“I DON’T KNOW ABOUT THE REST OF YOU. I AM STRUGGLING WITH WHAT IS HAPPENING IN OUR WORLD. ANY WORDS OF ENCOURAGEMENT?”
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Yes, Kimberly, try these:
God is not finished with us yet.
It’s easy to get discouraged when we are fed a constant stream of the most outlandish and outrageous things happening somewhere, anywhere, in our tired old world.
But everything that’s happening now has happened before, over and over again.
There was a gag in the Fifties that went like this:
They told me, “Cheer up, things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure enough . . . things got worse!
In times like these, I feather my own nest; I tend to my knitting; I weed my garden. These are all metaphors, Kimberly. I don’t actually do those particular activities.
The point is, I show up every day. I take people one by one. I try to respond to their needs as I can discern them—especially each person’s need to be treated with dignity and respect.
I hear folks’ concerns, but when those concerns are political—usually informed by media reports of matters far from our daily lives—I safeguard them in File 13 and redirect the conversation.
An old Chinese poem, perhaps the oldest extant Chinese poem, says:
I focus on the here-and-now and on my own responses, which ultimately are the only things within my control. Yes, I can control my own thoughts, words, and deeds.
Some may think me cold-blooded, but I simply do not get urges of the heart that compel me to act out of character. My heart, if I have one, is not that kind of heart.
Calm, philosophical detachment may be impossible if you have another kind of heart. If so, all I can say is you are in for a lot of woe that I have managed to avoid over the past eighty years.
Despite my distance from the flames of passion—or because of it—I am active, upbeat, and productive in my actual life. I meet each day with a certain zest, untroubled by a whole world of troubles, confident the sun will rise again tomorrow.
In a recent workshop, novelist Barbara M. Britton said, “What are your three favorite movies? What do they have in common? Those are apt to be the themes and topics you hold dearest as a writer.”
In the last analysis, It’s a Wonderful Life is all about home and family. Public Domain photo.
That impressed me, because it’s true.
How does it apply to Your New Favorite Writer? My three all-time favorites are sentimental Christmas movies.
I like many kinds of films. I’m tickled by screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby or The Gods Must Be Crazy. I like great political satires such as Romanov and Juliet, Dr. Strangelove, or The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming. I’m bolstered by writing, directing, and acting brilliance as displayed in Casablanca, Double Indemnity, The Third Man, or any film by the late, great Hitchcock.
But the three I would choose to answer Barbara’s question are: Meet Me In St. Louis, It’s a Wonderful Life, and We’re No Angels. The first is a cozy domestic drama, the second a stark morality play with an Everyman hero, and the third a blackish comedy in which the stock villain gets a hilarious comeuppance.
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So, what do these three flicks have in common? And what does that say about the subject matters and themes in my own writing?
“Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Judy Garland comforts Margaret O’Brien in Meet Me in St. Louis. Screen grab, fair use.
These films are old. Meet Me In St. Louis came out in 1944, It’s a Wonderful Life in 1946, and We’re No Angels in 1955. I like people and things that are my age. This backwards look is my brand, if I have a brand. The fiction I write tends to be historical. Most of the posts here relate, one way or another, to times past. I like to explore the days of yore because I think that all treasures worth having, all the secrets of life, reside there.
Why Christmas movies, in particular? I happen to be a Christian and attach theological meaning to Christmas. To me, it seems Christmas is when our Creator showed how much he cares for us by taking on all the burdens of our creaturehood. The birth of Jesus is the event that starts the reconciliation of God and man. That theme strikes a deep chord in my heart.
In these films, the characters—ordinary folks like you and me, not rich and powerful people—have their lives, their homes, and their families restored to how they should be. In a deep sense, this is a kind of homecoming.
One of the chief plot lines of literature is that of someone returning home. Odysseus, the Prodigal Son, E.T., Dorothy Gale—all are bound on homeward journeys. In the films I love most, the characters have not necessarily left home, but their homes are threatening to leave them.
The Smith family of St. Louis, the Baileys of Bedford Falls, and the Ducotel family in the French Caribbean colony of Cayenne all face crises in which their homes are about to disappear, leaving them suspended, as memoirist Dinty W. Moore might say, “between panic and desire.”
