Only Two Plots?

The two prose stories about Jex and Ticca exemplify the adage that “there are only two plots: A stranger rides into town, and A man goes on a journey.”

In “Relief,” the young narrator flies to other planets in Jex’s spaceship. In “Just,” the narrator finds Jex has arrived on her moon and gotten caught in a murder investigation.

Quote Investigator looked into the origin of that adage, which has been attributed to many authors in recent years. It found that:

• Credit most commonly goes to John Gardner, author of The Art of Fiction.
• He never wrote that, though he wrote an exercise in starting a novel in omniscient voice that could be stretched and misconstrued into that statement.
• Gardner was being credited with making that pronouncement as early as 1986, four years after his death.

Therefore, if you find wisdom in the adage, give Gardner the credit. If you think it’s far too reductive and at best it’s a rubric for starting a story, be pleased there’s no proof he said it.

Prologues and Passengers

Last month folks were discussing the value of prologues in novels; see comments from Nathan Bransford and his community and Dear Editor.

I’ve long heard that most kids don’t read prologues and other ancillary material. I did, but then I went into publishing. So did, I expect, many other people who grew up to write blogs about books. The problem is that authors have to aim for audiences larger than the kids who’ll read anything, even a bowl of Alpha-Bits.

As I’ve said before, I think writing the first chapter is like making a big airplane take off. You need a lot of forward thrust. Your readers are the passengers, wanting to feel that surge of power and be lifted away.

Flashbacks can break that forward momentum. Just as readers are supposed to focus on what’s happening right now and what lies ahead, flashbacks ask them to imagine some earlier time. Too many flashbacks (and I’ve seen manuscripts and books with handfuls of them in the first chapter), and readers don’t get a sense of narrative thrust. They’re back in the cabin, nervously muttering, “Come on, come on! Faster! Oh, god, we’re all gonna die!” Well, maybe not that last part, but some of them will bail out.

Prologues can produce a different problem. They can feel like a little puddle-jump flight before you get on the jet plane—you don’t cover much ground before you have to get off and do the whole boarding process again. Most people would rather take a non-stop. They can catch up on what they need from the in-flight reading material.

Wisest Thing I’ve Read Today

From Lester Dent’s Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot:

First line, or as near thereto as possible, introduce the hero and swat him with a fistful of trouble.

Plus, make sure there’s a “surprising plot twist” every 1,500 words.

Look, Do You Want Me to Tell the Story or Not?

Intrusive narrators are old hat, especially since they’ve been reintroduced into children’s literature by Lemony Snicket. But I was tickled at how over a century ago Carlos Collodi opened The Adventures of Pinocchio with an intrusive audience:

Centuries ago there lived—

“A king!” my little readers will say immediately.

No, children, you are mistaken. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.

Which reminds me that Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer, which I featured back in May, is now available in paperback.

“What It Is That I’ve Done, What It Is That I Do”

Here are some of Neil Gaiman's thought-provoking remarks about his storytelling and writing process from Roger Sutton's interview of the recent Newbery Medalist for the School Library Journal:

I was in Bologna a few years ago, in 2003, listening to a speech being given at the university about my work. It was an incredibly perceptive speech by a Bolognese professor of children’s literature. What fascinated me and troubled and worried me was I thought that I was so clever. I thought that everything I did was so different. And in this speech, the lady was talking about what it is that I’ve done, what it is that I do. And I realized with a sort of horrible sinking feeling that she was describing my next two books. . . . And it was a really major sinking feeling. It was like, Oh, my God. I’m actually doing the same thing over and over. . . .

The Graveyard Book was the longest in gestation of anything I’ve done. And it also was kind of the book that I was working towards writing for a very long time. It began in 1986, maybe early ’87. . . . I was a working journalist at this point. I’d written a few short stories. And I wrote an attempted first page and then read what I’d written and thought, You know, I’m not good enough for this. This is a really good idea, and it’s much better than I am as a writer. I will put it aside until I’m good enough. And once, maybe twice after that in the intervening years, I would go back and try writing a bit more. I’d definitely given up on it by 1989. . . .

Somewhere in 2004, after I’d finished writing Anansi Boys, it occurred to me that technically I was no longer getting better in terms of, you know, just the sheer skill of putting a sentence together, the ability to say whatever it was that I wanted to say. Whether I was any good or not, I didn’t know. But I was definitely no longer seeing the kinds of year-to-year improvement that I had previously been aware of. I was now going, “OK, this is basically whoever I am.” And I no longer had any excuse for putting off writing the story.

I had a notebook with the words, “There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.” That was definitely going to be the first line. I had begun and given up on the opening many times, and suddenly I thought, I can start in the middle. So I did.

Whole interview here.

