(no subject)

[tanaise]

And to all the writers and readers out there, I'd like to see some serious introspection about beginings and hooks and such--how you do it/how you like it, how you want to do it, examples that you like, and things like that.  I gave Stranger Things Happen to one of the boys here (the gay one, if you must know, and I know you must), and he was reading Water off a Black Dog's Back last night and is hooked.  Which is just how I want it.  And if nothing else, slushing has taught me how much crap you can trim out of a begining before the editor can even tell.  I am ruthless, even on my own pieces.  So let's hear some discussion.    I'd prefer it here, but if it fits better in your own journal, i'll just be terribly, terribly disappointed. 

Comments

[timprov.livejournal.com]

Editorially, there's a point -- which I think comes much sooner for me than for others -- where you start feeling manipulated. I don't particularly like being treated like a fish, and neither do most of the readers I know. So be careful, and don't get too hung up on your beginning to the expense of the rest of your story. If you benefit by being ruthless to the beginning, you probably benefit from being ruthless to the whole thing. Some specific comments:

If you have a strong setting, hit the reader with it right away. Even if it means talking about the weather: The sky above the port was the color of television, turned to a dead channel.

Remember to foreshadow. The first two paragraphs are the strongest foreshadowing points, but most people are still hung up on introducing their characters and settings. A really-pretty character introduction that doesn't flow into the plot isn't going to get you anywhere.

The most important character to build early is your narrator. Don't be afraid to throw in details that the narrator's audience would know, but yours doesn't: On the first Monday of the month of April, 1625, the market town of Meung, in which the author of The Romance of the Rose was born, appeared to be in as perfect a state of revolution as if the Huguenots had just made a second La Rochelle of it. This is a historical structure that can be adapted very well to give realism and depth to a fictional world.

Keep a database. Really the best way to be able to write good openings is anecdotal, not analytical. Remember ones you like.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

Er, that should be "tuned to a dead channel."

[timprov.livejournal.com]

I would also point out that the number of writers who can write good "hooks" is vast compared to those who can write good endings. It may make more sense to devote your time to working on the other end.

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

Well, it does and it doesn't. I mean, you need a good ending to *sell* the story, but as an editor (albeit a very picky editor considering we're a semipro-webzine), I'm not going to make it to the ending unless the begining is interesting. And I get so much slush that is just mindnumbingly boring--not badly written, just...I don't even wonder why the story was written. I'm talking slush that is "Steve got up. He got dressed. He ignored the elephant in the corner of the room." boring And maybe that's just me, but it is somethign I tend to wonder about--what makes this story the one worth being written down. And there's lots of good answers for the question, i just like feeling like the author could answer it if I asked them that.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking more of people who have a well-demonstrated competence. You can put the best beginning in the world on a story like that, and it'll just annoy the editor more. The most heart-wrenching rejections I ever had to write were the ones where the author had a very strong beginning, even a very strong first half, and then veered off into terribleness. I hate hate hate those.

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

yeah, "this story sucks on so many levels I can't even start to explain it" is much easier to reject than "It was soo good, and then it all fell apart and I wanted to cry cause I could see exactly where you failed." Not quite good enough is the hardest to reject.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

My method for dealing with those was always to beat the writer over the head with the idea that they should be sending me another ASAP. Made me feel better, and often them, too.

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

Also, I'm of the opinion that a good opening should also be a good ending, or at least should strongly influence the ending, so I do see these as related issues--I've got a story now that I've started beautifully, and one of the rejections it got is that they didn't realize that it had ended when it ended. And I looked at it, and it's got that lovely strong opening, and then everything that makes the begining good is missing from the last scene. And now I'm wrestling with figuring out how to fix it--a new begining? a new ending? both? a flame thrower? So in asking about beginings, while I'd had a very specific reason for asking it, I think I was also thinking about endings, but I hadn't gotten as far as actually thinking about it. At the least, a good beginning should make you hungry for a good ending, and that's where so much slush fails--I don't care what happens next, let alone 10 pages later.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

Mostly this sort of response comes from structure, not from prose. If you're absolutely sure you're ending it in the right place, I would guess the right thing to do is ignore the criticism.