The purpose of the plot is to break open a new dispensation, a new state of affairs in which the characters can find their way home. A path is opened. In each case, this shifting paradigm of reality comes as a mental transformation.
Three of Santa’s helpers drop in on a distraught family, just in time for Christmas. Aldo Ray, Humphrey Bogare, and Peter Ustinov in We’re No Angels. Fair use.
In St. Louis, Alonzo Smith suddenly realizes that success is not counted in dollars or prestige, but in his family’s happiness. In Bedford Falls, George Bailey is awakened, through Divine Intervention, to the fact that all these years he has not been wasting his time in meaningless sacrifice but investing in the currency of abiding love. In Cayenne, the inward epiphany comes not to the family whose home is saved but to the trio of criminals who enact that salvation. It doesn’t seem to matter who has the revelation, as long as the audience gets to experience it.
So I guess the cat is out of the bag. I like stories that bring people home, bring them in from the cold, reunite families, and restore harmony in local communities.
In The Price of Passage, I wrote about people displaced from their homes—Norwegian immigrants and fugitive slaves. They prove Thomas Wolfe’s assertion that you can’t go home again. They are called to rise above their loss of home and create new spaces where they and their offspring will eventually find their harbor.
In Izzy Strikes Gold!, I focused on a 12-year-old boy being jolted from his comfort zone by family circumstances. Will Izzy have to leave home? If so, will he find a new home? Those are the dramatic questions addressed.
My current manuscript follows two brothers who can’t coexist at home with each other; their mutual resentment is too great. War intervenes and poses the question whether the brothers will ever be able to find each other again and re-establish their family relationship. I don’t know that answer because I haven’t read the book yet.
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What is the point of all this rumination? Simply to help me find and become more aware of the central themes in my writing. Ideas that reside close to the writer’s heart make for authenticity in his voice. So these are the kinds of things a guy likes to know.
See you next week, Dear Reader, when it will be about Something Completely Different.
Visit of the Wise Men, from an 1894 Sunday School lesson, by lithographers Harris, Jones & Co. of Providence. Public Domain.
Tomorrow will be Christmas Eve. On Thursday morning, as Santa’s sleighbells jingle away to the North, the Big Day itself will arrive.
This will be my eightieth Christmas on Earth.
The first few of those eighty are lost in the mists of time, permanently and perpetually outside my experience. But I recall clearly the next several after that. I remember times of gathering and feasts of togetherness.
After the workday—most folks used to put in a whole day on December 24—Mom and Dad piled us into the car and we drove in darkness over the hundred miles from the city of Streator to the little town of Knoxville on the Illinois prairie, to gather with family.
1936 Plymouth, from an old postcard. Fair use.
The car was a 1936 Plymouth or a 1939 Chevrolet—both of them relics from an old-time gangster movie—or, later, our first modern car, a 1954 Plymouth. I sat in the back seat with my sister Cynda. We all four sang Christmas carols all the way down the road. Over the river—both Illinois and Spoon—and near some woods but mostly through plateaus of snow-dusted corn stubble, to Grandmother’s house we went.
It was all about gathering. Being together.
The “-gether” part of “together” is really the same word as “gather.” From Old English gaderian, meaning to unite or join.
We gathered together with Grandma and Grandpa, with Uncle Dick and Aunt Jane and Cousin Rick, with Uncle Garrett and Aunt Edith and Cousins Steve and Betsy, with Aunt Jo and Uncle Earl, with Aunt Jean and her boyfriend Richard Henderson, with Aunt Sue and Aunt Linda; with Grandma’s sister Aunt Bertha and her husband Uncle Harry Young; with Dad’s parents, my Grandma and Grandpa Sommers, who had no other children left in the Midwest and so joined the LaFollette mélange; and sometimes we would even see Grandma LaFollette’s brother Uncle Roy Dredge and his wife, Aunt Eva.
Eighteen of us including the unpictured photographer, who is probably Aunt Bertha, plus General George C. Marshall on the cover of Life to prove it’s Christmas 1950. Your New Favorite Writer is the boy at lower left, chin on hands.