Turning Books Inside-Out for Boys

In an article on single-sex schools, the Sydney Morning Herald quoted American physician and psychologist Leonard Sax as saying:

books that were considered to be more suited to girls, such as Jane Eyre, could be taught in a way that engaged boys.

"Start in the middle of the story and then work from the beginning," he said. Doing that created a sense of mystery and engaged readers and made them want to read on to find out more.

"Homer knew about it, Hollywood scriptwriters know about it," he said. "If you want to engage boys in any great book you start in the middle."

So let's check out that theory. Here's the start of Chapter 1 of A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett:

Once on a dark winter's day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares.

She sat with her feet tucked under her, and leaned against her father, who held her in his arm, as she stared out of the window at the passing people with a queer old-fashioned thoughtfulness in her big eyes.

She was such a little girl that one did not expect to see such a look on her small face. It would have been an old look for a child of twelve, and Sara Crewe was only seven. The fact was, however, that she was always dreaming and thinking odd things and could not herself remember any time when she had not been thinking things about grown-up people and the world they belonged to. She felt as if she had lived a long, long time.

And the start of Chapter 8 (of 19):

The first night she spent in her attic was a thing Sara never forgot. During its passing she lived through a wild, unchildlike woe of which she never spoke to anyone about her. There was no one who would have understood. It was, indeed, well for her that as she lay awake in the darkness her mind was forcibly distracted, now and then, by the strangeness of her surroundings. It was, perhaps, well for her that she was reminded by her small body of material things. If this had not been so, the anguish of her young mind might have been too great for a child to bear. But, really, while the night was passing she scarcely knew that she had a body at all or remembered any other thing than one.

Of course, that's a novel from 1905. Shall we try the same test with a "boy's book" of the same approximate vintage? Chapter 1 of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer:

"Tom!"

No answer.

"Tom!"

No answer.

"What's gone with that boy, I wonder? You Tom!"

No answer.

The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or never looked through them for so small a thing as a boy; they were her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built for "style," not service--she could have seen through a pair of stove-lids just as well. She looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but still loud enough for the furniture to hear:

"Well, I lay if I get hold of you I'll--"

That opening's all about mystery, humor, and suspense rather than, as in the Burnett extracts, mood. And just for completeness, here's Chapter 17 (of 35) of Tom Sawyer:

But there was no hilarity in the little town that same tranquil Saturday afternoon. The Harpers, and Aunt Polly's family, were being put into mourning, with great grief and many tears. An unusual quiet possessed the village, although it was ordinarily quiet enough, in all conscience. The villagers conducted their concerns with an absent air, and talked little; but they sighed often. The Saturday holiday seemed a burden to the children. They had no heart in their sports, and gradually gave them up.

In the afternoon Becky Thatcher found herself moping about the deserted schoolhouse yard, and feeling very melancholy. But she found nothing there to comfort her. She soliloquized:

"Oh, if I only had a brass andiron-knob again! But I haven't got anything now to remember him by." And she choked back a little sob.

Some boys might say that both those books would be improved if only you took out the girls entirely. That would make A Little Princess much shorter, to be sure, but we must make some sacrifices for the sake of education.

Of course, these days everyone who writes for children is told to get into the story as fast as possible, even if that means starting off in the middle of the action and doubling back with a flashback. It's a tough feat: too many explanatory flashbacks in an opening chapter prevents a book from building up any momentum.

Why Hero Has Trouble Taking Off

Yesterday I wrote that Perry Moore's debut novel Hero suffers from "much too much going on." That seems particularly evident in the book's opening. As Thom Creed starts telling his story of coming out as a superhero and a young gay man, he introduces many (though by no means all) of the book's themes and plotlines through a meandering, ultimately confusing, series of descriptions, flashbacks, and backstory hints and explanations.

Starting in the book's first paragraph, we read about:

• Thom looking back on all the experiences in the novel ("I never thought I'd have a story worth telling...").
• Thom playing a high school basketball game in which he's scored 22 points.
• Thom's father's past as a costumed hero.
• His father's meetings with people who recognized him after he retired.
• His father's encounter at some point with a wife beater.
• A basketball game four years before.
• The night Thom's mother "disappeared for good."
• The other basketball team's past legal transgressions.
• Earlier in the current game.
• Thom's growth spurt in fifth and sixth grade.
• Thom's first epileptic seizures.

And that's the first five pages. On page 6 the narrator says, "Let me backtrack for a second." Then we hear about:

• Thom's father choosing where to buy a house and raise a child.
• "Last summer," when Thom found a crack pipe in his yard.
• A break-in at the house after Thom has had knee surgery.
• When Thom's dad saved the country from "telepathic starfish-shaped aliens."
• Thom signing up to work as a tutor at the community center.
• Thom reading The Lorax to a group of kids at the center.
• Thom being reassigned to another job at the center the following week, and meeting someone he recognizes at the basketball game.
• Thom having trouble making friends in school because of his father's notoriety.

