Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes, #5

Don't Warm Up Your Engines



Often, when I start to read a story written by an inexperienced writer, I am reminded of those cold winter mornings long ago in Ohio when I sat miserably beside my father in the old buick, in the dark garage, waiting for the engine to warm up before driving away from home.

In those days it was considered good form to warm your engine before driving the car. Multiviscosity engine oil was far in the future, and the theory was that hte motor should idle a while under no strain while the heat of ignition warmed the oil so it could circulate more freely, providing better lubrication.

Those days are long gone. But, amazingly, fiction writers still do the same kind of unnecesasry and wasteful thing in starting their stories.



"Why, " I may ask them, "have you started your story with this long static description of a town (or a house, or a street, or a country scene)?"

"Well,"the beginning writer will reply, puzzled, "I need to set up where the story is going to take place."


Or I may be forced to ask, "Why have you started this story by giving me background information about things that happened months (or even years) ago?"

"Well," the poor neophyte will say, "I wanted the reader to know all that before starting the story."



Such static or backward-looking approaches to fiction are probably lethal in a novel, and are certainly fatal in modern short story. Readers today -and that of course includes editors who will buy or reject your work- are more impatient than ever before. They will not abide a story that begins with the author warming up his engines. If a setting needs to be described, it can be described later, after you have gotten the story started. If background must be given the reader, it can be given later, after you have intrigued him with the present action of the story.

Don't warm up your engines. Start the story with the first sentence!

How do you do that? By recognizing three facts:


1. Any time you stop to describe something, you have stopped. Asking a reader to jump eagerly into a story that starts without motion is like asking a cyclist to ride a bike with no wheels -he pedals and pedals but doesn't get anywhere. Description is vital in fiction, but at the outset of a story, it's deadly.

2. Fiction looks forward, not backward. When you start a story with background information, you point the reader in the wrong direction, and put her off. If she had wanted old news, she would have read yesterday's newspaper.

3. Good fiction starts with -and deals with- someone's response to threat.



As human beings it is our nature to be fascinated by threat. Start your story with a mountain climber hanging from a cliff by his fingernails, and I guarantee that the reader will read a bit further to see what happens next.

It stands to reason, then, that you should not warm up your engines at the outset. You should start the action. What kind of action? Threat -and a response to it.

Better minds than I have pointed out that we human beings like to feel in harmony with our environment and our situation in life. Each of us carries inside a view of ourselves, our life, and the kind of person we are. When things are going well, we feel in harmony with everything and everyone around us, and we aren't threatened. But enter change -almost any change- and our world has been shaken up. We feel uneasy.

Threatened.

Nothing is more threatening than change.

From this is stands to reason that you will know where to start your story -when you identify the moment of change. Change is where the story starts.

To begin in any other way is to invite disaster:

• Open earlier, with background, and it's dull.

• Open by looking somewhere else in the story, and it's irrelevant.

• Open long after the change, and it's confusing.

Begin your story now. Move it forward now. All that background is an author concern. Reader's don't care. They don't want it. The reader's concern is with change ...threat... how a character will repsond now.

Remember what the reader wants. Don't try to inflict your author concerns on her. You must give her what she wants at the start, or she'll never read and further.

And what she wants -what will hook her into reading on- is threat. The most common variety of which is change.


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes, #1

Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes, #2

Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes, #3

Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes, #4

Not at all sure I agree with this one.

It almost sounds like the writer thinks the story must start with the climax. But isn't that where the story usually ends?

I do agree starting with description might kill a story, but not always. One of my better stories (by votes and score) started off with a description of the main character.

My best, come to think of it, pretty much started with a description of the house much of the main action was set in.

Shrugs. If something works I'll use it. If not, I won't.

Yeah, Rob, I'm not sure what to think either.


On one hand he has a point about avoiding the warm up, especially in short fiction. On the other hand, as you point out, starting with the climax will make for a short piece of erotica.


I do think it's important to have a good "hook", which might be what he's trying to say. Sometimes that hook can be a particularly crafty description. But for me, if I'm browsing a book store and pick up a book, read the first paragraph or two, and all it talks about is how beautifully decorated the living room is, I'm most likely not going to read further. Give me some action. A hook. Something to pull me in because my curiosity is dangerous; use it against me.

I'm a firm believer in a strong opening line. I don't feel like I could do that in giving a background description. Maybe a character description under the right circumstances. There is plenty of time later for that, though. I don't think the writer was insinuating starting with the climax, just starting where the story really begins. As a reader, I don't care about the wainscotting, the floral print, the creek outback, etc., unless it has something to do with the story and is just not setting.

I feel like I have to hook the reader with the opening line. Then give a little more story to carry their interest. Then, if it is needed, describe the details of the setting. The coolest ting about fiction is that every reader imbues it in their own mind. If the details of what the house looks like isn't important for another purpose in the story, let the reader build their own house.

