F is for Funerals

A funeral appears to be a great way to start a novel. You gather all the main characters together at a time of emotional stress so confrontation and conflict are inherently likely. A death is the end of one life, but it's also the start of a new life for those who remain - what could be better for your novel than to explore the repercussions of loss? And then there's drama in the burning question of who inherits the money, and potential for discovering information about the one who has gone. Yes, on the surface, a funeral seems a great way to start.

But it isn't.

A funeral is by its nature a reactive scene. The action - the death - has happened off stage. And because we don't know any of the mourners, we don't really care about their reactions. The grieving widow, the bereft daughter, the relieved son, the grasping nephew...we don't know them so their reactions are a matter of indifference to us.

You can tell us what a great guy the deceased was or what a tyrant, and we're not that interested - they're dead, so we're not going to get to meet them further. Now, it may be that in your careful plan, the deceased IS going to play a major part, but I'm talking about the reader's experience. At the beginning they don't know that because they haven't yet read the rest of your story. They are reacting to what they're reading now without the benefit of being the writer with it all planned out.

Funerals are all about something that has gone. Even the future is framed by the past eg how will I manage without X? The reader wants a promise of what's going to happen in the rest of the novel. They don't want to hang around waiting for the story to start. If you're writing for film or television, you have a small window of opportunity while the viewer decides if they're going to carry on watching (no one walks out of the cinema in the first two minutes, so you've got up to ten minutes to hook them).

But it's different for books. The first thing the reader looks at before parting with their cash and time is the beginning, whether that's in the bookshop or as a downloaded sample. They won't buy if the opening doesn't grab them and funerals, as reactive, not active, scenes don't.

Plus, a lot of people read for entertainment and don't want to read about death and grief. Your novel actually may be a rip roaring romp, but the reader won't know that when they start reading, unless they've been given the book by a friend who gives a quick resume, or have read a lot of positive reviews saying that.

Other bad starts include having the main character waking up or staring at themselves in the mirror thinking about the night before (that's reactive - start with the night before, make it active), and characters setting off on journeys (you're going to have to explain why they go which makes it reactive, so start at the moment when they decide to go, which is active).

There are of course exceptions, and I'm probably going to be deluged with titles of good books that start with funerals. But I'm going to suggest that they work because the funeral itself isn't that important to the characters and the characters aren't reactive, they're active eg they're a gate-crasher or the detective investigating the death. So, Holly Martins turns up at Harry Lime's funeral in The Third Man, because he came to Vienna hoping Harry was going to give him a job. He has to be active, because the job isn't there and then things don't seem to be straight forward about Harry's death and - am I the only one humming the theme tune?

(Cue zither music....)

5 Bad Ways of Starting a Novel - and 5 Good

1.  The Internal Monologue

This often involves a character staring at themselves in the mirror and wondering how, exactly, they ended up there.  They think about their situation, what has happened, how they feel about it all.  And all the while the reader is thinking: where are they?  what's happening?  why is this interesting?  We know characters by their thought processes, but we need to establish some basics first such as what's going on (ie action), where are they (physically and temporally), what the story problems are before we go into the workings of their mind too deeply.

2. Gimmicky Action

The opposite of the internal monologue, this begins with nothing but action and of the most dramatic sort - car crashes and chases, exploding this and that.  The trouble is, until we know the characters we don't care what's happening to them.  'Normal world' has to be established before we can leap into action.  Closely related to Gimmicky Action is...

3. The Info Dump: Factual

This is when the writer thinks we need to know lots of facts about the characters and their situation before we can understand them.  Not true: we can know very few facts about characters and their situation, so long as we understand the emotional meaning or resonance that they have.  But that's not to say a better idea is...

4. The Info Dump: Emotional

A few weeks ago I was sitting in a cafe having cup of tea when I fell into conversation with another woman.  She then told me her life story including a lot of traumatic detail about her miscarriage and how she'd decided not to have another child.  The writer part of me was fascinated, and as a woman I was sympathetic, but it wasn't a comfortable situation.  Piling on loads of heavy emotional stuff right at the beginning will have the same effect on the reader.  You may think it's a way of getting sympathy for a character, but most readers will find it cringe-making.  Again, establish 'normal world' first.  

5. Flashback

You may have noticed I'm not a fan of flashback generally but I particularly don't like it on the first page of a novel. It makes 'normal world' hard to place - is normal the present situation, or the one in the past?  You want the reader to be swept up into the story of what it happening now, and flashback, by definition, is not now.  Plus, it can be confusing, and the last thing you want to do is confuse the reader right from the start. 

So what do I think are good ways of starting a novel?

1.  Establish normal world 

2. Within normal world hint that all is not as it seems.

3. Show characters in action

4. Give an indication of the main theme(s) of the novel

5. Clearly show the genre (romance, thriller, literary, sci-fi etc)

Anyone in St Ives for the September Festival?  I'm giving a talk on Friday 23rd September at 11.00 am.  Go to the website for more info.

The 10 Minute Difference - Why Films Are Not Like Prose

I use films as references a lot, mainly because I think people are more likely to have seen the same films as me, rather than read the same books so the examples will have wider resonance. But there's one area which you shouldn't take films as your 'how to' guide, and that's the beginning.

Think about how you choose to see a film. You look at the cover. You look at the reviews. You may see some carefully chosen clips. And then you decide to watch it. You buy cinema tickets or the DVD.

Compare with a novel. You look at the cover. You look at the reviews. Then, if you're in the bookshop, you look at the first page and start reading. If you like it, you then buy it. In other words, you can test the product before you invest your money in it.

When you get round to watching the film, you're going to give it at least ten minutes before deciding if it's any good or not. So the film maker has about ten minutes to do any story set up before your attention is going to wander. The novel or story, in contrast, has to earn your attention right from the start or you won't be investing in it. The storytelling must begin on page 1.

NEW!!! I've finally got round to organising some course dates....

How to WRITE a Novel: London 3rd May/Birmingham 7th May/

Oxford 8th May/Exeter 21st May/Bath 12th June

How to SELL a Novel: London 24th May/Exeter 4th June/

Bath 3rd July Details are on my website

Why Readers are like Goslings

Reading is a strange business. We start out with high expectations and long for them to be fulfilled - no one reads hoping that they're going to waste their time, surely. So we latch onto whatever we get given in the first paragraph. Aha, we think, that's what this story is going to be about.

And then it isn't.

It's such a disappointment. As a reader, you sort of commit to the first person you see in a story, just like a gosling hatching from the egg. And as you read further, and the story gets further away from the character you started with, half your brain is wondering when we're going to get our real main character back, the one we started out with, the one we bonded with.

I see it in class time and time again. We begin with character X, then mourn X's absence if X doesn't turn out to be the main character. Feedback invariably starts with 'What happened to X?'

In novels this may not be so important - though in published novels, if the story is going to start with a different character, you often see that chapter being called a prologue, or some such, just to alert the reader that they shouldn't commit fully.

But in short stories starting with the character you mean to go on with is vital. Consider this: I see misleading story beginnings in class fairly often, but I can't remember seeing a story that didn't start with the main character when I've been the final judge for short story comps. That implies that the misleading beginnings get weeded out in the initial judging stages.

So, I'd strongly advise anyone to make sure their opening paragraph concentrates on the main character and call me a goose if I'm wrong.