The Allure of the Lure

What about these openings?

“When the blind man arrived in the city, he claimed that he had travelled across a desert of living sand.” —Kevin Brockmeier, A Brief History of the Dead 

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.” —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” —Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“You better not never tell nobody but God.” —Alice Walker, The Color Purple

In every case, don’t you want to read on? Don’t you feel you can’t help it, even though you ought to walk the dog, empty the dishwasher, pack the lunches, turn out the light?

Tip: Start every scene—especially the first one—by enticing your reader. Irresistibly.

Because, as Paula Berinstein puts it, “We all know that if we don’t capture reader attention within a few seconds, we might as well kiss the sale of our work goodbye.”

K.M. Weiland adds: 

Readers are like fish. Smart fish. Fish who know authors are out to get them, reel them in, and capture them for the rest of their seagoing lives. But, like any self-respecting fish, readers aren’t caught easily. They aren’t about to surrender themselves to the lure of your story unless you’ve presented them with an irresistible hook.

Hooked on hooks yourself now? These tricks might work more often than not:

~ Check to see if your hook is already there—just not in the opening sentence. 

~ Emphasize what drives the scene. 

How will it intensify the obstacles from the previous one? What must the protagonist learn? What additional pressure will the antagonist exert? What single sentence propels the protagonist into the next difficulty or exacerbation of a previous one?

~ Value high stakes over context, which you can easily fill in after you’ve grabbed attention.

How can you crystallize huge tension right now? Can you provide enough grounding with a prepositional phrase or two?

~ Write vigorously. 

This means connotative nouns, active metaphorical verbs, and minimal modifiers.

~ Watch your sentence structure.

Don’t overdo any one technique. But compound sentences rarely coalesce the most energy. Strive for either short sentences or highly rhythmic long ones.

~ Use the ending of the scene to launch the subsequent one.

It’s often helpful to have that in mind before you even begin writing a scene. How will this one cause whatever’s next?

Like so many things about fiction writing, developing hooks is a skill that anyone can master, simply through lots and lots of practice. No magic involved. Doesn’t that challenge hook you?

A Harsh Numbness Descended to My Entrails, Writhing There

Whoops! A harsh numbness as opposed to a cheerful one? The numbness actually descended, writhed later? Is it strategic to discuss emotion (or lack of it) in terms of entrails?

Here’s why not. Ever start watching an old movie only to become dismayed by the music? The melodramatic facial expressions? A plot so obvious it seems a sixth grader contrived it? Although you’re dying to know who Tony Curtis was or how the young Tommy Lee Jones looked (blond and great!), you give up. No novelist wants readers doing that.

Tip: Tastes change.

Obvious as that seems, what you learned to read in what my folks called “their youth” (see how language changes?), that’s unlikely to be what you want to write right now.

So what’s different?

~ Concept.

It may have been true since Ecclesiastes that “there is no new thing under the sun,” but as Donald Maass puts it in Writing the Breakout Novel:

What about your premise? Is it truly a fresh look at your subject, a perspective that no one else but you can bring to it? Is it the opposite of what we expect or a mix of elements such as we’ve never seen before? If not, you have some work to do.

It’s a bittersweet irony that readers enjoy familiarity—but never too much of it.

~ Characterization.

Readers loved Dickens not despite the unctuousness of a creep like Uriah Heep or unmitigated greed of Ebenezer Scrooge, but precisely because the good and bad guys were unquestionably identified. Now, though, every bad guy is in some way good, and every good gal overcome by fatal flaw. In pretty much every book, today’s characters are full-bodied, passionate and resilient, but usually wrong-headed in at least one way.

~ Plot.

A great divide exists between those arguing that literary fiction is never about plot, while genre fiction is never about anything else. But writing coaches like Lisa Cron or Jessica Page Morrell, not to mention agents, publishers, and readers themselves, like to see high stakes. Unlike the meandering beauty of the 19th century novel, what sells—and gets read—is a causal chain of events that are neither improbable nor overly predictable.

~ Language.

Today’s fiction has its own share of overwrought agony. It also has examples like these, retaining the rhythmic intensity of yesterday’s sentences with the acute diction and metaphor that contemporary readers hope to encounter:

When the blind man arrived in the city, he claimed that he had travelled across a desert of living sand.—Kevin Brockmeier, A Brief History of the Dead

Quiet as it's kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941.—Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

 I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.—Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Of course you want to read on. They sound like right now—at its very best.

Opera for the Novelist?

Don’t enjoy listening to it? That’s fine. It’s an acquired taste—like blue cheese or the musty Indian spice Asafoetida. And yet regardless of your genre, goals, or commitment to gravitas, a taste of operatic idiosyncrasy might zestfully season your fiction. And you needn’t endure a single high-pitched note to apply these possibilities.

~ Passion.

Not just with a capital “P.” Rather, an entire word that’s capitalized in boldface. Consider Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux. The Queen loves Essex (Devereux), who’s madly in love with his dearest friend’s wife. It can’t end well. Spoiler: it doesn’t. And this has to do with contemporary fiction because…

…the higher the stakes, then the better. Build Concept. Corner your characters.  Want your audience to feel passion? Escalate the tension. Escalate it even more.

~ Motif.

Many of the loveliest operas revisit musical themes. But exploring themes radically differs from merely repeating them. This concept functions the way a poet plays off the six central worlds that build the sestina form: each encounter differs at least slightly. Same with the scarlet letter in Hawthorne’s novel: always similar, never identical. That familiar yet new variation amplifies tension, resonance, and complexity.  Chillingworth, Pearl, Dimmesdale, and Hester all view that letter differently—and thus readers do, as well. This is relevant to you because…

…the best fiction has texture. Layers of meaning emerge from words and symbols echoing off each other. And recurrent variations let the audience intimately connect your world with their own—the way years of varied encounters cement a friendship.

~ Climax.

People who adore opera rarely notice how long it takes the protagonist to die, while that’s the first thing people who dislike opera mock. Why must it take so long? Because a lot has gone into this ending. Why rush questions like who lives, rules the kingdom, gets revenge, and wins true love (usually no one). This relates to contemporary fiction because…

…big stories need big resolution. Consider proportion. If your scenario is low key, as many good ones are, then hurry up. But if you’ve posed huge dramatic questions, give your audience enough time to savor, wind down, exhale.

~ Theme.

It’s likely a good thing that we no longer fuss much about honor. But the ageless questions of morality, betrayal, hope, irony, and sacrifice matter to you because you’re a contemporary novelist. Those questions will be the crux of story—forever.

Tip: Fiction comes not only from the imagination, but the world. The more of the world you put in, then the more your readers will get out of the fictional world you create.

Such Stuff as Scenes are Made on

In the fourth act of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the magician protagonist says:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

Scholars disagree about exactly what has “ended.” Magic? Story? Wakefulness? Life? In any case, Prospero advises that wisdom—and story—intertwine reality and magic. Of course Prospero didn’t add that story blends scene (live-time presentation) with summary (abbreviation of the less dramatic, supporting parts). Yet that mix is a huge part of story magic.

Alas, it doesn’t always happen. Novelists find it easier to condense drama as summary and expand the mundane into scene. But that gets readers thinking about “little lives” and “sleep.” Make your readers happy by plotting with a combination of scene and summary.

~ Hook readers at both ends of the scene.

Though readers want some setting pretty quickly, push the hook as close to the first sentence as you can. It’s not just for readers. When scenes never get off the ground, it’s because the writer knew neither the source of the tension nor where it was headed.

~ Show how the scene advances the protagonist’s arc.

Never let a central character exit a scene unchanged.

~ Create palpable adversity.

If the characters merely shrug and agree to disagree, this shouldn’t be a scene. Raise the

stakes. A lot. Raise them with someone actually doing something.

~ Save scenes for high drama.

Most adults have coffee and drive away in their cars every weekday. Do readers truly want to encounter this over and over? If you need it at all, do it as summary.

~ Develop skill with summary.

Efficiency isn’t inherently tedious. In fact, done properly, quite the opposite. But until you compose intriguing summaries, you’ll put everything in scene. Here’s how to keep your voice when writing summary.

·         View this as a skill—one you can learn. You mostly just need practice.

·         Trace the passage of time with character emotion.

·         Choose specific, concrete language.

·         Emphasize how one event caused the next.

·         Set up the next conflict.

Tip: A mix of scene and summary is the stuff that fiction’s made on.