That made twenty to twenty-five of us all celebrating Christmas in Grandma’s house. Gathered. Together. And the best part was: we all knew each other. We knew one another very well. We were kin. There’s hardly a better way of understanding love than gathering at Christmas.
“Fear not,” says the prophet Isaiah, “for I am with thee: I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west; I will say to the north, Give up; and to the south, Keep not back: bring my sons from far, and my daughters from the ends of the earth; even every one that is called by my name: for I have created him for my glory, I have formed him; yea, I have made him.”
It’s a grand vision of gathering together, members of one tribe, one kindred.
That’s what we did on those long-ago Christmases. Our tribe came together, at least those of us who could. We came from east and west and north and south and called one another by name.
I did not know this fact at the time, but I know it now: It was not the toys that mattered most, nor the turkey and dressing and pie and cake. It was the coming together of the people. The spindly tree, illuminated by strings of gaudy colored lights over which Uncle Dick and Uncle Garrett and Uncle Earl had slaved for hours on the living room floor getting all the bulbs to light up at once, was the totem pole, the magnet that gathered the kin.
Rice pudding with lingonberries. Fair use.
In my wife’s family it was much the same, only with a Swedish accent, because her mother’s folk were all Swedes, first- and second-generation Swedish Americans. So they had warm glögg with almonds and raisins in the bottoms of the cups; rice pudding with lingonberries; meatballs and gravy; limpa rye bread and dopp-i-gryta, the dipping of bread in fatty broth. But mostly with them, it was the people coming together, even if they were all Swedes except my wife’s father, who was Norsk.
The decades bring forth change. Families are smaller now. Folks tend to be more spread out, east and west, north and south. In our house this Christmas we will have Jo and me, my sister Cynda and her husband Steve, our daughter Katie and her children Elsie and Tristan (teenagers!). Plus Katie’s friend Valerie. Eight, all told. Still, it’s a coming together, a gathering.
Most of us will attend our church’s Christmas Eve service. It’s a Congregational church, meaning the local congregation governs itself autonomously. Such a church is said to be a gathered church, that is, one formed by a process of kindred souls simply gathering together. And indeed it’s more like a family than like a formal institution. We’ll read the Scriptures and sing the carols and burn up a few candles in the process. But the main thing is, we’ll gather together.
We have within us the seeds of hate and the seeds of love. When we gather together around the Christmas tree or the communion table, we nurture the seeds of love and starve the other ones.
Two greatly different realities are available to us in this world. I prefer the gathered one.
May you gather this season with whomever you have to gather with. And treasure the time, the place, and the gathering. It’s the best Christmas gift.
For decades, she flew flatwise across the vertical top of our yearly Christmas tree—be it pine, balsam, or spruce.
Some people place a star on their tree—to represent the Star of Bethlehem, I suppose. Others place an angel. Most of the angels, like the stars, are built in vertical format, the better to occupy the top of the tree, which is usually a single evergreen spear, jutting toward the ceiling.
But our poor little angel, I’ve never known her name, was made in such a way she could only lie horizontally. We hung her from the vertical top branch, but she lay sprawled across its middle, resisting all upward tendency.
There is something to be said for the horizontal. When Your New Favorite Writer studied the photographic arts, he learned that horizontal lines and shapes suggest calm, tranquility, rest, repose. If you want to show strength, go for the vertical. For drama, diagonal lines and swirly shapes are great. But horizontal composition speaks of peace.
We stopped buying cut trees at some point a few years ago—maybe the forty-dollar point. Instead, we trimmed our potted Norfolk Island pine for Christmas.
The Norfolk pine lives outdoors in spring, summer, and fall. At the end of all that warmth, we huff and puff and carry the big tub with its delicate little tree indoors. Originating on Norfolk Island, it would never survive a Wisconsin winter.
Norfolk Island, in case you’re wondering, is nowhere near the same-named city in the Tidewater region of Virginia. Rather, it’s an external territory of Australia, located in the Pacific Ocean between New Zealand and New Caledonia. Its namesake pine, Araucaria heterophylla in case you’re interested, is not a true pine but a closer relative of the hoop pine and the monkey-puzzle tree. In other words, a subtropical specimen.
