The wrong shape for your opening

a very common thing

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I have read slush at more than one literary magazine. These are the basic, unsolicited submissions that come in by the hundreds. If you are interested in being a published writer, you should read slush at one some point in your life. It’s the only way to really get a sense of what the talent distribution looks like. Only after you’ve gone though a hundred of these is it pretty clear how rare a good piece will be. (I have written about this in detail in another post.) But the majority of them will not be exceptional, in fact much of it will be bad. Maybe 10-20 percent comes in with solid writing—okay this person can write a sentence, but do they have something interesting to say? When you’ve swam through all those submissions, only then does it make sense how rare something really good is—that when you come across something really good, do you sit up in your chair, your attention caught.

One time I was at a literary conference and the editor of a lit mag I knew was speaking as part of a panel. He said something to the effect of, “I can tell when a piece isn’t good just by looking at it. I don’t mean reading it, I just mean looking at the shape of the first few pages.” This instantly made sense to me as someone who has read slush, but I can imagine a reasonable person being angry about that. How can you tell about the quality of writing without actually reading it?

I’m going to show you. This is an extremely common shape of the opening pages of a story or novel. When I see it, I instantly know the opening needs to be reworked. I have reproduced some pages below so you can see. (Sorry mobile users, I hope you can see this all right.) You are not supposed to be able to read the text itself (don’t worry this is not taken from some innocent person- I cobbled it together from my own stuff to recreate the common shape.)

Okay, so not paying attention to the actual words—because the words themselves might actually be okay. Our book or story starts with some dialogue. Dialogue is great, in theory, it puts you right in the action. This might even be an action scene with some dialogue weaved throughout. So we start with that dialogue and are feeling it, but then we hit a big block of text. This is two double spaced pages, but more realistically you’d get 3, 4, 5 pages of big block text.

What’s going on here? In the romance novel, the first two pages is the MC talking to her mom, who is being frustrating, as the MC is moving back in with her and they are trying to move boxes. The block text is the MC explaining in exposition to the reader that she was fired from her Big City job for making a viral tweet that was taken out of context and now, dread of all dreads, she’s needed to move back in with her mom in Small Town. And the LAST THING SHE WANTS TO SEE is her ex…. In a fantasy, the opening two pages can be a wizard and an elf having a tense conversation about the heist they are about to pull off in the tavern. Then all the block text is explaining how this particular world works, politically, or historically, or who these races are, etc. In a mystery, these first two pages could be the mysterious sexy woman hiring the detective, then all that block text is him explaining about how he was kicked out out of the NYPD for being too much of a loose cannon or refusing to go to therapy or whatever.

Point being, people tell you to start your book with something interesting. Something to grab people. So a lot of people think, okay, I will start in medias res, literally in the middle of the action. Starting in the middle of something is perfectly fine—that is not actually the shape I am objecting to. In medias res is only a problem when the book opens up with a really fast paced, confusing action scene. We get a lot of characters thrown at us, doing things we don’t understand for reasons we are unclear of, and we can’t even tell what is happening or why we should care. You can start a book with action, just be aware that action is really hard to write in general, and that the start of a book/story is where you have 0% room for error. If there is a bunch of jargon—capitalized words referring to spells or mythical people or whatever—people will get lost. Cap jargon to as little as possible with it being VERY clear from context what the jargon means. If there is a lot of action, minimize the number of named characters (this would include both a literally named character: “John” and an unnamed but specific character: “the guard” because once you mention several different people who are not part of an unnamed crowd, it will be harder to tell who from who.) If your opening scene involves perilous danger, just remember that no one cares about any of your characters yet because we don’t know them at all, so the stakes are actually pretty low.

So we’re moving along, maybe have some interesting dialogue. Then we hit the great wall of China in exposition. This is like being dropped into a stream of water and I’m moving along with the current, then you’ve built a dam for me to knock into. “Now I need to explain everything about wizards so you know how the world works.” But I was interested in what was happening when I was moving. You tricked me with what looked like in medias res but turns out it wasn’t.