And back to the basketball game again.

Pages 19 through 28 portray a bench-clearing brawl, a terrible injury, the first manifestation of Thom's superpower, the approach of an epileptic seizure, a last-second victory, someone calling Thom "that gay guy," his father realizing that he really is gay, a superhero flyover, and a woman slapping Thom's dad for some unexplained deed he'd done as a hero.

And then comes chapter 2.

I fear that's asking too much of readers: too many facts to remember, too many conflicts to follow, too many problems to care about. Many readers are intellectually capable of tracking all those issues, but the real challenge for an author is getting readers to buy in emotionally. We need good reasons to care about the protagonist, but too many reasons dilute and divert our attention.

Writing the first chapter of a novel, I think, is like launching an airplane. You don't want to be weaving back and forth across the runway and going back to the terminal to pick up more stuff. You want full power and forward momentum.

I've found myself struggling with that challenge in some of my own writing projects, and I see it in other people's manuscripts, too. The first chapter has so much backstory, so many themes and characters and situations to establish, that it never gathers much momentum. Flashbacks are a particular temptation and trouble. Some of the solutions:

• Take some ideas out of book 1 and save them for book 2. (In this case, we really don't need the Lorax scene.)
• Find a different starting-point, one where the most important information grows naturally from the scene.
• Move some flashbacks into the present or into later chapters, after the story has started moving. (Why not combine the abusive husband and the slapping wife?)
  
• Splice instead of knotting. Use a single detail or episode to introduce two or more themes or facts instead of creating new details for each. (Thom's healing could attract more attention, and lead directly into the gaybaiting.)
  

Of course, if it were that easy, I'd never have this problem.

Rookie Author

Adam Gopnik’s essay “The Rookie,” originally published in The New Yorker and reprinted in his 2003 book Paris to the Moon, is one of the finest essays ever written about the appeal of fantasy for children, and the power of storytelling for adults.

So when I learned that Gopnik had jumped onto the children's fantasy bandwagon with The King in the Window, I figured I should read it. As usual, I didn't get to the book until considerably after it was published, but now I'm pushing through. And it is a push.

Gopnik pulls details and plot twists out of the air when they become useful, which means they accumulate like cat hair. I counted eighteen short flashbacks in the first chapter (though, technically, half of those are flashbacks within a flashback). Young protagonist Oliver's behavior seems to be consistent with his character only when that won't interfere with what he must do to bring on Gopnik's next scene.

But finally, at page 134, Psmith shows up. Okay, he's not calling himself Psmith. He's calling himself Charlie Gronek of Allendale, New Jersey, and his fashion sense has changed greatly; he dresses as a skater boy with digital gadgets stuffed in every pocket. But I can recognize an old friend as soon as he opens his mouth--at this particular moment, opening it to explain the word supportive:

"It's--uh--it's an American word that means, sort of, you may be nuts but you have a right to be nuts in your own way. Hey, I like your thinking on this, Ollie. We had to do something like it for credit in symbolic archetype class--that's what they used to call English, but Randi decided to change it. Now we do archetypal symbolic analysis. I mean, we each had to create our own myth, and draw our own mandala and everything. And then we had to, like, analyze everybody's archetypes. Personally, I'm thinking of becoming a Buddhist. They worship lettuce."

Compare and contrast.

Finding Where Foundling Really Starts and Ends

Foundling, the first book in D. M. Cornish’s Monster Blood Tattoo series, tracks young Rossamünd as he leaves the orphanage for his first job. This being Fantasyland, he gets lured and knocked off course, enticed into dangerous deeds, presented with rival mentors, and so on. And a good thing, too, since ordinary job orientations aren’t that exciting. Foundling is thus a novel about Rossamünd trying to figure out his place in the world.

A few years ago, I heard Newbery-winning Richard Peck intone (he didn’t seem to simply say anything) at an SCBWI conference that after completing a novel he always goes back to rewrite the first chapter. Later he told Publishers Weekly the same:

I'll take this first chapter, and without rereading it, I'll throw it away and write the chapter that goes at the beginning. Because the first chapter is the last chapter in disguise.

I’m not sure a total rewrite is necessary, but the first chapter of a novel definitely needs to set out the threads and themes of the story that follows. It should also be where life changes for the protagonist, and thus where the story really begins.

So what’s the first chapter of Foundling? “It Began with a Fight” shows Rossamünd and another boy at the orphanage sparring with sticks. Is that the last chapter in disguise? Does it lead into the rest of the book? In retrospect, can we glimpse the threads of the wafting through the air back there? I don’t think so.