It’s a pretty, willowy plant with short-bristled branches that droop as they get longer. You can’t hang heavy ornaments on it, or the branches will droop more than they already do.
Our little angel, a real lightweight, qualifies for the top of the Norfolk pine. We used to hang her on the upward-pointing spear, just as we did with our cut trees in prior years.
This year, however, is different. The Norfolk pine grew too tall to be brought in through the door. My wife, anticipating this problem, cut off its top in the spring. The little tree, in a touching burst of cooperation, grew replacement branches horizontally. So now, instead of a vertical spike on top, we have a horizontal bed of interlocking branches.
Just the right place for our little angel’s true vocation, which rhymes with fiesta.
Something about that seems to fit the peace message of the season.
Sleep well, sweet angel; and flights of pine boughs loft thee to thy rest.
Detail from Rembrandt, The Night Watch, 1642. Public Domain.
. . . Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. . . .
—Shakespeare, “The Seven Ages of Man” from As You Like It
Young men with beards think they can fix everything for us.
Not long ago, clean-shaven young men thought they could fix everything for us.
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Well, STOP THE PRESSES, Dear Reader, because I’ve got a news bulletin: Everything is not fixed.
They’ve worked at it and worked at it and fought fiercely for their constituents and—guess what?—the only part they left out was the fixing of everything.
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Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be endured.
As to those things that can be fixed, we’ve mostly got to do it ourselves.
To imagine that politicians will fix everything—or would, if not thwarted by opposing, evil, politicians—is arrestingly naïve.
If politicians solved more problems than they create, we’d run out of problems.
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Of course we must have politicians, to divide the spoils among us and administer our public institutions. But Politics holds no key to a New Jerusalem where streets are paved in gold and teardrops never fall.
Here’s the fact of it: We are all in this together, Dear Friend: All broken, jumbled, confused creatures muddling our way through swamps of untoward circumstance.
Swamps of untoward circumstance . . . Paul Klee, The Man of Confusion, 1939. Public Domain.
Each of us gets one life, and it’s altogether imperfect. We are mixed creatures. Our lives are spotted, blotted, their meanings and messages obscure.
Perhaps God could have made us perfect—but at what cost to our souls?
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Beware the temper that looks to some hero to come along and straighten it all out.
Making idols of the prominent, or of the adamant, leads us to loathe our neighbors. Hatred and suspicion of those we live with is the worst form of hell on earth.
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It might be better just to relax.
Resolve to enjoy what life throws at you, pain and pleasure together, weal and woe alike. Do what good you can, when you can. Forgive others. Forgive yourself.
This—right here, right now—is your chance to witness the grand spectacle of human existence from a front-row seat, and it will be over before you know it.
. . . I would put this in verse. Or if I were Shakespeare, I would write it in blank verse and make it comical, tragical, or historical. But I’m not Robert Frost, and I’m certainly not William Shakespeare, so here it is, and you’ll just have to imagine it’s poetic and comical, tragical, or historical:
(Written in Late October)
My dog took me out for a walk around the block on a sunny, windy day with gold leaves flying through the bright blue sky.
The question was in some doubt, as our glorious summer has been hanging on irrationally long. But today, it’s football weather, gorgeous weather, and one feels the stirring of one’s blood as locust and birch betray their year’s-end destinies.
Every year it’s easier to see the autumn as a metaphor for my time of life.
This year I am eighty. It has only now dawned on me that when my time comes, there will be no protocol or ceremony. I’ll just leave. All that pertains to me will dry up and blow away in an instant. I may live on in memories for a few years or decades, but that’s all.
It means I’m radically free.
Suppose I were busy assembling an empire, and only Tierra del Fuego remained beyond my grasp. Should I die with that region unmastered, or should I manage to complete my world first—no matter. When you’re gone, everything and everyone else keeps going.
That’s how it is. Life is change.
Whatever is important, all I can do is enjoy it now.
My life is equal parts pleasure and delight. There is little of pain or even mild discomfort, so far. I am content, and Fooboo is pleased to drag me around the block.
