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For Crying Out Loud

February 1, 2012 in Writing | 10 comments

It’s my belief that the chief goal of fiction is to make a reader care. Without that emotional investment, you’d be wasting even the most kick-butt plot and the most ingenious characters. Without an emotional connection, the rest of your hard work will never take off.

That’s why I get frustrated with writers who expect me to rise to serious emotions without giving me a reason. A great example is putting a very emotional or traumatic moment in the first chapter, before I’ve had a chance to bond with the character. Let’s say the book opens with a funeral for the character’s father. They are a wreck, weeping all over the place, inconsolable. You’d think that a funeral scene would automatically elicit strong emotions in the reader, but you’d be wrong.

I don’t sympathize with anything or anyone unless I care about it first, even a little bit. If I’m just meeting your character, I don’t know anything about them. And while funerals are sad, yes, and crying is sad, sure, I will not automatically match emotions just because they are presented on the page.

Similarly, I don’t much like to see crying for crying’s sake. There are manuscripts I’ve read that have characters screaming, raging, crying, laughing, and every other powerful emotion in between. But they fail to strike a chord. Why? Because rather than seeing those external displays of emotion, I’d rather know the exact thoughts that bring those tears about. Instead of saying, “She wept bitterly as they lowered the casket into the ground,” I’d prefer to read something like, “Of all things to think in this moment, she remembered the stupid joke birthday card she was planning on giving him next week, and how she’d never hear him laugh about it.” The thought that triggers the tears, whether it’s rational or completely random, like the above, is always much more powerful. I know more about the character and her relationship to her now-dead father from the specific second example, and that makes me more invested. It helps me to form that emotional bond.

Another thing to think about, and this I borrow from Robert McKee and his scriptwriting Bible, STORY: The Law of Diminishing Returns. The first time you see something, it’s powerful and it gets your attention. Like a rip-roaring action sequence in a summer blockbuster. “Awesome,” you think, “that semi just totally just clipped that low-flying police helicopter,” or whatever. But if the movie keeps throwing insane chase sequences at you, they’re going to have less and less of an effect. This principle makes many things in life possible. Think about doctors. They may feel queasy digging into their first cadaver, but by the end of medical school, they’re mucking around in bodies like champs.

Don’t hit your reader with strong emotion over and over again because you mistake this for making your audience care. If people aren’t attaching to your characters or their struggles, the answer isn’t to make them cry or rage more or more often, it’s to carefully choose your moments of high emotion, motivate them well, and really let us into the character’s experience.

Again, I’ve read many manuscripts (especially YA), where a vexed and emotional teen cries all the time, constantly flying off the handle. Instead of bringing me into that character’s world, it turns me off, and keeps pushing me away the longer the tantrums continue.

We all are hard-wired to respond to emotions, but it’s the way in which you present those moments in your fiction that will make all the difference.

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The Problem With Immortality

January 25, 2012 in Writing | 10 comments

This doesn’t seem like a very real headline. The problem with immortality? What problem with immortality? I know that I, for one, would love to be immortal. *bares neck for any vampires that might happen by*

But in fiction, immortality is a huge problem for stakes. If your characters are immortal, they can’t die, and therefore one of the worst things that could befall someone is out of the question. When your characters are immortal, stakes plummet.

The same goes for scenarios that are larger than life. It’s very hard to wrap one’s mind around a global apocalypse, when you really think about it. Think about those charity ads for starving children. If we hear the same mind-numbing statistic of “XX million children are starving in the world,” it’s almost too much to process. And it doesn’t stir our hearts for long. But those ad campaigns that highlight a particular child in a particular place and tell us their story, those are the ones that engage us into putting a specific face on world poverty and hunger.

So if you have an immortal character running around screaming, “The world’s going to end! Gaaah!”…I don’t know if you’re going to get the kind of reader-hooking reaction you want. The stakes you say are present (death/end of the world) are too big, and therefore they start to mean nothing, after all.

Let’s say you are writing a story about an immortal character or the end of the world. Should you put down the quill and sulk because it’s hopeless? No. The trick is to build in a framework of things (probably people) that your character cares about more than life itself, and put them in very real and immediate danger that is much smaller, more menacing, and more specific than some malformed looming apocalypse.