Knowing exactly where to start is really hard. Too early and nothing’s happening. Too late and you’d have to explain too much. Exposition plays a really critical role in fiction, particularly when there is worldbuilding. It’s better to sprinkle in exposition with things actually happening rather than in infodumps. Here’s a bit from the opening chapter of the vampire thing I’m working on. (At this point the vampire has woken up from a very long sleep, and sensed that there are other vampires nearby.)

Instinctually, I headed in their direction, walking down one street and turning onto the next until it seemed we were in a worse part of town. More graffiti and overturned trash cans. I turned one corner and there they were, at the end of the next street turning into an alley. They were like kittens. Four fledglings in the fit of the Turn. Shaking with fever, eyes red, crying with uncontrollable hunger. I relaxed my eyes and I could barely make out their auras, undoubtedly because I wasn’t up to my full strength. Their sickness surrounded them, an oval of mist invisible if you weren’t exerting this particular power, a hint of the deep red common in vampires, but overlaying that, a phlegmy, clotted grey of infection. Out of four it was unlikely that even one would survive. I could pity them.

The kittens had a leader though, and he was not sick. His aura had healthy red waves, a faint pulsing. He was a young vampire. I could not tell you how I knew this, other than that extra sense that vampires have, that ability to stack themselves against others. For it is only the very, very powerful who are able to cloak the power that emanates off them like waves of heat. The leader had the appearance of a young man, tall, lanky in both his limbs and how he walked. He was dressed as strangely as everyone else, wearing a cowl—no, hoodie, my brain corrected. His black jeans were ragged with strings hanging off with a few glints of metal. Was he poor, or was this modern style?

This is the first time we’re seeing the word “Fledglings” but it’s clear that refers to newborn vampires. The “Turn” is them changing from humans to vampires- I did not explain that, but I’m pretty sure it’s clear. I do not explain that the Turn itself is like having a terrible sickness: you just see the fledglings being really sick. This is the first time there is any reference to auras or the MC’s ability to read them. I just have her read his aura, so now you know that she can read auras. Then a couple sentences of explicit exposition where you learn that vampires are constantly racking and stacking each other based on age (because age is a proxy for power) and that only the very powerful can cloak exactly how powerful they are. We see that this guy is stressed strangely enough that we get the sense that the MC has been asleep for a long time. There’s no sentence where she says “Boy, have I been asleep for a long time!” She’s just looking at what people are wearing and LED screens and wondering what year it is.

To not engage in big infodumps, you need to have faith that your audience isn’t an idiot. Give them enough of a bite so that they know it’s pizza they are eating. The Romance MC doesn’t need to explain her entire background in exposition if enough of that comes out in a snappy conversation with her mother as she’s moving in.

“I told you not to take a job at a a startup! You work long hours for shit pay!” Mom said, dragging another box past the kitchen.

“Mom, your beloved Facebook was once a startup.”

“And I told you to stay off the Twitter! Everyone’s getting cancelled these days!”

Or whatever. Then as time goes one, maybe we get some exposition about her job, or maybe we hear about it a little in dialogue with the best friend or love interest. I just don’t need a huge giant chunk at once.

If you have the giant exposition dumps, trying printing off a hard copy and cutting up each individual sentence. Are there other places where you can put that piece of information so that I can stay moving in the stream of action? I did not go into a giant paragraph about vampiric powers in this first chapter, but you get some inkling that the main character can 1) read auras 2) cloak herself so that she is unseen by humans or less powerful vampires. In the rest of the chapter you see a few other powers—another vampire has really high presence/charisma, the young vampire she meets here has the power of illusions. But I definitely do not have, in this first chapter, a giant block of text explicating power. In the opening few chapters, I’m dipping the teabag in so you start to understand how the powers work, but at no point in time do any of the powers get a big block of text explaining them.

Have faith that you can just dip the teabag and the reader will figure out that it’s tea.