Tom Huggler’s The Woman She Left Behind is exactly what historical fiction ought to be. A mature novel for the intelligent reader. It’s a powerful story of human desires and connections in a historical setting that’s rendered with loving attention to small details as well as the overall feel of the era. So you read it because you care what happens to the characters, and the history lesson is a valuable added bonus.
It’s early 1862, a critical time in the western theater of the American Civil War. Widowed farm woman Rachel Barnum of south central Michigan gets a telegram that her elder son, Dwight, is ill and languishing in a Union Army hospital camp after fighting at New Madrid, Missouri. Alone, in the sketchy weather of early spring, she sets out in her farm wagon behind a pair of draft horses, headed for Cairo, Illinois—the nearest Army installation to her son’s location.
Her trusted hired man, John Welch, pleads with her not to go: let him, an experienced man, make the trip on her behalf. But Rachel is determined to bring her firstborn, who may be dying, everything a mother’s care can do. She leaves her younger son and two teenage daughters in Welch’s care. A woman alone, driving into a battle zone, she faces bad roads, rudimentary accommodations, uncertain riverboats, and the hazards of war.
Readers will understand the urgency of Rachel’s quest and sympathize with her struggles. Huggler’s sure-handed narrative follows Rachel through frustrating delays and maddening obstructions as she seeks her wounded son.
The story is a fictional interpretation of a very real journey by an actual Michigander named Rachel Barnum. At the end of the fictional narrative is a long, informative author’s note in which Huggler tells about the process of researching Rachel’s story and converting it to a novel. Huggler tells of his own 21st-century journey across the same landscape Rachel traversed more than 150 years ago. It’s a great piece of travel writing appended to a wonderful historical novel. The author’s note alone is worth the price of the book.
Huggler
Tom Huggler is a seasoned writer of nonfiction, former president of the Outdoor Writers Association of America, with many books and articles in the woodsy vein to his credit. His first book was a conservation novel for young readers, and now after a long career he returns to fiction with Rachel’s story.
It’s a story everyone should read, a great Christmas gift for any historical fiction reader you may know. Highly recommended by Your New Favorite Writer.
Being the second part of a seven-part series based on Your New Favorite Writer’s recent WWA workshop “A Bulletproof Beginning: Five Ways to Anchor Your Story in Urgency from Word One.”
As mentioned last week, I can’t tell you how to write a great beginning. But here are FIVE BIG IDEAS—three Dos and two Donts—that ought to help quite a bit:
Engage the reader immediately.
Do not drown the reader in information.
Introduce important characters and plots early.
Do not let INFORMATION bog down the profluence of the narrative.
Shape early action toward later plot points.
This week, let’s look at the first Big Idea: Engage the reader immediately.
Engagement
Sometimes the very first sentence is memorable and therefore remarkable.
Marley was dead: to begin with. —A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
It was love at first sight. —Catch-22, by Joesph Heller
Call me Ishmael. —Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
More commonly, the first sentence is simply the most direct way to start a brief passage, perhaps a page or two, that leads us into a compelling story.
It used to be common practice to start a story slowly and indirectly. Thus, Miguel de Cervantes:
Picasso’s 1955 rendering of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
In a village in la Mancha, whose name I do not care to remember, an hidalgo lived not long ago, one of those who keeps a lance on the rack, an old leather shield, skinny nag and swift greyhound. An occasional stew, beef more often than lamb, hash most nights, eggs and rashers of bacon on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, some squab added on Sundays—these consumed three-fourths of his income. The rest went for a light woolen tunic and velvet breeches and hose of the same material for feast days, while weekdays were honored with dun-colored coarse cloth. . . .
Leisurely, you might say.
Booth Tarkington
Or how about this opening, from Booth Tarkington’s Penrod, a popular middle-grade novel in the Misty Eons, when Your New Favorite Writer was a lad:
Version 1.0.0
Penrod sat morosely upon the back fence and gazed with envy at Duke, his wistful dog.