Through your character’s relationships to these people and their willingness to risk all for what they really care about, we will start to get invested in their story. After all, immortality is one thing, and it’s pretty boring, turns out. But the event that threatens to make immortality shallow and meaningless for your character? That’s what I’m interested in. And an apocalypse isn’t scary to me because it’s too huge. But the thing your character can’t bear to leave undone before the world grinds to a halt? That’s what I want to see.

Writers keep hearing advice to up the stakes, but it is possible to make your stakes too high and impossible to care about. If that’s the problem you’re battling, give your characters other more immediate things to despair over.

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The Promise of the Novel

January 23, 2012 in Writing | 13 comments

In December, I was feverishly working on finishing my Writer’s Digest webinar critiques from the MG and YA novel presentation (if you missed it or are just joining us, I’m teaching a MG and YA craft intensive webinar again on February 9th, more info to come soon). This experience is always fascinating for me. Not just because I have no idea how it’s possible for me to do over 300 critiques in such a short period of time. It’s interesting because I get to read reams and reams of novel-openings-in-progress.

Now, a novel opening is one of the hardest things in the world to do right. In fact, there’s a whole book about why that is (and how to jump this difficult hurdle) called HOOKED by Les Edgerton (Writer’s Digest Books). I highly recommend it. Anyway. One of the issues I ran into during critiques was the promise of the novel. What do I mean by that?

As readers, we like to telescope into the future a bit when we pick up a book. After reading the first 5 or 10 pages, our imaginations start feverishly working on where the story will take us. Conflict is usually presented in the first chapter, or a world is introduced, or we meet characters, and we think, “Okay. I get it. This will be the central conflict of the plot that I’m reading here,” or, “I’m going to spend the next 350 pages with these people,” or, “I think we’re in some futuristic dystopian society, cool. Can’t wait to learn more.”

This is a natural process and readers do it almost subconsciously. The key for you — the writer — is to know that and to build the right promise into the beginning of your novel. You always want to work with your reader’s imagination, make the right promise, and then deliver it. They’re going to be telescoping forward into your story, so you might as well make them a) excited to read on, and b) at least right about where they think you’re going with your novel. The most common error I see is one of a misguided or misdirected promise.

I wish I could say this has only happened once or twice, but this scenario happens to me at almost every conference. I read a novel opening that takes place in school or with the family or during a sports game. These scenes are introductory and often info-dump-y and they don’t really do much for me, so I say that to the writer. They always look at me and say, “Oh, well, the rest of the story doesn’t even have anything to do with school/family/sports. I just thought I had to put them in a normal setting first and then go off to the good stuff.”

Not kidding. This happens all the time. And I understand it. When we talk about plot, we often talk about a character’s normal and how the inciting incident wrecks it. So, of course, for most kids, “normal” means family and school. But I also talk about prime real estate and directing your reader’s attention. This relates to the promise of the novel like so: if you start your story in school and going through all the usual suspects of introducing the bully and the Queen Bee and the crush, your reader will think (not without good reason), “Ah, I am going to be spending the next four hours reading a school story.”

And if on page 11, aliens descend and suddenly your protagonist is a long-lost space queen, well…your reader might be a bit jarred. If the story is good, they will reset their expectations and forge on, but you don’t want to give them this kind of cognitive dissonance. The same goes for genre. If something reads contemporary realistic for enough pages to make me think that it’s a contemporary realistic novel, don’t toss dragons at me on page 25. My expectations have gelled. I am settling into your tale. I don’t want to suddenly discover that I’ll be reading high fantasy.

If you have to start in a normal setting, at least drop hints. If yours is a ghost story, make your character see eerie shadows that disappear when she looks them head-on. If there are going to be dragons, you better let us know that this is a world that has dragons in it (a news report about dragon shortages playing in the background would be a cliche, but I hope you understand what I mean). If your character will be going on a long journey, drop subtle hints and foreshadowing, like briefly describing walking shoes piled by the door. Whatever. Just think about your story — the core of it, the plot, the arc — and then make sure that the beginning either starts with it or strongly suggests it.

