosion of action. We need to care, and before we can care, we need to know why we care. 

If you're on the road and you pass a sign that says Boston - 60 you have your direction, your time, your expectations. It does the same to telegraph the protagonist's hidden need and give a hint at the general problems of the world he's in. Once we know where your story is taking us, we're happy to come along for the ride.

---

Jane Lebak is the author of The Wrong Enemy. She has four kids, three cats, two books in print, and one husband. She lives in the Swamp and spends her time either writing books or knitting socks. At Seven Angels, Four Kids, One Family, she blogs about what happens when a distracted daydreamer and a gamer geek attempt to raise four kids. If you want to make her rich and famous, please contact the riveting Roseanne Wells of the Jennifer DeChiara Literary Agency. 

Engaging Openings

You hear a lot about having "a gripping opening" and beginning your novel with a fast-paced sequence. And, well, I'm not impressed.


Ursula K LeGuin in Steering the Craft stated that most novelists begin their story three chapters too soon, and I admit I've seen several novels with what my instructors have called "throat-clearing."  It's what you say before you really begin to tell your story.

But the current trend of beginning with an action sequence isn't the answer to "throat-clearing." Not every novel in every genre needs to begin with your main character battling a werewolf or an explosion ripping through a warehouse. So let's stop and think about what an opening needs to accomplish.

Most people will tell you that your story needs to begin as close as possible to the inciting action of the story, the moment after which nothing can be the same again. I don't agree. Let's pretend for a minute. Let's pretend the inciting incident is important, but not as important as knowing the significance of the inciting incident when it happens.

What would that mean? It would mean we trust Blake Snyder in Save The Cat: first we need to know why life for the main character can't stay the way it is. That, as Snyder says, "to remain here is death."

Your main character won't know that at first. Your main character won't suspect that not only will everything be shaken up soon, but also that it needs to be shaken up. That's because your main character isn't aware of his or her "hidden need" (as Amy Deardon says in The Story Template) but you, the writer, will be aware of this hidden need, and you're going to have to establish it in the opening.

Your main character is perfectly happy as an assistant pig-keeper, or your main character is eeking out an existence in an overcrowded colony of rabbits, bullied by the Chief Rabbit's special police. But although the characters are settled in the way things are, you're establishing, word by word, that things mustn't stay the same.

Snyder has the inciting incident taking place almost ten percent into the story. Deardon has it happening earlier, but still after the main character's introduction. So, take some time. Don't spend three chapters telling us how your main character learned to shoot when she was seven years old, but also don't drop us into a scene where she turns around and shoots five men in an alley.

The problem with these action openings is that we don't know whom to root for. We don't know why it's important.

But back up a bit. Your opening needs to establish who your main character is. Yes, I know there are novels which don't begin with the main character, but let's just ignore that for now. For most of us, the opening chapter needs to establish the main character and why she's important. Not important in the world: important to us. 

My agent and I struggled with the opening of my WIP. A first scene with the inciting incident left readers with a bunch of who-cares people being accosted by an angry client. Um, okay. I added a chapter before that where I carefully established the main character's hidden needs, and my agent fell asleep before page three. I lopped off the first three pages and opened with an interesting sequence, and it still wasn't working. My agent (who deserves combat pay) suggested a crisis for the opening, but it felt too much like a red herring because it would never come up again. (Which is another problem with action openings: if your MC shoots a bandit in scene one and then gets recruited to hunt vampires, never to encounter a bandit again, it's rather unsettling.)

I turned to my much-abused critique partner, who after three versions of the opening scene said, "But I don't care."

Ah. People in three surrounding counties may have thought it was a freak lightning storm, but it was an actual lightbulb going off over my head.  I sat down with the opening and told my main character to talk. Just talk. Enough with the tight writing and trying to get to the main action as soon as possible. Just talk to me.

Talk she did. My MC talked about birthday gifts and calendars and her grandmother's thimble collection, and after an additional five hundred words of padding, out came the thing she needed to say. Her hidden need expressed in one sentence, one concrete longing: she wished that just once, when she came home from work, she'd find a note from her grandmother that she'd put a leftover chicken drumstick and mashed potatoes in her fridge.

I deleted the thimbles and the birthday gifts and the calendars and kept some of the other things, but there on the front page is my character's longing to be nurtured, to be accepted. 


I passed it along to my second crit partner, who said, "This is awesome, and I can tell she's afraid of failure, but how does she define success?"  Second lightbulb moment.  


I passed the new revised fiftieth attempt back to my agent, who said (sweet relief) she really liked it now.


Days later, Kristin Nelson wrote about action openings versus active openings, and I felt vindicated. It's not about action. It's about engagement. It's about giving us someone to care for and then putting her in a situation where we can care about what she's up against.

---

Jane Lebak's first novel The Wrong Enemy (originally titled The Guardian) will be re-released this September by MuseItUp Publishing! She is also the author of Seven Archangels: Annihilation (Double-Edged Publishing, 2008) and The Boys Upstairs (MuseItUp, 2010). At Seven Angels, Four Kids, One Family, she blogs about what happens when a distracted daydreamer and a gamer geek attempt to raise four children. She is represented by the riveting Roseanne Wells of the Jennifer DeChiara Literary Agency.