I am reading a book right now that I had almost given up as a write off. it is stephen king and peter straub's Black House. it starts off with about 50 pages of third person description. Drove me nuts
now that I Am past that, I am enjoying the book immensely.

I think I disagree with this one as well. While it's important to have an attention-getting opener, I think a strong description or background can be very helpful in a novel if and only if it's going to be a vital part of the story later on.

...or maybe I just read too much Anne Rice. That is one long-winded lady when it comes to description.

Always grab the reader by the throat in the first paragraph, sink your thumbs into his wind pipe in the second, and hold him against the wall until the tag line.
-Paul O'Neil

I prefer background as a spice rather than an appetizer.

I agree with this one. History lessons are so boring. I didn't see where it said start with the climax; I saw start with the threat. If I don't sense conflict within the first few paragraphs of a short story, I rarely continue reading.

Fwiw, I don't bother to warm up my car's engine either.

Take Care,
Penny

What? This is like sex without foreplay!

I believe that some background is required so that the reader can understand the motivation of the characters involved. Just as in comedy, a good joke needs a good set-up or the audience won't get the punch line. My philosophy in erotic writing is that you are taking your readers on a sexual adventure, and that a certain amount of foreplay (i.e. background, set-up, motivation, whatever you choose to call it) is called for. To loosely quote John Cleese from "Monty Python's The Meaning of Life", where he played the part of a sex education teacher---
"Oh, so we're diving right for the clitoris, are we? What's wrong with kissing first?"

P.s.

By the way, I am a big Stephen King fan. Maybe that's part of my problem.

nushu2 said:

I prefer background as a spice rather than an appetizer.

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I agree. To wonder what the hell is happening, why people act the way they do and so on, and as a story goes on, slowly getting pieces of the past fed to me by relevant references, is a kind of storytelling that I always enjoy reading. One or two papragraphs of scenery setting, then I want a character and some action.

HenryDelta said:

I believe that some background is required so that the reader can understand the motivation of the characters involved. Just as in comedy, a good joke needs a good set-up or the audience won't get the punch line. My philosophy in erotic writing is that you are taking your readers on a sexual adventure, and that a certain amount of foreplay (i.e. background, set-up, motivation, whatever you choose to call it) is called for. To loosely quote John Cleese from "Monty Python's The Meaning of Life", where he played the part of a sex education teacher---
"Oh, so we're diving right for the clitoris, are we? What's wrong with kissing first?"

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Agreed on the need for background in general (and excellent Python quotage as well), but I think it's better to keep background out of the opening passage. Unless it's moving the story, or making your character insanely interesting, then it belongs in the second chapter/passage, after you've hooked the reader.

Not sayin you should start with the gunshot, but, to paraphrase Stephen King, the reader needs to know where your characters have been before the story started, but you don't need to bore them with it.

The Earl

PS. Welcome to the board. Good first post.

Bougainvillea

I would like to go on record as saying that I'm fairly certain we don't one more description of bougainvillea. Every writer has taken a sojourn to moderately tropical climes will wax on for pages about the bougainvillea, often without a timely and appropriate corresponding wax off.

McKenna said:

Remember what the reader wants. Don't try to inflict your author concerns on her. You must give her what she wants at the start, or she'll never read and further.

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I gotta say that I agree with this one. Yes, background is important. But the reader has to give a damn what's happening first. This is a mistake made over and over for centuries. Do you know how many people have put down The Scarlett Letter, The Communist Manifesto and The Grapes of Wrath without having finished chapter one? Millions. Because the first chapter is long descriptive narrative that has no hook, and in the end has no bearing on the story being told. The Grapes of Wrath is actually one of my favorite books, and I like Steinbeck's descriptive powers but when my friends were barely plowing through it in high school, I told them to skip the descriptive chapters that fell between the story line. Once they did that, the could finish, understand and enjoy the book.

The one thing I'd like to add to this tip is that the "threat" in the opener does not necessarily have to be the main conflict in the story. It certainly could be that, but it could also be something minor that will play a part in advancing the story. Of course, anyone who has read my "Dig If You Will a Picture, Or, A True Story of Frustration" (link in sig) knows that I don't always follow a straight line in my story telling.

HenryDelta said:

By the way, I am a big Stephen King fan. Maybe that's part of my problem.

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This is almost exactly why I won't read Stephen King. He does do a goodjob of opening with a bang, but then he spends the next three chapters describing every detail of the setting, the characters (including a full life history) the car the protagonist drives, what the antagonist had for breakfast, etc.

The first page is good. The next 50 bore me to tears and I throw it away.

I think what the guy is getting at here is that you need to start your story with something happening. Painting the surroundings is less important than than what the character is doing there. Example, Which draws your attention more?