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

Yes, but I'm not happy with where it ends, it just took me a while to figure out why I wasn't happy with it. I *think* it may be because of the beginning, but any time I move beginnings and try again, everyone points to the original beginning and tell me the story really starts there. So I may have to cut it completely and start over again. Though at this point, I'm not sure if I shouldn't just rewrite the whole darn thing or give it up as a good try.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

You're welcome to send it to me for a second opinion, if you like. I'm usually pretty good at figuring out where they should be going.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Unsurprisingly, I am with timprov: I hate watching a first chapter or first scene unfold exactly as we are told it ought. Beginning in the middle of action is a good thing, sure -- unless the action is stupid or unnecessary to the plot or robs a climactic moment of its climax.

David Gerrold's Jumping Off the Planet was the most recent example of a beginning that seemed to me that it sucked because of listening to too much advice about beginnings. It read like a freakin' paint-by-number. Then again, I didn't think much of the middle or the ending, either, so maybe it was a "good" beginning in that it was indicative of the whole book.

I guess that's what I'd say: if you have a funny story/book, it's good to start out funny. If the piece is going to be a creepy mood piece, start with some creepy mood. If it's realio trulio about adventure, start with action. Begin the way you intend to continue. Don't give the reader expectation that you're telling an action story by starting with the only frenetic action-adventure in a physically mellow story.

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

Oh, I totally agree that stories that do exactly what you're expecting them to do are failing on some level. One of the entries on "the long list of things that people do to openings that makes me want to bite them" is writing stories that start out so *obviously* normal that I don't even need to keep reading to know that there's going to be a 'twist' where suddenly it turns out he's not human, or everyone else isn't human, or he's a psychotic postal worker. And I suspect that a lot of this isn't subject matter so much as skill--that Kelly Link could write a story with a twist like that and we wouldn't blink. But then again, some of it is subject matter, because I don't think Kelly would write a story with a twist like that, or at least not with that as the whole point of her story.

I'm not sure that I'm looking for advice for beginings--I've actually always been pretty pleased with my openings--so much as just wondering how other people look at them. When all I read of a story is the first paragraph, it makes it obvious how much you have to tell the editor right there in the paragraph--"yes, I understand how to use the English language," "trust me, I know what I'm doing," "Pay attention, this will be important later."--and how easy it is to miss saying one or more of these, and how easily my attention slips away at that point.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, I wouldn't blink for a different reason: I don't like Kelly Link's fiction and avoid reading it whenever I can. I've heard she's a very nice person, and in absence of evidence to the contrary I believe it. But her stories do nothing for me; at least, nothing good.

(I try not to judge her on her fans, because there's a vocal handful of people who hear that someone doesn't like her work and say things like, "Well, not everybody understands what she's trying to do" or "You can't always get it on the first read." Oh, I get it. I just don't want it.)

It's strange, too, because some people whose work I like very much get compared to Kelly Link and get all pleased and flustered, and I want to shake them and say, no, no! You're doing well the things she does well, but you're also doing well the things she does poorly! Don't stop on either count!

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

I tend to think of Kelly's fiction as falling into the category of "acquired taste." I personally don't have that taste, but I can see what she's trying to do and I can realize that she's succeeding.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

For me, a beginning has to make it very clear the five W's: who, what, where, when, why. I want to know what's going on well enough to visualize the scene.

This doesn't mean that I don't appreciate a little mystery at the beginning, or a few concepts that I don't yet understand as long as I trust that I soon well (Octavia Butler's "seed village" in WILD SEED comes to mind). But I want to know that I can trust the author to show me around as a good host, as Damon Knight refers to it in CREATING SHORT FICTION.