And if any element plays a strong role in your opening, let it play a strong role throughout. No spending 10 pages focusing on a school story if school does not show up ever again. In fiction, you plant seeds from the very beginning and they grow in importance as you hurtle toward the climax. Don’t scatter pumpkin seeds at the beginning of planting season if you’re trying to grow a tomato garden.

You never want to confuse your reader by accident and leave them scratching their heads halfway through your beginning. Save the misdirection for withholding information and crafting suspense and surprise. Instead, make a solemn promise to your audience that you will tell them the story they think they’ve settled down to read. That doesn’t mean make it predictable, but it means build their expectations just so and make them excited to follow you down the path you’ve set up for them from page one.

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Animal Characters

November 21, 2011 in Publishing, Writing | 8 comments

I got some questions from Darshana and NAP about animal stories. NAP asked why they seemed to be unpopular in today’s market given the many perennial animal favorites, and Darshana wrote the following:

I am under the impression that when you have a topic that could be traumatic to a child using animals lessens the effect. Example: Corduroy or Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. Also there are wonderful stories such as CLICK CLACK MOO, BEAR SNORES ON, LITTLE BLUE TRUCK that simply can’t be told any other way. Or is that if you use animals in your story, it has to be a story that couldn’t be possibly told with any other setting/character?

When I talk about animal stories, by the way, I mean mostly picture books, chapter books, and some MG. It’s highly unusual to see anthropomorphic animal characters in YA. And it’s true that there seems to be less excitement in general about animal stories than there was a few years ago. Sure, in ye olde days, animal protagonists were de rigeur. Now, I can acknowledge that they’ve somewhat fallen out of style, though publisher’s catalogs are still crammed with all sorts of critters, especially on the PB side.

There’s nothing wrong, per se, with writing stories starring animal characters. Ask Erin Hunter, the creator of the WARRIORS middle grade series. I’m pretty sure you can find her on the road to the bank…she’ll be the one laughing. And, as I said, there are tons of creatures on shelves today. But why is there this aura that animal stories aren’t quite as popular as they used to be?

Darshana brings up an intersting point. Are animals better suited for difficult stories that need one step of remove from reality? This could be a reason for choosing animal protagonists, though lots of the animal stories I’ve read are simply stories with critters who act very much like human children. In fact, as an interesting counterpoint, I know that one publisher, Lee & Low, will not publish stories with anything but real children, because their mission is diversity and they want the opposite of that remove, they want the human experience only so that their readers can instantly relate. In this vein, I think that we, as people, are so used to relating to protagonists in stories, whether animal or inanimate object or kid, that I don’t know how real this psychological distance is. I’m guessing it’s negligible, though it is good food for thought.

As for the other examples that Darshana mentions, she’s right, they can’t be told any other way, but I think the reason there is just because…they are stories that happen to include animals (or Little Blue Trucks and their animal friends). Her last point is true of all stories, I think, or at least it should be: You make the choices you do in your fiction because you simply cannot make any other choices. Your particular choices are so right that they seem like the only ones. This should apply to characters, of course, but also to setting, plot, word choice, etc. THE VELVETEEN RABBIT is a story about a discarded toy looking for a home. It literally cannot star anyone else but a toy character.

I think anthropomorphic animals are very much a case-by-case question, as well as one of very personal taste. Personally (and here I speak for me and me alone), I do not like chapter books or MG with animals. And most unpublished picture books with animals fall short for me. From what I see in the slush, I get the distinct feeling that some people are writing animal stories simply because they remember reading a lot of animal stories when they grew up. This is a red flag because it shows that they may not be as familiar with today’s market and that they may not be making the strongest and most inevitable choices.

Overall, across the tens of thousands of submissions I’ve read, animal stories tend to cluster near the bottom of the barrel. This is by no means true across the board, it’s a huge generalization, and it has nothing to do with the canon of successful animal stories out there, but this is a clear effect I’ve noticed. (Again, just speaking for myself here.) So I’m wary of them most of the time. And it could very well end up being my loss.

However, I’ve personally broken that mold on my list with BUGLETTE THE MESSY SLEEPER (Tricycle Press) by Bethanie Murguia (and its sequel, coming from Knopf in 2013, SNIPPET THE EARLY RISER), WHEN BLUE MET EGG (coming from Dial/Penguin in 2012) by Lindsay Ward, and POCO LOCO (coming from Marshall Cavendish in 2013) by John Krause. It’s important to note that none of these books deal with issues so difficult that we needed to project them onto animals. It’s more important to note that all of them are tales that could only happen with these particular characters, because their creators made very active story choices. I think that’s the bottom line, right there.

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Do Fiction Writers Need Platform?

November 16, 2011 in Advice, Writing | 10 comments

This interesting question comes from Diana:

Platforms continue to elude me. How to build one without pigeon-holing yourself, how to assess the best methods, how to find the time (snort). Is the scope of your platform important to an agent? Are publishers looking for genre-specific platforms or more generalized author-focused approaches? Am I worrying too much about this?

First and foremost, when a writer asks, “Am I worrying too much about this?” the answer is almost always “yes!” Not to make light of Diana’s plight, but writers do have a reputation for getting hung up on things and then swirling in their own heads until panic arises. I get it, too. It’s the curse of hte intellectual/creative type.

Now, “platform” is one of those buzzwords that you hear on blogs and message boards and at conferences. First and foremost, it’s much more important for non-fiction writers. That is a fact. When you put together a non-fiction book proposal, the publisher really wants to know how many people you can reach and sell books to. That’s a crucial concern for them at acquisitions. Professionals with big networks, popular bloggers, experts with connections, people who have caught the media spotlight…those are the types of people who can impress editors with the promise of big NF sales.

Fiction writers are different. They’re not selling themselves (an essential part of every non-fiction book is either that the author or the idea are noteworthy and attention-grabbing), they’re selling a story. In most cases in fiction, it really is all about the book and not about the personality behind it. Some fiction authors don’t even do promotion for their work.So the average fiction writer’s platform is, “I like to write fiction,” and that’s okay.

Let me repeat: Fiction lives and dies by the manuscript itself, unless you’re famous. And you would know if you were famous (hint: you wouldn’t be reading this blog because you’d already have five different types of agents).

A lot of my (unpopular) thoughts on developing platform for fiction writers can be found addressed in this previous post. I stick by what I said. Just like a query letter does not have the power to make or break you as a fiction writer (query letter writing and manuscript writing are two different things), a fiction writer’s huge platform does not have the power to land you a book deal if your book is horrible, nor does a lacking  platform get in the way of an acquisition if the book is brilliant. (Unless, again, you’re Snooki.)

All that said, however, it’s important for writers in today’s market to think about platform at some point. You should start getting familiar with the idea of self-promotion, the venues for developing your marketing strategy (blogs, social media), etc. However, platform shouldn’t be the thing you need to focus on before you write your manuscript.  Once you get a book deal, you’ll need to shift into two modes, a) marketing Debut Novel, and b) writing Follow-up Novel. But that’s after. Building a platform now, before you have a book, before you have anything to leverage it with, is a bit like putting the cart before the horse.

People love their blogging and their Tweeting and the communities of unpublished writers that they’ve created online. I’m not trying to take that away from you. But realize that a platform without something to sell is not something you really need to be worried about at this point. I’m all about writers getting themselves out there and starting to participate in the world, build buzz, etc., but that’s not what I’m selling when I sell your fiction. If platform is stressing you out, go back to focusing on the writing.

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Writing on a Theme

November 7, 2011 in Writing | 9 comments

This heady MFA question comes from Valeria:

Some writers say they work around one certain theme, others just find the theme later. But what are your thoughts on it?

Theme is actually something I’ve been thinking a lot about as I move forward (luck you!). We all hear the stories of the writers who finished their opus and then saw all the threads come together into their big, almost unintended theme. Sure, it must’ve been there subconsciously, but they never intended to put a Big Idea together in just this way.

That happens all the time, and I’m not criticizing it. In fact, I think it’s valuable to let your subconscious step in and plant little anchors throughout your story that have to do with a larger theme. But I’m coming around to the idea that you could — and maybe even should — write with a theme, Big Idea, or Big Question in mind. Here’s why:

It helps you refine your idea from the concept stage forward. If you know what theme you want to write about, you can more easily pinpoint yourself in the marketplace, and you don’t have to wait until you have a completed novel to figure out a) what you’re doing, and b) if it’s marketable.

What is the big question you want your story to answer? What is the thing you’re asking or hoping to express about the universe and life itself? What are you exploring? What do you wish you could solve about your own life? What have you observed about being alive? That’s your Big Idea and/or Big Question and I think every book should have it…otherwise, what’s the point?

Now take your Big Idea and find its layers. What is an idea that contradicts your central theme for the story? Can you work that contradictory viewpoint in through a plot event or secondary character? What are the shades of your idea? The layers? What are the twists and surprises that will keep your readers engaged, that will help them dig deeper into your story?

Every big, successful book has a big question or a big idea behind it. (BEFORE I FALL: What would you change if you could do it all over again? 13 REASONS WHY: What small things in life add up to big consequences? HUNGER GAMES: What matters in a society that works so hard to dehumanize its citizens? HOLES: How can you be in charge of your own destiny? Etc.)

You don’t have to introduce your Big Idea right on the nose in the beginning of your story, but hint at the questions that you’ll be answering, and make sure they grow in importance as you write. Your Big Idea or Big Question should be at work in all parts of your novel. For example, voice: What does your characters and narrator (if different) notice about the world? How do they notice it? What does it have to do with your Big Idea? How is it expressed?

Why am I so high on theme these days? You, as the writer, have one responsibility: you have to, as Ursula Nordstrom says, “dig deep and tell the truth” about the world as you see it. That plays directly into the “why” of your story, as in, why are you as a person telling this story to the world now?

What Big Questions are you asking? What is the thing you want to say with your book? What human foibles and characterizations do you want to bring to light? What kind of plot construction will let all that come together in an engaging way?

If you want to reflect life back to your readers with your own personal slant, you have to be committed to living and observing and distilling. Be honest with yourself and be honest with your ideas so that you can be honest for your kid readers. They’re still getting to know the world…reach down and pull them up so that they can experience the vista you’re seeing.

In addition to your big idea, you need to think about the idea of the Core Emotional Experience, which we talked about all the time in my theatre training. You’ve expressed your Big Idea. You’ve answered your Big Question, using this story as a tool to explore theme. What do you want your reader to put the book down and think or feel? In theatre, what do you want the audience saying as the house lights come up and they emerge from the “fictive dream,” as novelist John Gardner calls it, and stagger back into their real lives? How do you want to change them? What seed of an idea do you want to plant in their imaginations?

Your responsibility is to say something that’s true to you, true to your vision of the world, and a story that speaks in a big way. That’s where your theme comes into play and, ideally, you will have that framework in place before you start to write.

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Character Self-Description

October 24, 2011 in Advice, Writing | 16 comments

Here’s an interesting question from Anne:

I’m looking for clever ways to write physical descriptions of first person narrators. It’s just so awkward to have people describe their own looks. I’ve heard that editors are sick of the old “I stared in the mirror” approach. I’ve used the self-effacing “I wish I were better looking” approach, but that too seems overdone.

I have to admit, when I read some bad character self-description in a manuscript, it makes me wince. Never in my life have I, for example, “examined my dark brown locks in the mirror, giving my tall frame a once-over, and wishing, for once, that my blue-green eyes would just pick a color and stick with it.” Who thinks like that? The obvious problem is, of course, that we may think like this if we were seeing ourselves for the first time, but most of us are very familiar with what’s in the mirror. In this case, I feel like we’re all expecting the contrived, super unique self-description, and we’re already groaning about it. What you can do instead is stop trying to make the character’s self-description into a creativity moment and just tell us the details that we need to know.

“I swatted a clump of black hair out of my eyes and ran down the field,” or whatever.

Don’t be too precious about it, don’t put physical description in dialogue unless you can get it to sound organic (none of this “But gosh, that skirt looks really great with your hazel eyes” stuff, that doesn’t sound like authentic speech, we would just say “your eyes” because both characters know what color they’re referring to), and don’t think this is your big opportunity to revolutionize character self-description. Less is definitely more, so just tell us (yes, you can tell and not show in this case) and move on. That’s what I say. This is a frustrating question because I’ve seen it done very poorly, and most likely not noticed when it’s done really well, and would just rather have the necessary details out of the way. I’m guessing your character’s look isn’t the most important thing about the story, so all we need are a few details peppered in.