It was 4:30 PM on a bright, sunny Thursday when Paula Somerton parked her dark blue 1998 Honda Prelude in the gravel parking lot and walked short distance to the rusty metal door and stepped inside. She was wearing snug fitting Chic jeans with a frilly white blouse, high heel shoes and her long, jet black hair in a tight braid of the back of her head.

She took note of the humor in the faded wooden sign on the building, "Bill Yards Recreational Emporium. The Budwiser lamps illuminating the line of 8 foot pool tables were all she could make out until her eyes adjusted to the dim light of the empty pool hall.

She walked cautiously to the plywood counter and rand the chrome bell for service. A short man with a scruffy beard appeared from a back room and took he eight dollars and fifty cents for a rack of balls and directed her to the last table in the line.

She selected a plain but heavy pool cue from the wall rack and carefully arranged the brightly colored balls in the rack before aligning it properly and removing the wooden triangle to leave the balls open and vunerable at the top end of the table.

She chalked her stick, bent over the table adjusting her feet and grip several times before drawing the cue back slowly and firing the polished white cue ball down the table where it scattered the colored balls acroos the table.

She jumped only slightly at the voice from behind her saying, "Nice break."

Or:

Bolting across the expanse of the green plain, the albino struck the leader of the herd, scattering them across the field in every direction, caroming off the low walls and each other. With a soft thump a victim fell and all was still again.

From the edge of the field she relaxed, straightening to her full height and dropping the butt of her weapon next to her foot. She surveyed the results of the attack, taking mental notes of the positions of her prey and selecting her next victim.

She was not alone; from a few yards away another studied her carefully. Attracted by the sight of her long shapely legs and the braid of dark hair that fell over her shoulder. He crept in silently as she prepared for her next attack. His voice reached her ear just in time to halt her assault.

“Nice break.”

I went with the second one as the opening for the story I'm working on.

Yes and no.

I'm going to guess that the author of this book is in his 50's or 60's. His advice seems to epitomize the kind of fiction the big magazines were buying back then: reader-friendly, action filled, fast and lean. A combination of Hemingway and Mickey Spillane.

Bud Shulberg gave a good example of the dangers of the kind of high-action, right-in-the-middle story openeing when he wrote this parody:

Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!

Four shots ripped into my gut and I was off on the adventure of a lifetime!

Fiction has changed since then, and now I think the in-the-middle-of-the-action opening has become something of a cliche.

Personally, I have a natural aversion to stories that open with something like:

Jessica slammed her keys down on the kitchen counter. "Oh, that Ronald just makes me so furious!"

It's a perfectly valid opening, but it's become kind of hackneyed. You don't see the A-list authors using it anymore, and often a story that opens with a line like that will immediately detour into a flashback telling us why she's so upset, rather than letting the character reveal the reasons herself in the course of the story.

I do think that a story should reveal what it's going to be about in the first few paragraphs or so. Either show me an interesting character or an interesting situation, but give me something. I'm entirely willing to read an interesting description too, or wait while you establish a mood. I don't need to be shot in the gut.

logophile said:

Do you know how many people have put down The Scarlett Letter, The Communist Manifesto and The Grapes of Wrath without having finished chapter one?

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That first chapter of the Scarlett Letter is a beotch! So much so, that my literature professor suggested that we skip it initially, and only go back to read it later when we were more established in the novel. That's precisely what I did, and I have to say that novel has become one of my favorite classics.


I was thumbing through one of my favorite modern novels this morning. I was curious about the first few paragraphs. Reading it with this chapter from Common Mistakes in mind, I'm not sure the opening is all that remarkable (except for the fact the second paragraph contains a sentence 121 words long!)


Here's the beginning from Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. I don't think he hits his stride until the third paragrah:


"This is the most beautiful place on earth.

There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio or Rome --there's no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment. Theologians, sky pilots, astronauts have even felt the appeal of home calling to them from up above, in the cold black outback of interstellar space.

For myself, I'll take Moab, Utah. I don't mean the town itself, of course, but the country which surrounds it --the canyonlands. The slickrock desert. The red dust and the burnt cliffs and the lonely sky --all that which lies beyond the end of the roads."



So my question to the rest of you is, which of your favorite novels have a good opening? I'm the kind of learner that learns best by example. If I see what makes a good lead, maybe I'll be able to replicate it.

If you write a certain type of opening, and if you are "successful" by your own definition of success, then you did it the right way.

If you want to mimic someone, pick someone who has achieved the type of success/acclaim you wish to achieve.

