Day 7 - Starting a Novel with Disembodied Dialog

I have a confession to make. I was never able to get into Dorothy L. Sayers. I never knew why, because I love the adaptations made of her Lord Peter Whimsey books. The plots, the characters all that.

I finally realized just the other night that the whole reason is because I've been trying to start with the wrong book. And it's not even the wrong whole book, just the wrong first page. Yep, I've got to say that Murder Must Advertise has a sinker of a first page:

"And by the way," said Mr. Hankin, arresting Miss Rossiter as she rose to go, "there is a new copy-writer coming in today."

"Oh, yes, Mr. Hankin?"

"His name is Bredon. I can't tell you much about him; Mr Pym engaged him himself; but you will see that he is looked after."

"Yes, Mr. Hankin."

"He will have Mr. Dean's room."

"Yes, Mr. Hankin."

"I should think that Mr. Ingleby cold take him in hand and show him what to do. You might send Mr. Ingleby along if he can spare me a moment."

"Yes, Mr. Hankin."

"That's all. And, oh, yes! Ask Mr. Smayle to let me have the Dairyfield's guard-book."

"Yes, mr. Hankin."

This is a much better beginning than the one in the book I threw across the room the other day, because at least it does its job of orienting us. It's pretty clear that this is an office, and the relationship between the characters. Given the title of the chapter "Death Comes to Pym's Publicity", we have some kind of idea what kind of office it is, too.

But it does make you work to figure out that setting, and what is going on and why, and it doesn't give back a lot in return. For instance, since we don't have any expectations yet, it doesn't get to play with or against those expectations. Which is what would make the whole "Yes, Mr. Hankin, Yes, Mr. Hankin, Yes, Mr. Hankin, Yes, Mr. ..." thing work. If we had actors and and a setting, it would be funny and subtle. By itself, the words have to work too hard to set the scene and set up the relationship. There isn't time for fun with it. Still, there might be just a little drama in there if he had said something which made her struggle to answer "Yes, Mr. Hankin." But that wouldn't be appropriate to the characters.

So, imho, it would have been better to cut it out altogether, because ALL of the information in this bit turns out to be in the next part of the scene when Miss Rossiter goes off and relates it all to the other people in the office. And Sayers deigns to actually describe them a little, and better yet, they actually have personalities and conflicts.

And in that bit, a page later, we finally get a hint of the "promise" that should have been on the first page, when one of the characters describes this new guy as a "tow-coloured supercilious looking blighter" and now we have some anticipation. If you're familiar with the series, here you think, with a chuckle "Is that who I think it is?" Or if you aren't, you at least get a sense of upcoming conflict.

Usually, dialog carries a lot of meaning in how things are said. But when you have nothing but dialog , what is said is extremely important. In an opening, it becomes a kind of narration in itself. The characters can tell you about other characters the way Dickens told us about Scrooge - but if so, it's better not to make the dialog carry too much other weight. It can't establish the characters who are speaking, AND the setting, AND the political situation, AND the other characters.

In Murder, Mr. Mosley by John Greenwood, the opening dialog is like the chanting of a Greek chorus. We meet a couple of minor characters in an obvious setting but they are there to comment:

"You are not contemplating," the Assistant Chief Constable said, "committing this to Mosley?"

Detective-Superintendant Grimshaw looked his master in the eye with a firmness meant to conceal the fact that he would rather have been looking almost anywhere else in the world. "Chief Inspector Marsters is tied up with managerial crime -- the Hartley Mason business. We've leave and sickness problems. Woolliams is looking after two divisions. Stout's going off on a course. And it is Mosley's patch."

"But damn it, he couldn't even get to the scene of the crime."

"He's been up all night sir: an epidemic of poultry-rustling over at Kettlerake."

This scene goes on for about another page and it is all dialog. Not even a "he said" for the rest of the scene. But you don't have to work all that hard to know it's taking place in the ACC's office, and if not, the location is irrelevant to the conversation.

But the best thing is that the very first sentence introduces conflict. It's a question in the negative, full of doubt. And Grimshaw's reaction shows us that he is dreading that doubt and has to stand strong against it.