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Boiling It Down

October 17, 2011 in Writing | 23 comments

Recently, I’ve posted two things that I firmly believe are the cornerstones of my fiction philosophy. First, writing must make me care. I need to care about character (most important) and then about their story. If I don’t care, you’re dead in the water. If you aren’t thinking about the emotional impact of your story, good luck to you in someone else’s inbox.

Second, fiction is a balance of action and information. Too much action and we don’t hook into the character or situation. (Especially if the breakneck action is at the beginning of your novel, like if you start with a hectic chase sequence, for example, we have a really hard time figuring out what’s going on or why.) Too much information (a first chapter where your character sits in their room thinking about his life, for example) and there’s no action, no plot, no forward momentum, and the whole thing drags. The two elements must always be in balance. In times when there’s a lot of information being introduced, you must also keep your characters moving. You can’t indulge in an info-dump. In times of action, you must also work hard to keep us invested by giving us context and information (later on in the novel, once character and situation are established, this usually means emotional context, ie: interiority).

I was at the Rutgers One-on-One Conference this past weekend, in a roundtable discussion with super agent Tina Wexler from ICM. We were talking about novel beginnings and, of course, I sprouted off my “action vs. information” line. Then Tina put the missing piece together and it fit perfectly: “But it needs to have emotion, too. Emotion is the third point of that triangle.”

I made a joke at the time about really working a metaphor to death, but a lightbulb definitely went off because of her comment, and now I think I have the perfect image for my two most important tenets of writing.

If fiction is a balance of action and information, the axis of the scale, the part that holds everything else together, is emotion. Without emotion to lord over the work and to keep everything else in check, your whole manuscript falls apart. (And you do not get to hold the Sword of the Awesome Manuscript.)

We should always be in touch with your character’s emotions (especially if you are writing in third person, as that is a challenge for many) and they should be legible and resonant for readers. Whether you’re writing a scene of action or dropping information in your manuscript, keep in mind your characters’ interiority (thoughts, feelings, reactions) near the surface. You can even indulge in some strategic Good Telling.

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A Balance of Action and Information

September 28, 2011 in Writing | 19 comments

This is something that I’ve started saying at each conference I attend. For those of you who’ve heard it in person or during a critique, I apologize for being redundant. But listen to it anyway because it’s important:

I believe that all writing is a balance of action and information.

Imagine scales in your head. On one end is action: what keeps plot driving forward and teaches us about character as our fictional people advance through the present moments of the story. On the other end is information: what gives us context about the fictional world and also fleshes out the characters we’ve created with need-to-know tidbits that exist outside the present moment.

Both are necessary. Both need to be in balance so that a story can continue. The biggest place where this matters is in a novel’s beginning. Imagine you are trying to read a dystopian that’s in a completely other world–you open the book and it’s strange, you don’t know much about it. Worse, your main character has been whacked in the head before the start of the story and is just groggily waking up. She doesn’t remember who she is or where she is. When she does come to, she realizes she’s in an underground maze, being chased by…something. Whatever it is, it has sharp teeth, it reeks of death, and it’s after her. She doesn’t have anything to defend herself with, so she must start running.

We open immediately to action. It’s great. There’s danger, the stakes are high, her life hangs in the balance. But is this a compelling beginning for fiction? I’d argue that it isn’t, really. Because we have action, but that’s all we have. We don’t know anything about this world in which people get clubbed on the head and maze monsters seem to be just a regular part of life. We don’t know anything about this character because she’s recently suffered a head injury and doesn’t know enough to tell us herself. The stakes here are high, yes, but generic “life and death” versus specific. Since we don’t know the world or the character, we don’t know exactly what’s at risk (other than some random broad’s life) or why we should care. This beginning has too much action and not enough information so it fails to ground the reader and provide a foothold for us to access the story.