I just finished reading Reservation Blues, by Sherman Alexie (my favoritest auther), and he does a good job with an opening paragraph that combines history and action, I think:

In the one hundred and eleven years since the creation of the Spokane Indian Reservation in 1881, not one person, Indian or otherwise, had ever arrived there by accident. Wellpinit, the only town on the reservation, did not exist on most maps, so the black stranger surprised the whole tribe when he appeared with nothing more than the suit he wore and the guitar slung on his back. As Simon drove backward into town, he first noticed the black man standing beside the faded WELCOME TO WELLPINIT, POPULATION: VARIABLE sign. Lester FallsApart slept under that sign and dreamed about the stranger before anyone else had a chance. That black man walked past the Assembly of God Church, the Catholic Church and Cemetary, the Presbyterian Chruch and Cemetary. He strolled to the crossroads near the softball diamond, with its solitary grave hidden in deep center field. The black man leaned his guitar against a stop sign but stood himself straight and waited.

This piece does seem a bit dated but it's not entirely off base.

When editing I very often encounter stories that could and really should be hacked down to about half their initial volume. I have no problem with length in general --- hell, I'm something of a size queen when it comes to novels since I like the ride to last --- but I have a definite problem with filler and that's what a lot of description is. This isn't because description in and of itself is bad or superfluous but because too many people don't write it well. They don't know what's essential to the story and what enhances it and moves it along as opposed to what derails it and keeps everyone standing around the station while the author drones on about details we care nothing about and don't need.

This is especially true in amateur erotic writing. I think it may be because people write from their fantasies and are writing as much to exorcise or manifest their own imaginations as they are writing to turn others on. Hence the endless descriptions of what our heroines are wearing or the "5'7, green-eyed blonde with 36D tits" crap.

Then there are the writers who provide waaaaay too much back story. "If I want people to care about my characters I have to tell you how they got where they are." Only most of the characters in the stories at Lit aren't all that unique. They're secretaries and college students majoring in Communications or Business or they're accountants or traveling salesmen or housewives etc. They're just ordinary everyday people and how they got to the point where they're shagging a co-worker in the broom closet isn't all that interesting short of the last ten minutes leading up to it.


-B

It was a dark and stormy night...

I think this mistake is valid but could misdirect you.

Starting with a startling statement can hook some readers yet can deter others. I think that a short paragraph of introduction is acceptable. A slow build to a climax on page one would also be a possible beginning.

The real mistake is to start with the main character's birth and work your way through early life to adulthood before the plot begins. 21st century readers generally do not have the attention span of 18th century ones. They are not prepared to wait 200 pages before something happens.

I have been accused by anonymous of just this fault. My defence is that I'm still learning my craft and even my longest stories are barely novellas, not novels. 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo is barely enough for a novella. 350,000 is a better figure for a modern novel.

Most of us on Literotica write short stories. A slow build up in a 10,000 word story can't really be slow because the whole thing is over and finished before authors such as Sir Walter Scott or Thomas Love Peacock has ended their preface or introduction. As for Bulwer-Lytton? How long is that first sentence that I quote in the title of this post? Yet for a time he sold nearly as many books as Dickens.

Beginnings:

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." - Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.

"Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father's house in Beldover, working and talking. Ursula was stitching a piece of brightly coloured embroidery, and Gudrun was drawing upon a board which she held on her knew. They were mostly silent, talking as their thoughts strayed through their minds." D H Lawrence, Women in Love.

"Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter." Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist.

Og

I sort of agree with it, but not in the way many are taking it. I like using strong opening lines and openings and believe them to have some importance in setting the pace of the story. You can easily do this in a character description or a town description. I've done it more than once where the description was "catching" enough to lead the reader in.

You don't need to go noir and Spillane, but catching some sort of interest early on is key.

I get the feeling this book is for writing general fiction and may have less application to our specific field.

In my works at least, the conflict is more often than not an inner conflict. If you don't understand the character's back story, you don't have any feel for the inner conflicts. And you have little to go on emotionally, if you haven't built up an emotional connection between character and reader.

When reader suggestions include having one of your fictional villanesss: run over by a bus, trampeled to death by her own horse, shot, kifed or otherwise messily done away with, your on the right track. Perhaps the author can do that in his/her works by starting with the villan acting a cad, but I can't. I have to build to those kinds of emotional reactions and I can't do it without building the characters through their back stories.

CT,

I think you have a very good point --- Bickham (?) is talking about a fairly specific kind of fiction --- what he writes. He's written a lot of books and has a loyal following apparently, but he's not the only popular writer in the world nor do all popular writers share his style. Bickham writes adventure stories --- spies and westerns and cop capers. This doesn't mean I think all "adventure" tales are devoid of anything but plot twists and sensationalism but you will less often find such a tale that is both action packed AND a good character study.

Also, I don't know that Bickham is as concerned with teaching people how to write well as he is concerned with teaching people how to write marketable fiction. There's a big difference. Not all good or even exceptional writing sells and a great deal of saleable material is utter crap. Bickham doesn't appear to be a great writer but he's a working writer with a steady market for what he produces and that holds more appeal for more people than being the next Shakespeare but living in a cave in the Ozarks.

-B