A bitter soul dominated the various curved and angular surfaces known by a careless world as the face of Penrod Schofield. Except in solitude, that face was almost always cryptic and emotionless; for Penrod had come into his twelfth year wearing an expression carefully trained to be inscrutable. Since the world was sure to misunderstand everything, mere defensive instinct prompted him . . . .
This kind of opening has gone out of fashion, under the dual impetus of cinematic experiences and the mad pace of modern society.
Lucy Sanna
These days, the Done Thing is to start in medias res. In plain English, start in the middle of things. For example:
The rain came again, harder this time. Charlotte pulled her knit hat tight, pushed up the collar of her gray wool coat, and stared through the chicken wire at the rabbits. Kate’s prize rabbits.
She entered the pen and chose a plump one, furry and warm in her cold hands. Its heart thumped like a tiny sewing machine. Charlotte brought it into the dim barn and stroked its fur until it calmed, trusting. She hesitated a moment—stealing from my own daughter—then picked up the butcher knife.
When she cut the jugular, the sewing machine stopped. . . . —from The Cherry Harvest, by Lucy Sanna
By adopting a deep third-person limited viewpoint and starting the story in the middle of traumatic action, the author engages the reader at a visceral level while also sketching salient traits of the main character—who is, in this case, both cold-blooded and conscience-stricken at the same time.
The technique of starting in medias res may even be used to involve the audience in action that is no part of the story—as in the James Bond film Goldfinger. The initial sequence, with Bond electrocuting an antagonist in a bathtub, has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. Doesn’t matter: The audience is still recovering from the unseemly frying when we cut to a cool and collected Bond entering the office and flirting with Miss Moneypenny.
Alternative Methods
There’s no actual Law, Dear Reader, that says you have to start your story in medias res. I do recommend, however, that you start in medias somethingus. For example, here is the way British author J.R.R. Tolkien began his fantasy classic The Hobbit:
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat; it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with paneled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats—the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill—The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it – and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were all on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden, and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.
This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses had lived in the neighbourhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him. This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours’ respect, but he gained—well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.
J.R.R. Tolkien, ca. 1925.
This is masterful technique. Bear in mind, Gentle Reader, that in 1937, when Tolkien sprung this book on an unsuspecting world, nobody had ever heard of a hobbit. It was a brand-new concept.
In fact, most of his readers probably bought the book because the title intrigued them and they wanted to find out what a hobbit was.
So, in his first sentence, Tolkien mentions both a hole in the ground and a hobbit. And then, in the second sentence, he begins to tell the reader about the hole!
“No, no, Mister author! Tell us about the hobbit! We want to know about the hobbit. Never mind the hole.”
But Tolkien procoeeds unperturbed through a long paragraph about the arrangement, layout, and furnishings of the hole. At last he moves on to a little trove of information about hobbits in general, and about the family to which this particular hobbit belongs. And little by little, we find out all we need to know about the hobbit: He is risk-averse, and he’s about to have an adventure.
At this point, Gracious Reader, what choice do you have but to read the rest of the book?
The Hook
It’s what we sometimes call a hook. The hook is that we know Bilbo Baggins is constitutionally averse to adventure, yet the author assures us he is about to have an adventure, like it or not. And the author goes one step further, challenging us to figure out whether the hobbit “gained anything in the end.”
A reader would have to be made of stone to resist that hook.
The hook in the prior example, Wisconsin author Lucy Sanna’s brilliant historical novel The Cherry Harvest, is somewhat different. We are drawn into Charlotte’s world in a very close and compelling way. We experience with her the slaying of a rabbit, along with the guilt that accompanies it. We understand, through the author’s skill at narration, that Charlotte has been forced into this dire situation. The rest of the novel is about the larger situation Charlotte faces and how she handles it.
A Whiff of Death
Besides the general advice to begin in medias res or in medias somethingus, I have one other little suggestion for engaging the reader immediately: Contrive to place a whiff of death somewhere on the first or second page.
Why is that a good idea? We would rather read a story with life-or-death consequences than one with less serious outcomes. We not only need, as Donald Maass suggests, “conflict on every page”; that conflict must have high stakes. Life or death. Nothing less. Otherwise, why are we reading this book?