On the other end of the scale is information. It’s great to have because, once we know stuff (and, ideally, we pick it up through showing, not telling), we care. It’s not enough to know that there are millions of children starving in the world. Those charity commercials tug at our heartstrings because they show us one child, tell us one story, and they make the problem concrete enough and specific enough that we start to care. But you can go overboard on information, too. Let’s say I open another book. It’s a character who is sitting in their room the night before the first day of school, thinking about his crappy life. He has no friends, his parents are too strict (and definitely uncool) and his sister is a brat. He looks over at his closet, where he’s hidden his skateboard — it causes him even more pain that he hurt his knee over the summer and hasn’t been able to get to the skate park, further alienating himself. He looks around at his clothes, hoping they’re cool enough, and at the rock posters on the walls, grumbling that his favorite bands never come through to tour in his small, miserable town. He thinks for a while about how much he loves his dog, and maybe about the girl that he has a crush on that he’s never spoken to.

What’s wrong with this picture? Let me ask you, instead: What has happened so far? Nothing. A kid is sitting and thinking. It’s a completely static beginning with no action. Sure, we learn a lot about his life, but it is all telling, no showing. We care less about the girl he loves because we’ve never seen her reject him in scene. We know he is upset about skateboarding but we are not emotionally invested until we see him limp out of the half-pipe after a failed trick. And do we really need to know about the family pet or the sister right now? I’m guessing not.

You have all this great information in your head about your character or your world, but you can never dump it all on your reader (an “info-dump”) at once, especially at the beginning. Information must emerge organically, usually in the context of action. When we meet the dream girl, it’s okay to have him think about how long he’s been in love with her. That’s information. But then, Home Skillet must march on over there and get his heart crushed. That’s action. Like this, the two work very well together. Too much of either one, and your pacing gets all off, characterization starts to feel flat, and your reader’s emotional investment in the story starts to drag.

This doesn’t just happen in the beginning of your work, either. The balance of action and information is something you must always be vigilant about. I love this additional way of thinking about the fiction craft and I hope you do, too.

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Weighing in on Prologues

September 21, 2011 in Advice, Writing | 24 comments

It’s so nice to realize that, after all these years together, I still have new and surprising things to blog about! The issue of prologues isn’t new, by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve always avoided weighing in on it. Why? Because people love their prologues and, as you can probably guess, I usually don’t, and so I really don’t want to open a can of worms like I did when discussing sex and swearing in YA

As much as I love conflict in my fiction, I don’t much enjoy it on the blog. But people keep asking me about prologues so, therefore, here we go. Here’s the basic gist of the question. This one came in through my MG and YA webinar that I did for Writer’s Digest last Thursday, but this is pretty much the idea behind every prologue question I get, so the wording isn’t especially important:

What are your thoughts on prefaces/prologues? Do they ever work for you? Many people have told me that everyone HATES prefaces/prologues so I cut it. However, my beta readers LOVED the preface. It made them want to keep reading to see what really happens in that moment. What to do? Do prefaces/prologues ever work? Will you pass on a MS because they include a preface/prologue?

Yep, this is the point of a prologue. It usually teases the reader with a high-tension moment from later in the book and it starts the manuscript off with a bang — because, as a writer, you know to do that. Tensions are high. Things are really exciting. This is great!

Then the real first chapter starts. And the ol’ Prologue Deflation kicks in because the writer is usually dragging the reader into an ordinary beginning which is, let’s face it, kinda boring. Sure, there’s always that tension that you’ll go back to the exciting prologue stuff later. And that’s what the writer is counting on. But most of the time, this kind of prologue tension feels like a lazy cheat to me, to tell you the truth. A lot of writers lean on prologues because they don’t know how to otherwise make their beginnings exciting.

A prologue isn’t an automatic rejection for me but they almost always leave me underwhelmed because the beginning after the prologue is usually a failure of imagination. Most likely the writer didn’t know how to really start, so they throw a fake-out on the fire and hope that it’s enough to carry you through to the good stuff that’s buried later. It’s the equivalent of a writer saying, “Well, I really want to send you the first 50 pages because it doesn’t really get going until Chapter Four.” Why hide the goods? Why resort to tricks and manipulation? Why toy with the reader and cover up your own plot insecurities? I’d rather have a well-crafted, gimmick-free, honest-to-goodness beginning to a novel almost every time.

Sure, prologues start with tension and they’re popular, but they set my expectations low in terms of the writer’s overall craft level, to be perfectly honest. There are definitely exceptions to the rule and some prologues work. Regardless, lots are published. But just know that we’ve seen the prologue bait and switch too many times to really have high hopes in most cases.

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