Writing: Subsequent Openings, How not to
I actually had two, count them two, excellent writing conversations within the past twenty-four hours. One by phone, the other by the more usual method in my isolation: e-mail.
I picked a modern roman fleuve that I admire very much, Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series, and studied the openings to the novels as best I could. I thought I’d isolated how he introduced his characters-but when I experimented, getting some people to attempt to read HMS Surprise and Reverse of the Medal, which I thought the most immediately accessible, I was quite surprised to meet with no success. One of my readers could not tell who the main characters were supposed to be in Reverse of the Medal and didn’t care to read on and find out. Two were indifferent. The fourth didn’t want to continue in those two books, but did try Master and Commander--and got hooked.
What I’m realizing is that even the most judicious, close reader already familiar with characters, setting, and story cannot be trusted to see an opening in the same way that new readers will. They already have the connection with the characters, so they are already sorting story clues in order of importance as soon as they commence reading. The new reader, bombarded with all new info, has no idea what is important and what isn’t, and of course has no emotional stakes in character or situation.
So I had to look back at Master and Commander again, to see how he hooks the new reader, and what I rediscovered is that in every scene, there is not just one but several emotional changes for first Jack and then Stephen. We get brief glimpses of others’ internal status. No one is neutral. Least of all the main characters. Bingo. No one is neutral.
Of course that doesn’t mean frontloading the story with the sort of reader micromanagement of a romance novel. That is a different format-one in which emotion is so strong a prerequisite one can almost say the story is about emotion. But emotional counterpoint seems to be the way in.
I picked a modern roman fleuve that I admire very much, Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series, and studied the openings to the novels as best I could. I thought I’d isolated how he introduced his characters-but when I experimented, getting some people to attempt to read HMS Surprise and Reverse of the Medal, which I thought the most immediately accessible, I was quite surprised to meet with no success. One of my readers could not tell who the main characters were supposed to be in Reverse of the Medal and didn’t care to read on and find out. Two were indifferent. The fourth didn’t want to continue in those two books, but did try Master and Commander--and got hooked.
What I’m realizing is that even the most judicious, close reader already familiar with characters, setting, and story cannot be trusted to see an opening in the same way that new readers will. They already have the connection with the characters, so they are already sorting story clues in order of importance as soon as they commence reading. The new reader, bombarded with all new info, has no idea what is important and what isn’t, and of course has no emotional stakes in character or situation.
So I had to look back at Master and Commander again, to see how he hooks the new reader, and what I rediscovered is that in every scene, there is not just one but several emotional changes for first Jack and then Stephen. We get brief glimpses of others’ internal status. No one is neutral. Least of all the main characters. Bingo. No one is neutral.
Of course that doesn’t mean frontloading the story with the sort of reader micromanagement of a romance novel. That is a different format-one in which emotion is so strong a prerequisite one can almost say the story is about emotion. But emotional counterpoint seems to be the way in.