It may be that the chronology of your story does not allow for an actual death, or even a close brush with death, in the first pages. Never mind. It is enough to include a sentence or phrase that reminds the reader there is such a thing as death. That will be enough.
Lucy Sanna in The Cherry Harvest shows us the actual death of a small animal, foreshadowing very real risks of human death for the human characters in the novel. In Tolkien’s case, it does not suit his purpose to have a death occur in the first pages. But he does use the word “adventure,” which is a code word for “serious risk of death.”
That’s enough. Just something, that’s all you need.
Next week: How to avoid drowning the reader in information.
Last Friday, I had the good fortune to present a workshop titled “A Bulletproof Beginning: Five Ways to Anchor Your Story in Urgency from Word One” at the annual Wisconsin Writers Association Conference, held in Stevens Point.
I say “good fortune” for several reasons:
I got paid.
I heard the sound of my own voice—sweet music to my ears, indeed.
Most of all, I was with 175 friends of the Writing Persuasion—folks who have an itch they can scratch only by setting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard. These friends understand one another’s need. About sixty of the 175 attended my breakout session.
Some of my good friends relaxing just before my workshop last Friday.
A lot of people have told me they got something good out of it.
So, why keep it to myself? For readers who did not have the opportunity to attend, I will try to encapsulate a 50-minute talk in the next seven weekly blog posts.
Here goes:
A Bulletproof Beginning
What’s the big deal about a beginning? Why the fuss?
Aristotle, right, argues with Plato (strongly resembling Leonardo da Vinci) in this detail from “The School of Athens” by Renaissance painter Raphael (1483-1520). Public Domain.
Dear Reader, a philosopher named Aristotle said, about 2,400 years ago, that every story has a beginning . . . a middle . . . and an end. That may seem obvious, but apparently nobody before Aristotle thought to write it down.
And nobody since Aristotle has gone much beyond that simple observation in explaining story structure. If you want to hassle me about Joseph Campbell’s/ Christopher Vogler’s Twelve Stages of the Hero’s Journey, or about Blake Snyder’s Fifteen-Beat “Save the Cat” structure—sure, let’s have that argument someday. But in the meantime, consider:
Of the three parts of a story, the beginning is most important. Why?
Because if your beginning is no good, no reader will experience the joys of the middle and end. They won’t stick around.
More so, if the reader is an agent, editor, or publisher considering your story for publication or film production. Typically, such mandarins want the first ten pages included with a cold query. But that does not mean they will read ten pages.
No. They will read maybe one page. Or maybe just the first paragraph. And if that doesn’t knock their socks off, they’re done. They have a lot of scripts to read. You must earn your way to the second and subsequent pages.
Most of all, the beginning is important because it establishes the conditions under which the rest of the story plays out. The break into Act II, the many twists and turns thereafter, the great change of color and tenor at mid-point, the swiftening action as you move into Act III, the exciting climax and final denouement—all are present in embryo in the beginning of the story. If they’re not, it won’t work.
Studio publicity photo of Billy Wilder and Gloria Swanson on the set of Sunset Boulevard, ca. 1950. Public Domain.
Billy Wilder—the great German-American film genius responsible for Ninotchka,Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, Some Like it Hot, and many other classic movies, said, “If you have a problem in the third act, your real problem is in the first act.” If you go back and fix the first act, the third act will work better.
By the way, Gentle Reader, did you ever notice how many lectures, workshops, or articles about story construction for prose fiction rely heavily on movies for their examples? Here’s the reason: Owing to the format and function of film scripts, the screenwriter has nowhere to hide from the need for STRUCTURE.
A seasoned scripter can sit in a darkened movie house, discern the arrival of the Great Change at Midpoint, look at his watch, see that 58 minutes have elapsed, and predict—with dead accuracy—that the film’s total run time will be 116 minutes. It’s really that cut and dried. It’s all about structure.
The beginning is the first great pillar of structure in any story, filmic or otherwise. That’s why it’s important.
As I told my friendly audience last Friday, I cannot tell you how to write a good beginning. It’s your story, you figure it out.
But here are FIVE BIG IDEAS—three Dos and two Donts—that ought to help quite a bit:
Engage the reader immediately.