Rossamünd never has to call on his stick-fighting capability during his journey, nor other combat skills. His nasty rival never reappears in the book (though I’m sure he’ll resurface later in the series). There’s no causal link between this scene and the plot that follows; despite the chapter’s title, it’s not where “It Began” at all. And this scene has no tie to the novel’s main theme of defining one’s place in the wide world.

Furthermore, by focusing so many pages on the fight scene, Cornish seems to have left himself less space to start his story. When Rossamünd does get his job offer, in chapter 3, it’s followed by several very hurried paragraphs describing action instead of dramatizing it (no dialogue at all on on pages 40-41). Yet those actions turn out to be most important for Rossamünd’s future, more than the fight.

I think the same elements could have been combined this way for a more successful launch:

1) Rossamünd learns that he’s been selected for a new job.
2) His jealous rival pummels him unfairly in the sparring match.
3) Rossamünd’s friends on the orphanage staff (introduced largely in chapter 2) cluster round to ensure that he can take the job.
4) He departs, still a little dazed, which leads into his first adventure.

A similar problem of story structure appears at the end, though of course I don’t want to give everything away. In vague terms, Rossamünd has ended up working for a monster fighter named Europe. (A lot of Cornish’s characters share names with things or places in our world.) On page 284 Rossamünd does something that annoys Europe--he knows it would annoy her, perhaps anger her dreadfully, yet he feels he has to do it. This is thus an important step in defining himself. But now he has to accept the consequences.

And what are those consequences? On page 290 Cornish shows us that Europe still wants Rossamünd to be her helper. Score one for standing up for your values! Unfortunately, the novel doesn’t end for 22 more pages, which show Rossamünd traveling to his original job assignment. That final chapter thus becomes an anticlimax, hanging around like a last bit of pie when you’re already reasonably full and the pie wasn’t stellar to begin with.

Again, with a little tweaking Cornish could have kept up the suspense he’d created to the end. Rossamünd could have left for his assignment still worrying about how Europe felt about him, fearing that he’d cut himself off from her respect forever. At the end of his journey, he receives a note from her [page 296]. Move that to the end of the novel, make that the first way she tells him that she still respects him, and the anticlimax would disappear. Then the whole novel, from very start to very end, would be about Rossamünd finding his place in the Half-Continent world.

Some Opening: Charlotte's Web

Through McSweeney's, Ann Asher offers a discarded passage from Charlotte's Web, featuring the previously unrecorded character of Louis the Turkey. Louis has the instincts but not the hard-won tact of an editor: "I see where you're going with the 'Some Pig' thing, but don't you think it's so vague that it's not even worth writing? . . . "

And speaking of tactless editing, the first line of Charlotte's Web is often used as an example of a sterling opening for a novel:

"Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.

That one sentence introduces little Fern, it sets the scene in time and space, and anything involving Papa and an ax is intriguing even before Fern's question forces us to think about the mystery.

But frankly I'd like to retire this example, for two reasons. First, it's getting old. Not the book itself; Charlotte's Web more than half a century old, but timeless. The example just feels shopworn. Hasn't everyone writing for kids for over a year already heard it? And since editors believe that today's young readers want novels to begin even faster, with more action and intrigue, there must surely be more recent examples of opening lines to learn from.

The second reason involves some of the things the start of Charlotte's Web does wrong, or at least should only be attempted by writers with E. B. White's experience and skill, if then. In the third paragraph, the narrator tells us that Fern didn't understand the ax and its connection with the newborn pigs because she "was only eight." CLANG! Condescension alert! Don't try this at home!

More important, the opening puts the focus on Fern, the girl. But in chapter 3, White shifts his point of view to Wilbur the pig. He and the other animals can talk to each other. Fern can't talk to the animals, but chapter 8 depends on her understanding them--and then shows us a conversation between her parents that she's not privy to. For the whole book White jumps between the overlapping but not intersecting worlds of animals and humans. In the last chapter Fern makes only a token appearance, her mind entirely on (gasp!) a boy, while the relationship of Wilbur and Charlotte's children carries all the emotional weight.

Now it would have been next to impossible for White to write the first scenes from Wilbur's point of view because the pig was a fragile newborn. For similar reasons, no doubt, Dick King-Smith started Babe from Farmer Hoggett's point of view. (An example of a novel written from a human newborn's point of view is Butler's The Incubator Baby, but that's social satire for adults.)

In recent decades, children's book reviewers and editors have emphasized a more tightly controlled point of view than White used. A book can have multiple points of view, but they tend to switch obviously one to another, not fade into each other. That trend will go out of fashion sooner or later, but for now Charlotte's Web and its Fern-centered opening for a Wilbur-centered novel may not be the best model for new writers.