Once when I was judging a writing contest, the opening scene was so difficult to get into that I found myself asking, "Who are these people? What are they doing? Why should I care?" When I realized how much I didn't care (by page 2), I abandoned the story for the next one.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

This thread inspired me to take a look at some of my own openings, to see what I've done. Here's a few examples of opening paragraphs I've used:

1. Tony put on the spex and scrunched his hands into the tight datagloves. He pushed a button on the right earpiece, and the world around him changed.

2. No one saw the first four explosions. Only two people witnessed the fifth explosion, and it killed one of them.

3. Stasis felt unreal.

4. Sarah Jacobson's hands shook as she parked her clunky Volkswagen across the street from the old suburban house in which she had grown up. She sat there, breathing in the gas fumes from the idling engine, as she watched the reporters swarm all over the front lawn.

5. Morning, afternoon, and evening no longer existed, at least as far as Kel was concerned, despite just waking up from a long meditation. He awoke as always: floating in the darkness of space, among spaceships, a huge junkyard of them in orbit around one of the yellow-white stars of a binary system. Beyond lay nothing but empty space, and the distant stars of the galaxy, pinpoints of light sprinkled all around like--like--

6. I'm dying.

Having looked at this, I have to admit that I'm kind of fond of # 2, 3, 4, and 6. The first one and the fifth one seem weaker to me.

That said, I think they all do what I would hope an opening would do. Each one has a promise of something different, something changing, something interesting. The story questions that come up are easy for a reader to grasp:

1. How did the world change?

2. Explosions? If no one saw them, how do they know about them? And who died?

3. What's stasis? What does it mean to feel unreal?

4. Why is Sarah so nervous? And what are the reporters doing there?

5. Where/when are we, that day doesn't exist and a man floats in space?

6. Who's dying? How will he or she deal with it?

Hm. I feel an article for Writer's Digest coming on... :-)

[palinade.livejournal.com]

I think the thing I look for most in an opening is "Why should I care about this person or situation?" If I can't *feel* something about it, even if it's just wondering how it will all turn out, then I have not been "hooked."

Short fiction hooks and novel hooks are different in that a novel can take its time establishing world, characters, and mood. With short stories, I want to be thrust right into the story because it's a momentary thing; I don't need the backstory as well laid out as in a novel--the grounding details in a short story should be like nutmeg, just enough to flavor the piece without making its presence known.

But novel hooks that do jump right into the action or mood work well, too. I, too, am bored by the Establishing Shot scene, the description of weather or town or vista by the pov character. For one thing, this isn't a movie or TV show--we don't need a visual description to establish the place or mood. I'm also super bored by the openings that start with the pov character telling the reader about the "unknown pain" or "traumatic dream" he/she/it just had or is in the process of experiencing.

I agree that a good ending is just as important as a good beginning. The reader has to feel some sort of conclusion, some resolution to the conflict, something to show that the characters have gone through something and emerged on the other side changed, evolved, affected in some way. Even if I'm left with more questions than answers, I still don't want to feel cheated or short-changed.

[(Anonymous)]

i actually think about this a lot, celia. years ago, i'd walk through bookstores reading just the first paragraphs of great books - or any books, really - just to get a feel for the hook. hell, even non-fiction sometimes had terrific hooks (well-written histories, usually).

beginning "in media res" is essential for a page-turning plot, but what mid-action accomplishes is the goal of any good hook, really - to appeal to the reader's body and senses. and that's the mark of a successful beginning, by my read.

garcia marquez starts many of his books with a smell-image, which circumnavigates the reader's higher-mind and goes right for the brainstem. plus, it fits stylistically, preparing readers for marquez's sensual prose-feasts to come.

the sixth sense, sex, is a guaranteed, 24-karat hook. i love the first paragraph of LOLITA by nabakov. i'm not a nabakov queen and, in fact, i found LOLITA hard to stomach for many pages at a time, but i adore that first paragraph. "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down to the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta." (and not a complete sentence in the bunch, i might add.) whether you find him pathetic, ridiculous, or horrific, the main character and his obsession are emblazoned in your mind at once.

-barth