Do not drown the reader in information.
Introduce important characters and plots early.
Do not let INFORMATION bog down the profluence of the narrative.
Shape early action toward later plot points.
Now, Dear Reader, go ponder these things in your heart. Come back at this time next week, and we will consider Point 1: How to engage the reader immediately.
Does a writer spring full-bodied from the brow of Zeus, like Athena? Does a writer rise painfully from the sawdust of the arena floor, like Eric Hoffer?
Are writers born, or made?
These things have been on my mind lately, perhaps because the Fall Conference of the Wisconsin Writers Association is about to convene in Stevens Point. I am on the program, offering a workshop modestly titled “A Bulletproof Beginning: Five Ways to Anchor Your Story in Urgency from Page One.” I sure hope I know what I’m talking about.
But who are these people I’ll be meeting with? Folks a lot like me, only as different as different can be. You see, we all have our separate concerns and urgencies.
I write about Norwegians, Greg Renz writes about firefighters, Bob Allen writes about fish, and Deb Farris writes about the promptings of the Spirit in the workings of her life.
So you see, we are all the same.
All I know is, writers write.
Louisa May Alcott, the real-life model for Jo March. Public Domain.
We are those who write because we cannot not write.
Some, like Jo March and John-Boy Walton, scribble in notebooks from early childhood and sell their first work as teenagers. Others rumble quietly like dormant volcanoes, then erupt without warning in middle age.
John-Boy with pen in hand. Public Domain.
My friend Greg Renz waited till retirement to novelize the experiences he had been processing over twenty-eight years as a Milwaukee firefighter. In those years, he told some of his stories informally on more than one occasion.
I doubt anybody becomes a writer without a prelude of some kind. What warming-up exercises did Homer go through before composing twenty-seven thousand lines of dactyllic hexameter known as the Iliad and the Odyssey?
A Writer’s Odyssey
I, Your New Favorite Writer, set off on the yellow brick road of Literary Lionhood at age seventy. Notions long marinated in quaint bottles on the dusty shelves of my psyche spilled forth in written words, abruptly made manifest to all the world.
Like Jo, John-Boy, Homer, and Greg, I did not come to this calling completely cold. There was a detective story at the age of eight; a comic strip starring me as a cowboy, complete with sidekick, fighting bad guys; a seventh-grade essay on traffic safety, which won me a $25 savings bond—the first time I was paid for writing; plus news stories and feature articles for my high school paper.
In college, I became a radio thing. In the Air Force, I listened in on Chairman Mao’s flyboys and wrote down what they said—sometimes, even, wrote down what they meant to say.
Back in civilian life, after years of muddled career launches, I managed to burrow into the Wisconsin Department of Military Affairs. This is the agency that oversees the state’s National Guard and its Emergency Management division. There, I served the adjutant general as a photographer, writer, and editor.
When it came time to retire—and I was all for retirement—I still wanted to write. Some guys settle down to a life of golf or fishing or public service. I settled down to a last desperate effort to say what was on my mind.
I realized the truths I wanted to tell could best be told by fiction. Some say truth is stranger than fiction, but I think truth is the subject matter of fiction. There is no point in making up a story if it does not express what’s at the heart of the human experience.
I found out it’s not all that easy. I’m still working on it.
I’ve been working on it full time for almost ten years now. In that time, what have I learned?
I have learned you are more likely to be struck by lightning than to make any real money as a novelist. John Steinbeck said, “The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.” This seems a considerable understatement.
I have learned the Protagonist must protag.
I have learned that no matter what it is you ought to be writing, what you will write is what you are damned well determined to write, and that’s all there is to it.
Along the way, I have assembled enough words in a sufficiently plausible order to get two novels published—with the backing of actual, professional publishers—and am well along on the initial assemblage of words for a third.
These marvels of modern literary science to not fly off the shelves and into the cash register of their own accord. Oh, no, Dear Reader: Each copy must be individually sold by the author in the flesh, at a bookstore or an arts and crafts fair. A few people might purchase them on the Internet, but those people are exceptions.
Go on, be an exception: Buy my books.
But whether you buy them or not, rest assured I will go on writing them.