From there, the discussion progresses like a tennis match, with the ball in one court and then the other. And in the course of the conversation, we learn all there is to know about the reputation of Mr. Mosley, and about his "patch" or the community in which he works. This conversation continues to build that conflict, and by the end, it has built up to a hook - Mosley is about to be partnered with someone that both sides believe will a poor fit for his personality. ... And that is a perfect set up to actually meet Mr. Mosley in the next scene.

So in the end, I have to say that the disembodied discussion can work as an opening scene, but what it really does is focus the reader on the subject of the discussion. And if you try to hang too much else on these words (or make the point too subtle) you can lost the audience.  At the opening of the story, subtlety gets lost in the reader's search for information.  If you want to write wonderful subtle dialog, save it for a little later, when the audience can absorb it. 


So tomorrow I get back to thinking about what to do with this book, and my goals for the next dare (which I will post on New Year's Day).
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Here are the direct links to each post in the series: Intro - how to start a novel badly 1.) In the middle of the action, 2.) Narration or storyteller's voice, 3.) Disembodied Dialog.

Day 6 - Opening a Novel with Narrative

"Marley was dead: to begin with."

That's how Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol begins. The narrator just straight out tells you an important fact. He doesn't tell you why it's important, but he goes for quite a while, and in extensive detail, about how dead Marley is.

We get the idea that this plain fact -- that Marley was dead -- will soon be in question.

This is the great thing about "voice," and it's something you can only get with narration; It isn't just that we're given dry facts, but we are given a point of view.  In this case, you might even call it an obsession. "Listen! He's dead! Remember that or you will miss important stuff later on!" And because we have voice, we not only get facts about Marley being dead, we get with them everything we need to know about the characters and situation for the whole book.

AND, because we've got this wonderful opinionated voice, Dickens gets away with telling us outright about his protagonist: "Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!"

Of course, it was easier to get away with that authorial voice in Victorian times when omniscient was pretty much the norm. But even more modern fiction also uses authorial voice - just a drier more subtle one. I see it more on the hard-boiled side of the aisle, in the dry but intelligent voice of the omniscient reporter.

But right now I want to stick to the cozier side of the spectrum so I'll leave some of my favorite hard-boiled examples for later. What I found in just casting about for an ordinary example of classic and cozy fiction was not really omniscient. In The Emperor's Snuff-box by John Dickson Carr, for instance, there wasn't a strong personality in the voice. It does begin with summarized narration, though:

When Eve Neill divorced Ned Atwood, the suit was not contested. And, even though the charge was infidelity with a famous woman tennis player, it created far less scandal than Eve had expected.

As with A Christmas Carol, this one goes on with the same theme for a bit. If you don't pick it up in those two sentences, you see pretty quickly that Eve is disappointed with how easy the divorce turned out to be. It's not a particularly exciting opening, but it does it's job: it orients you with what the issues are, and who the protagonist is. The subsequent paragraphs give a lot of information about time and place and situation and personalities. It quickly dips into small fragments of scene to keep it interesting and vivid.

But, as I said, it's a slow starter. There isn't a lot of personality there, and the promise the writer is making is subtle and slow. Eve's problem at this point, is that she is dissatisfied, and that's about it. Dissatisfaction can lead to great things, though, and I would continue reading for a while. But it's a quiet interest.

Of course it's a lot easier to have a really strong and interesting narrator's voice if you write in first person. You can be opinionated and seductive and even irrational and untruthful. (You can be interesting, in other words.)

Probably the best example of a cozy narrative voice comes from a series which is not a mystery at all. P. G. Wodehouse was a real master of narration. And he usually did use a first person narrator, although often that person wasn't a part of the story, just a storyteller.  (His stories about golf, for instance, were generally told by an old man in the club house who told stories about other members he once knew.)

Here is the opening for Jeeves (from Chapter 1 "Jeeves Exerts the Old Cerebellum"):

"Good morning, Jeeves" I said.

"Good morning, sir," said Jeeves.

He put the good old cup of tea softly on the table by my bed, and I took a refreshing sip. Just right, as usual. Not too hot, not too sweet, not too weak, not too strong, not too much milk, not a drop spilled in the saucer. A most amazing cove, Jeeves. So dashed competent in every respect. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I mean to say, take just one small instance....

This story does not start with any kind of problem at all, but it's interesting because the narrator, Bertie Wooster, is so dashed excited about how great his valet is. Just as Dickens works to convince the reader to pay attention to the fact that Marley is dead, so Bertie is working to convince us that Jeeves is a miracle man. They are both telling us straight out that this is an important fact. The heart of the story hinges on it.

I think that's why the opening for John Dickson Carr doesn't work as well for me as the other two - because the voice is more neutral, the reader is not really sure if the opening information is just character development, or critical to the story. I think, when you have a narrated beginning, where you are just told information, you have to have a sense that this is important. Even if it's just a teaser that you don't understand.

I think it's possible for a narrated beginning - a summary of facts - to have some of the kind of inherent drama that a dentist dangling out the window of the twelfth floor of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel might have. Drama could act as cover to hook the reader when you don't want the reader to know the real reason you're starting where you are.

One example of that (which I don't have on hand at the moment) is The False Inspector Dew by Peter Lovesey. That book starts with some scene setting - a recounting of the sinking of a cruise ship in World War I and some other historical events. Those events turn out to have some bearing on the story, but for the opening, they are just a dramatic hook to set the scene.

Tomorrow I'll talk about a couple of books that open with dry dialog - exactly the kind of opening that drove me nuts with those books I bought the other day. Only in this case, the openings work.

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Here are the direct links to each post in the series: Intro - how to start a novel badly 1.) In the middle of the action, 2.) Narration or storyteller's voice, 3.) Disembodied Dialog.

Day 5 - The First Page - In The Middle of the Action

Back when I was at Clarion (many more years ago than I will admit to) I learned from Ajay Budris that a story begins with a character in a setting with a problem. It's the problem, and solving it, that creates all the interest and suspense in a story.

And so, of course, one of the ways of starting a story is to introduce the problem first and foremost, and the reader comes to know the characters and background along the way. Of course, if you do it this way, the problem has to be obvious and easy to understand.

Here is one of my favorite opening paragraphs, from Stuart Kaminsky's Smart Moves:

I was leaning out of the window of a room on the twelfth floor of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, but I wasn't enjoying the view. My right hand was trying to hold on to the sleeve of a frightened dentist who dangled and swayed in the April breeze. My left hand gripped the window sill in spite of the arm behind it, which ached from a very fresh gunshot wound.

You don't have to know who the characters are to empathize with the problem here. (And, frankly, if you don't know who the dentist is at this point, it only creates more tension, because as far as you know, he's just an innocent dentist, as opposed to an annoying one who may quite possibly deserve being dropped.)

The great thing about this kind of opening is that you get an idea of what your character is really made of, what he's capable of. And by how you pick that moment, you may be able to either establish what a typical problem is for the character, and what's extraordinary. In either case, you hook the reader and make a promise as to what the story is about. Once you've made that promise, you get a little more leeway to slow down and set up the rest of the story.

In this case, Stuart Kaminsky is using an old pulp fiction trick: the scene is actually from the climax of the book, and once you're hooked, he goes back to the start of the story. He makes it do double-duty, though, because this happens to be a typical day and a typical problem for the narrator of the story, Toby Peters. The thing that makes it worthy of the climax of the book is simply the stakes. (Which, if I remember right, are the fate of the world, and the lives of Paul Robeson and Albert Einstein.)

However, the beginning doesn't have to involve gunshot wounds and dangling dentists to be a decent hook. This is the beginning of Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie:

Gwenda Reed stood, shivering a little, on the quayside.

The docks and the custom sheds and all England that she could see were gently waving up and down. And it was in that moment that she made her decision -- the decision that was to lead to such very momentus events.

She wouldn't go by boat train to London as she had planned.

In this case, we don't know Gwenda Reed, but we already have a strong sense of a person in transition. Even if we weren't told that the decision would lead to momentus events, she's in a location associated with important changes. She's obviously been travelling or about to travel, and she is taking a step into the unknown. She's deviating from the plan - so she's taking a risk.

That may not be an actual problem, but it promises problems. There will be challenges to be met. Unexpected things will crop up.

When I think about those two books which disappointed me, I suspect that this is the kind of thing those writers meant to do. To start in the middle of something and create anticipation. They failed because there wasn't a promise of things to come.

And that failed because there just wasn't enough quality information. And not every story has gunshots or an evocative setting to set things going, but Christie gives us a hint of the other technique when she inserts the "the decision that was to lead to such very momentus events."

Sometimes it's good to just tell the story and not be coy about the information. More about that tomorrow.

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Here are the direct links to each post in the series: Intro - how to start a novel badly 1.) In the middle of the action, 2.) Narration or storyteller's voice, 3.) Disembodied Dialog.

Day 4 - How to Start a Novel Badly

I recently picked up a couple of cozy mystery paperbacks that looked promising at my local independent bookstore. I found I couldn't get past the second page on either of them. I found myself growing frustrated and impatient, and that's exactly the opposite of how I expect to feel when I'm reading a cozy mystery.

(Side Rant: I also had negative flashbacks to why I stopped reading new cozies back in the nineties. Screeching, nasty, whiny and disagreeable characters are not interesting. They do not constitute a real threat, just an immediate one. And frankly, when your main character puts up with them for one second, I lose all respect for the protag and there is no reason to continue reading. If you are trying to establish that your protagonist is non-confrontational, then at least make her clever about avoiding these people. Because even if she does have to put up with them, I don't. I can put the book down, and usually I do.)

Ahem. Where was I? While one of these books did have a negative character problem, the other one didn't. And both of them suffered from the same kind of opening. I call it the "set up via dialog" opening, and until this week, I too thought it was a good standard technique for jumping right into the story.

Here's how the better of the two books went (and I'm changing the details to protect the innocent and guilty): A small group of women are idly chatting while doing some activity - like sorting donated clothes for a rummage sale. There is no authorial voice, nor is there any internal voice of any of the characters. So there is no description, nothing to orient us to time and place except what they say and do. And they're too busy telling us about each other and the other characters who will enter later to actually let us in on the fact that this takes place in a church basement, in Cleveland, during World War I. The dialog is generic in terms of time and place, and so busy trying to tell us that one of them is a free spirit and the other is a conventional but loyal friend, and that there is a certain woman who is out to get one or the other of them, that one really, literally, cannot tell that this doesn't take place in present day in some unknown building of some sort.

Now, if the dialog and description had given me a little more sense of time and place, I might not have tossed the book aside as quickly, but I still would have been frustrated. Because there is no tension, and even though the characters were very interested in the upcoming social events in their community, the author had not given me any reason to be interested. The mention of this other woman who competes with one of the protagonists is not enough. She's not in the scene. She doesn't provide any conflict or tension. (And I have to admit, I started to worry that when she does enter, she'll turn out to be screechy or whiny or just too unpleasant to read about.)

Now, this is a published author, so I am going to assume that the problem with this opening isn't that there is nothing at stake. I'll even assume that the little hints of conflict will pay off really well later. Hey, sometimes a good payoff requires a lot of subtle groundwork to be laid.

But right now, I've got a novel which needs some set up for the "ordinary life" aspects. So I'm really interested in what's wrong with that opening, and what other kinds of openings I could write.

So I pulled six books from my shelves and looked at the opening paragraphs of each. (All light mystery and such, and none of them the more experimental artsy style of some classics.) They seem to fall into three categories, which are partly defined by the old "show and tell" rule:

1. Action scene which is deeply into the direct experience of the protag - which shows us what is at stake, and leaves the reasons for later.
2. The storyteller's voice, which dives directly into telling us what is important and what it means - reporter style. (But a good reporter will show us too.)
3. This "intro-by-dialog" technique which keeps an objective voice, and tries to show us by having characters talk - which is a form of telling.

The truth is, all of these techniques will show up throughout a book, the question is, which do you start with? Because later on, the reader is already oriented. But at the beginning, the reader needs a whole world of information. In a lot of ways, the kind of opening page you chose has most to do with which information you give the reader first.

Stay tuned - I'll be writing about each of these three techniques for the next three days. (Here are the direct links to each post in the series: 1.) In the middle of the action, 2.) Narration or storyteller's voice, 3.) Disembodied Dialog. )