Being the third 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.”
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 second Big Idea: Do not drown the reader in information.
The Urge to Explain
We are goaded by the urge to explain. It shows plainly in the writings of neophytes. Seasoned writers control the urge. At least, they’d better.
Here’s the problem in a nutshell: The reader must have information in order to understand the story. But we, the writer, have a devil of a time figuring out just which information is really needed. To include anything else hinders the narrative art.
We don’t trust ourselves. We so fear not being understood that we pour all our energies into pre-writing. We write down everything we think the reader might wish to know before we unleash the actual story.
Dear Reader, this is just backwards from how things should be. The reader does not need to know much—at least, not before you’ve given him or her cause to care what happens.
You must provide information, but if you give too much, too soon, or the wrong kind of information, you stop the story in its tracks. You create a snag.
Confusion
Let’s start with confusion, the easiest kind of snag to create. We don’t even have to try to do this; it happens automatically. This is not the result of giving too much information but of giving the wrong kind of information, or phrasing it in the wrong way.
Back when Your New Favorite Author wrote a lot of press releases, his boss used to say: “It’s not enough to write it so they can understand it. We must write it in such a way that nobody could possibly misunderstand it.”
That’s the requirement. But it’s easier said than done. The confusion we create by misguided diction and inappropriate syntax is invisible to us, the writer. We know what we meant. How can anyone take it any other way?
We lack the imagination to spot the ambiguity in our own words.
There seems only one cure: Get someone else’s eyes on it, preferably more than one set of eyes. It’s a good idea to join a mutual critique group that meets regularly. Members read one another’s work and comment on it. Part of the value is artistic advice. Part of it is simply the fact that one’s colleagues may be completely baffled by what one thought one said. Only when your peers display their confusion do the scales fall from your eyes.
If you want to write well but do not yet belong to such a group, seek out one you can join. The Wisconsin Writers Association posts a handy list of about 58 such groups, all over the state. If none of those work for you, start a group yourself.
Over the Top
The other problem is that we provide too much information, too soon. We strive to put the reader fully in the picture before the story ever begins.
Consider your mental state when reading an encyclopedia article versus your mental state in the midst of a harrowing ordeal.
Reading a purely informative article, you seek a comprehensive bird’s-eye view of the subject. You’re in academic mode. You want to know the width and breadth of the matter—all the ifs, ands, and buts. You want to master it from above, from afar. You seek a scholar’s distanced appreciation of the thing.
In a life-threatening situation that requires split-second decisions and swift, unreserved commitment to a course of action, you are not given all the information. You focus on what you must do to survive.
The reader entering the world of a story needs to identify with a lead character and feel the action of the story as if from inside. Give the reader just enough information to get from page one to page two.
You can fill in a few details later, but never at the expense of immersion in the story.
Especially at the beginning, do not burden the reader with an information dump. There’s no point knowing that John is devilishly handsome or that all his money was inherited from a scoundrel grandfather until you have seen John in action and decided he’s worth following.
The narrator’s art consists as much in withholding information as in giving it.
An Example
Consider this opening, from my novel The Price of Passage: From Norway to America, From Slavery to Freedom:
Norway
February 1853
Anders Gunstensen jumped up from his straw pallet, struck a match, and re-lit the oil lamp. What was the time now? How soon could he start for North America?
He teased open the gold case of the watch Grandfather had given him.
At that moment Uncle Torgus burst into the barn with a great bang of the door. “Anders, you oaf—wasting my lamp oil in the middle of the night!” The old man swayed left and right. He smelled of hard spirits.
The cattle, accustomed to Torgus’s rages, neither lowed nor bellowed.
You may or may not like this opening. You may or may not want to read what happens after Uncle Torgus enters the barn and challenges Anders.
But now consider this alternative opening, Dear Reader, from an earlier draft:
Norway—February 1853
Second sons were always out of luck.
Anders, though born in the caul, was still only a second son. So when the Crown increased Øiestad’s school from one to two teachers, the new teaching job went, as if by Divine Right, to the firstborn son of the schoolmaster. Thus Gunder, not Anders, had become Father’s assistant teacher—simply by virtue of having arrived earlier.
Father, too, had been second son in his family. That was why the farm had gone to Uncle Torgus, the firstborn, and not to him. Father was happier as a teacher than he would have been as a farmer, but poorer. “I had to find my own way in the world,” he said to Anders, “and you had better make up your mind to do so as well.”
Anders had gone, hat in hand, to Uncle Torgus and begged tuition money for the agricultural college at Holm. In exchange, he bound himself to a seven-year indenture. It was a brilliant arrangement: Anders would get an education and Uncle Torgus would get seven years’ skilled service from a college-trained agriculturist.
This kind of opening gives the reader a lot more information, information about Anders and his place in the world. But it does not give us Anders.
The virtue of the other opening, the one we actually kept, is that it shows Anders wanting and hoping something, starting some kind of action related to that desire, and meeting a potential obstacle. The very next thing that you’re going to read is what Anders does to overcome that obstacle. Don’t you want to turn the page and find that out?
There is no point knowing who Uncle Torgus is, and how he came to be an obstacle to Anders, until Anders is acting out his story
All of those details about Anders’s birth and family and background eventually find their way into the narrative, but only in places where they do not interrupt the unfolding of the action.
In a novel, there are plenty of words available to deliver needed information. So postpone each datum’s delivery until you reach the place where it is needed for understanding, or where it will have the greatest dramatic impact. When in doubt, put it off.
Front-loading exposition, even necessary exposition, creates an academic feel, a stance of distant observation.
By plunging into action and dialog, you get the reader up close and personal with the characters. People—represented in fiction by characters—are much more interesting than dry facts, and the reader’s interest in the characters, interest generated by their actions and speeches, will prepare the reader for additional information when you at last see fit to provide it.
Next week: Introduce important characters and plots early.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
