(no subject)

[tanaise]

So, today, instead of writing, I discussed openings. First, you learn it as a hook. JJA talks about it that way. "didn't Grab me." And that's a fine way to learn it. But eventually you have to get more subtle than that. And I was thinking about it recently, and decided it's more of a seducing. A strip tease, even. Hooks are all 'off with the clothes, into the bed.' Which can work, if you continue at that speed. But the problem is too many stories start like that, and then switch to like, half speed. Sudden bursts of modesty don't work. If the story's got a more sedate speed, as most do, it's more of a strip tease. And this can still fail. Because while you're telling the story, you've still got to be working those buttons.

For me, it works out to something *else* we were talking about, what we decided to call inpositioning. It's the opposite of exposition. My openings are all artful dropping of story details. Very carefully placed, for very specific reasons. Let me look for an example to show what I'm saying.


He sat on the wooden floor in the middle of the room on a double layer of silk rugs, woven with brass threads. His shoes were set neatly beside him on the floor, heels against the edge of the rugs, toes pointing to the wall. He kept his hands folded in his lap, well away from the edges. She walked barefoot around him, trailing a hand along the paneling, talking quietly to herself. He sat and watched her. She'd been doing it since he brought her to the house hours ago, when it was still light outside the high-set windows. He couldn't hear what she was saying, but he didn't think he wanted to. He couldn't hear the spirits, but he could feel them, pressing at him from all around.


See? I don't know if that's the best example--it's a little too blatant, I think, but it's the use of the little details. they all work on their own there, but ideally you have to wonder if there's a reason they're all together--wooden floor, silk and brass rug, the shoes he's got nearby vs her barefeet, the spirits she can hear but he can't.

Make sense?

There's another big problem. Betraying the reader's trust. This, I think, is where the hatred of such things as dreams and flashbacks comes from. This is why I hate the stories that start and describe--in detail--every article in the whole damn room and then say, "but sarah was blind, so she saw none of this." Because as a reader, you trust that the author is telling you the truth. And then *boom* it's all a lie. This isn't something that no one can do. But it's something that it's *way* too easy to do badly, as many many slush piles can attest to. I can almost figure out how to do the whole room thing and have it work. But I know I have the chops to do it, and that people would trust the skill in it to not let them down when it turned out to be false. And now I want to use that as my opening for Blinding. It's pretty close as it is.


I heard Paul first, before the others saw him. I could hear the sound of hooves on the road up to the house while I was playing Blindman's Bluff with Rory and Elsa in the front yard. Elsa thought I was making it up to lure her close enough to tag, but Rory could see him above the wind break in front of the house. He sent Elsa to get her grandmother. I thought Paul had ridden, judging from the creak and jingle of leather, but as we waited for him to reach the house, Rory told me he was driving a one-horse gliderframe.


I'm being urged to go back to the 'January was blinded" opening, but I'm not sure now. I think the reason I've been resisting it is that I knew it was a hook, not a seduction. Who cares that these people are going blind? The only thing I had going for me was that they are all named for months, which confused people and made them keep reading.

You know, it would help if I stopped having epiphanies about things that I've always known how to do, even if I didn't know why.

It would also be nice if these came around at, say, 2 in the afternoon, instead of 2 at night. :)

Comments

[teapot-farm.livejournal.com]

I think the current opening works better - as long as there's a more explicit reference to the narrator's blindness within the first page(ish) for those of us who are slow on the uptake.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

It would also be nice if these came around at, say, 2 in the afternoon, instead of 2 at night. :)

The epiphanies always smack you when your defenses are down.

It occurs to me that what we were talking about last night may be three things that all work together:

1) inpositiong, which looks a lot like incluing, but isn't.

2) a superrefining of show-don't-tell, grounding, and sentence-level craft to force the "fictional dream" beyond "suspension of disbelief" and into "story drags me around by the neck."

3) deep characterization where the internalization is so heavily interwoven into the narrative--like this passage from the bit with the troll that I mentioned--Kit didn't like his footing on the stone, which rocked under his boots. He stepped into the stream, calf-deep, a cold gout of water soaking his leg to the thigh.--that the reader stops reading the character and is the character.

That internalization relies on the grounding, etc, above.

It is one thing that is many things.

Ommm.

[stephdray.livejournal.com]

Another consideration to take into account when planning openings is that readers like as much of their information up front as possible without info-dumps. So, sometimes the direct hook is not only a 'throw off your clothes', but it's a 'throw off your clothes with a purpose because we're about to do a lot more than you would have expected'.

If you're only going to give them metaphorical sex, then seduce them. But if its going to involve a chicken, a camera and vibrating parts, then you can dispense with the preliminaries and not bother being coy.

I also think that a reader gives you about one short paragraph's worth of time to be 'seduced'. I haven't seen your other opening, but I think this one works well except for the fact that if you hadn't told me in advance she was blind, there still weren't enough hints in there for the obtuse reader (me) to get where you were going with it so that it would be anything other than "This paragraph boils down to 'Paul arrived.' rather than 'She was blind'"

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

I was intending for the lack of visual cues as well as the total reliance on what she heard and what she was told to do the trick there. It still needs work. :)

The original first paragraph was as follows:

January was blinded as we climbed up from the storm cellar, eyes clouding over while she screamed. Three years later, April was struck down while she hung out the laundry. May collapsed in the shower a year later. Nothing happened to Rory and Mars and the rest of the boys, no surprise rite of passage they had to go through. They stayed children, and I watched my older sisters grow up too fast. By the time it reached May, I was seven. I wanted it over with. Five years is too long when you already know your fate.

I like it, I'm just thinking it might be a little too sudden peril.

[stephdray.livejournal.com]

Oooooh. This opening is killer. And it conveys ever so much more information than that the narrator is blind. It conveys that this is a world in which spontaneous blindings occur, and it occurs to girls, and that is all the kind of information that I need as a reader up front.

It certainly makes me care a lot more than 'Paul has arrived' -or- 'The narrator is blind'.