It’s often as simple as this:

“Dude you told me you were out of the game,” I said, surprised. He had gone clean after a stint in Rikers and meeting some super Christian girl via email who wanted to save him.

“Julie has cancer.”

I don’t need a paragraph to explain anything here.

Last year, I started watching the old TV show Prison Break. The first season of this show is pretty good, but after that you’re like how many times are these people going to end up in prison?? Anyhow, the first five minutes of this show are incredible in terms of efficiency of storytelling. You can see the screenplay here, but for those of you who don’t want to read this is how fast things move: (Keep in mind that one screenplay page roughly translates to one minute of screen time.)

Page 1: a guy, Michael, is getting his first tattoo, which is a full back tattoo with arm sleeves. (your immediate question is, what is this guy up to? Why does he say he has no time?)

Page 2: we see one of those corkboard-with-red-string collages with a lot of information that doesn’t make sense right now: stuff about a court case, about diabetes, an origami swan. Clearly Michael is up to something.

Page 3: Michael is literally robbing a bank. The way he is doing it makes it clear that he is 1) abnormally cool and collected and 2) deliberately trying to get caught by the police.

Page 4: Michael is in court. Against the advice of his lawyer, he pleads no contest, even though it’s not in his best interest.

Page 5: Outside the courthouse (before sentencing) Michael sees his nephew. Michael is surprised and says, “I’m ashamed. All this.. It’s not me.” The nephew says, “Heard that before.” If it isn’t clear already, Michael deliberately robbed a bank and got caught so he could be put into the same prison as his brother and then break him out. But he doesn’t want the nephew to hate him or his father—who he already has a lot of resentment towards because he thinks his father actually did commit the crime he is in prison for.

One thing that is great about reading screenplays is that you can see how much of a story can be conveyed visually without giant expository dumps. Nobody in these first five pages tells you that Michael is very smart, but it’s extremely apparent that he is. You also go through 20 or 30 episodes before you fully understand WHY Michael appears to be abnormally cool and collected all the time. That first season had 22 hour long episodes to tell its story, but the writers were clearly like “the show is called Prison Break. Let’s get this guy into prison asap.” He might be in prison before the first commercial break. Not a lot of explaining. And while the cork board is a big mystery, each piece of it is slowly unraveled. Everything in Michael’s tattoo is actually coded content to help him remember all the components to break his brother out.

I do want to say that I’m not against exposition at all. (In fact, I’m the first person to roll my eyes whenever someone says “Show don’t tell.”) Telling can be captivating. Sometimes it is the most appropriate choice. My second book starts with three pages of “telling.” This is the first para: “The mountain had existed long before there had been anyone around to name it, pushed up by the inevitable forces that made the Appalachian Range millions of years ago. Hulking, it stood with a peculiar formation at its apex, two peaks like a pair of horns, giving the mountain its eventual name of Devil’s Peak. The coal mine inside was abandoned long ago.” The telling is on purpose. I have to tell you the entire history of this town. You’d think that starts in the late 1800s, but the reality is, it starts millions of years ago with Devil’s Peak. This is the start of a book that is 500 pages and 141k words. I’m signaling what kind of book it is.

But the reason why you don’t want the shape depicted in the above picture is because it reads “I wanted to start with a big exposition dump, but instead I was told to start in medias res, so here’s some action, then I will cut to what I REALLY want to say, then we can start the car up after it’s stalled and get going again.” But the thing is that the car won’t get going again, in terms of the attention span of a person skimming it.

Just get in the car and go—but avoid this shape at any cost because it is extremely common. People who read slush see it constantly and unless there is something absolutely insane about your exposition dump, odds are they are going to feel annoyed that you’ve pulled them away from the action. Page 2 of Prison Break could have been five pages of him explaining his entire plan to his nephew, but that is not interesting or mysterious, and the story is way more exciting this way. Remember that you want the momentum to pull people forward, not back.

Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash