Chapter Six
The Beginnings Rulebook II
The Dignity of Greatness
“To get the truth, you want to get your own heart to pound while you write.”
—Robert McKee
“Action is the dignity of greatness.”
—José Marti
Action
The most reliable way of opening your story is with action. Readers respond to proactive characters; they want to read about people who err on the side of action, rather than inertia. That’s why you don’t want to open your story with your character asleep, flat on her back, dreaming her life away. No dream is that good. I know I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating, and I’ll keep on saying it until writers stop opening stories with dreams.
Even those of you who say that you write character-driven stories are not off the hook. As F. Scott Fitzgerald pointed out, “Action is character.” Characters who don’t act are boring and stuck and impotent. No one wants to read about boring, stuck, impotent people. We get enough of that in real life, and it frustrates us. We don’t want those kinds of characters in our lives or in our fiction. In fact, one of the reasons we read fiction is because we identify with the heroine, who must act to achieve her happy ending or, failing that, to achieve wholeness. We look to fiction as entertainment, sure, but also as enlightenment: Here’s how Dorothy makes it home to Kansas; here’s how James Bond foils Goldfinger; here’s how Elizabeth Bennet (and Bridget Jones) wins her Mr. Darcy; here’s how Sherlock Holmes solves another impossible case; here’s how Piper Kerman survives her year in prison. The best stories teach us through action, not sermons.
Action conquers fear, monotony, lethargy, and plot problems. Without action there is no plot, only dead prose. Writing good action isn’t easy, but if you can do it, you can sell your work. That’s why I’m always on the lookout for authors who write action well. So open with action, and grab your reader. It’s just that simple—and that difficult.
Visualize Your Story
If your story were a film, what would you see on the screen? What would your hero actually be doing? How would you show us his peccadillos and problems, hopes and dreams, flaws and failures, virtues and victories?
One of the most affecting story openings is Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist. In this classic family drama, Macon and Sarah Leary are a middle-aged couple whose only child has died at the hands of a random shooter. We meet them as they are driving home in a rainstorm from a week at the beach. Sarah wants Macon to pull over until the rains stops. He says that everything is fine and keeps on driving, and she asks him for a divorce.
In the next scene, Sarah has moved out, and Macon is alone in their house. Macon takes advantage of her absence by devising a series of energy-saving systems designed to facilitate household chores, incorporating a number of eccentric home inventions.
Breakfast: Breakfast was your most important meal. He hooked up the percolator and the electric skillet to the clock radio on his bedroom windowsill. Of course he was asking for food poisoning, letting two raw eggs wait all night at room temperature, but once he’d changed menus there was no problem. You had to be flexible about these matters. He was awakened now by the smell of fresh coffee and hot buttered popcorn, and he could partake of both without getting out of bed. Oh, he was managing fine, just fine. All things considered.
—The Accidental Tourist, by Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler never tells us Macon is depressed, as any man might be in the wake of death and divorce. But in an accumulation of hilariously heartbreaking actions, she shows us a man drowning in grief—without actually using the word depression. This very short selection from The Accidental Tourist proves that action doesn’t have to mean car chases and bomb explosions. Action means characters doing things, and here, Tyler shows us what it looks like when a devoted husband and father loses what matters most to him.
Lights! Camera! Action Writer!
One of the best shortcuts to writing good action is to take a screenwriting class. This will help you learn to: (1) think cinematically, (2) write in scenes, and (3) transform thought into action for your characters.
Research Your Story
If you’re stymied by the thought of beginning your story with action, then do your research. The more you know about the time, place, and content that you aim to dramatize in your opening scenes, the better. And the more likely you are to discover a way into the story that you had not imagined before.
For her shattering masterpiece Paradise, Toni Morrison researched the all-black towns formed in Oklahoma after the Civil War by ex-slaves. She took that history and made it her own, creating “an all-black community, one chosen by its inhabitants, next to a raceless one, also chosen by its inhabitants.” And then she let the drama rip, starting with the very first line.
They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.
—Paradise, by Toni Morrison
Morrison says that she wanted this opening sentence “to signal (1) the presence of race as hierarchy and (2) its collapse as reliable information.” That devastating line of action did all that and more: It grabbed the reader by the throat and didn’t let go.
Research can prove the springboard for your opening scene’s action as well. When you get stuck, go back to the well and prime your story pump.
Enact Your Story
“I think of writing in theatrical terms, and generating raw prose on a blank page is roughly equivalent to performing on a bare stage in rehearsal. Do something. Take up space.”
—William Alexander
Storytelling is an elaborate and stylized form of the “pretend” game we all played as children. If you’re having trouble dramatizing your story opening, then step into the role of your protagonist. Act out what you mean to communicate in your beginning, the action you need to happen to get your story started.
In short, this exercise is why actors often make good writers. Take Hugh Laurie of Jeeves and Wooster and House fame, who acts, sings, plays the piano (among several instruments), and writes novels. Here are the first lines of his acclaimed thriller, lines obviously informed by his life as an actor.
Imagine that you have to break someone’s arm.
Right or left, doesn’t matter. The point is that you have to break it, because if you don’t ... well, that doesn’t matter either. Let’s just say bad things will happen if you don’t.
Now, my question goes like this: do you break the arm quickly—snap, whoops, sorry, here let me help you with that improvised splint—or do you drag the whole business out for a good eight minutes, every now and then increasing the pressure in the tiniest of increments, until the pain becomes pink and green and hot and cold and altogether howlingly unbearable?
—The Gun Seller, by Hugh Laurie
This beginning could be the ruminations of an actor considering how to approach a scene as easily as it could be what it truly is: the opening scene of a novel. When you’re looking for the drama in your story, imagine you are Hugh Laurie or the actor of your choice and write away.
If you have any actor friends—and all writers should—invite them over and ask them to inhabit your characters. See what they come up with, and play around with their approaches to your story. Sometimes two or three or four drama queens are better than one.
Go Big—or Go Back
There is no such thing as too compelling a story opening. From Jaws to Paradise, The Accidental Tourist to Pride and Prejudice, the opening action should be big enough to jolt your characters and your readers right out of their complacency, upturn the world as they know it, and blast them right onto the path of transformation.
Which brings us to conflict.
Impromptu
You’re writing a story in which the lead role is to be played on screen by Angelina Jolie. List fifty ways to show us that she’s depressed.
Now, do this same exercise once more. Only this time, do it for a male character to be played by Brad Pitt. When you’re finished, compare versions.
Note: This is also a great exercise to do with your writing group.
Writers on Action
Let’s take a look at some of the best advice from accomplished authors on writing action, and examine how it might work for your own story.
“Never mistake motion for action.”
—Ernest Hemingway
“I have a graduate degree from Penn State. I studied at Penn State under a noted Hemingway scholar, Philip Young. I had an interest in thrillers, and it occurred to me that Hemingway wrote many action scenes: the war scenes in A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls come to mind. But the scenes don’t feel pulpy.”
—David Morrell
“Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.”
—William Shakespeare
“… the writer must be a participant in the scene ... [like] a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camerawork, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character.”
—Hunter S. Thompson
“ … believable action is based on authenticity, and accuracy is very important to me. I always spend time researching my novels, exploring the customs and attitudes of the county I’m using for their setting.”
—Sidney Sheldon
“Good action films—not crap, but good action films—are really morality plays. They deal in modern, mythic culture.”
—Sylvester Stallone
“There is a comfort zone of knowing where things are going and having characters in place, but the action gets more and more dramatic and is very challenging to describe.”
—Jerry B. Jenkins
“Plot is a big pain in the ass. I work very, very hard on that, but I enjoy working on it because it has great rewards. ... I think when you’re working on the plot, you’re talking about ‘What does the character want?’ All the plot is the structure of the main character towards the achievement of one goal.”
—David Mamet
“All fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call ‘the plot'.”
—Margaret Atwood
“Drama is action, sir, action and not confounded philosophy.”
—Luigi Pirandello
“The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson
“Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.”
—Thomas Carlyle
Conflict
“The greatest rules of dramatic writing are conflict, conflict, conflict.”
—James Frey
Conflict is the currency of drama and the driving force behind action, but action alone does not a story make. That’s why video games make such terrible movies and, God help us, novelizations.
Merriam-Webster defines conflict in literature as “the opposition of persons or forces that gives rise to the dramatic action in a drama or fiction.” The most compelling action is the result of the conflict between those people or forces. Let’s take a look at the many kinds of conflict available to you as a storyteller and how you can use conflict to craft your story opening for maximum effect.
The Many Faces of Conflict
You probably learned about the four basic kinds of conflict—man vs. man, man vs. society, man vs. nature, man vs. self—in your high school English class, along with the rest of us. But writing now in the twenty-first century, we have even more options at our disposal than just these four tried-and-true types; modern literature scholars often also include man vs. fate/God, man vs. paranormal, and man vs. technology among the main types of conflicts. This is good news for us; as writers we need all the conflict we can get. All are plotting tools we can’t live without—and the more tools in our writer’s toolbox, the more opportunities for drama in our stories. Let’s examine each type of conflict in turn.
Man vs. Man
Man vs. Man is the conflict that pits your protagonist against your antagonist. Think of the opening of every James Bond film, when Ian Fleming’s one-of-a-kind spy 007 faces down the first of the story’s many villains. Or the discussion amongst the March sisters that opens Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, where they debate the unfairness of a Christmas without presents or their beloved father.
“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
“It’s so dreadful to be poor!” sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress.
“I don’t think it’s fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all,” added little Amy, with an injured sniff.
“We’ve got Father and Mother, and each other,” said Beth contentedly from her corner.
The four young faces on which the firelight shone brightened at the cheerful words, but darkened again as Jo said sadly, “We haven’t got Father, and shall not have him for a long time.” She didn’t say “perhaps never,” but each silently added it, thinking of Father far away, where the fighting was.
Man vs. Society
Man vs. Society is the quintessential story about fighting City Hall. Most dystopian stories fall into this category: Katniss Everdeen takes on the Capitol in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, and her first act of defiance occurs in the very beginning, when she goes poaching in the forbidden woods, trades her illicit catch for bread and salt on the black market, and volunteers to take her little sister’s place when her name is called at the reaping. We know right away in this first line that trouble is brewing.
When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. My fingers stretch out, seeking Prim’s warmth but finding only the rough canvas cover of the mattress. She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with our mother. Of course, she did. This is the day of the reaping.
Man vs. Nature
From the beginning of human time, the survival of our species has depended on our winning more conflicts with Mother Nature than we lose. Many stories open with her treachery: the cyclone that carries Dorothy to Oz, the storm at sea that shipwrecks the Swiss Family Robinson, the boot-destroying perils of the great outdoors that challenge Cheryl Strayed on the Pacific Crest Trail. Bad weather, wild animals, disease-spreading mosquitoes, venom-injecting snakes, and swarms of killer bees—Mother Nature at her worst—can make for very scary, literary storytelling. Consider the beginning of Ernest Hemingway’s classic The Old Man and the Sea.
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
Man vs. Self
Inner conflict—otherwise known as Man vs. Self—is the one kind of conflict that all good stories must offer readers. A character’s inner life can be revealed directly only in the novel; film, television, and theater cannot let us into the very heads of our heroes to hear all of their unspoken thoughts (the limited device of voice-over not withstanding). So every good story must open with this kind of conflict, inevitably ramped up by the other kinds of conflict as well.
For most coming-of-age stories, inner conflict takes center stage, beginning with word one. Think of Holden Caulfield, that poster boy for adolescent angst, who begins his narration of J.D. Salinger’s A Catcher in the Rye with this opening line.
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
Man vs. Fate/God
In Man vs. Fate/God, the conflict is between the protagonist and his God, or his Fate. The heroes and heroines of classic mythology always suffer at the capricious and often cruel hands of the gods and goddesses. In Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Oedipus does everything possible to avoid his fate but—spoiler alert!—ends up killing his father and marrying his mother anyway. Rick Riordan opens the first entry in his best-selling middle-grade series, The Lightning Thief, with his half-blood hero Percy Jackson taking on his pre-algebra teacher, Mrs. Dodds, a.k.a. Alecto, one of the Furies from Hades, and he wastes no time about it.
I ACCIDENTALLY VAPORIZE MY PRE-ALGEBRA TEACHER
Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood.
If you’re reading this because you think you might be one, my advice is: close this book right now. Believe whatever lie your mom or dad told you about your birth, and try to lead a normal life.
Man vs. Paranormal
Conflicts with the paranormal are very common in today’s storytelling. Vampires and werewolves, ghosts and demons, UFOs and aliens—all these creatures, and more populate the stories with this type of conflict. In the opening lines of Stephenie Meyer’s massive bestseller Twilight, heroine Isabella Swan narrates the tale of her own seduction.
I’d never given much thought to how I would die—though I’d had reason enough in the last few months—but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this.
I stared without breathing across the long room, into the dark eyes of the hunter, and he looked pleasantly back at me.
Man vs. Technology
In the high-tech world we live in, the threats of technology loom as large as the benefits. Thus Man vs. Technology is the timeliest of conflicts and can come into play in stories as varied as James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd’s The Terminator, in which Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese are pitted against the cyborg, and Spike Jonze’s Her, in which Theodore falls in love with his operating system. No one does Man vs. Technology conflicts better than Philip K. Dick, as evidenced by the opening lines of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the sober novel upon which the cult film Blade Runner was (loosely) based.
A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard. Surprised—it always surprised him to find himself awake without prior notice—he rose from the bed, stood up in his multicolored pajamas, and stretched.
Note: Here Dick cleverly breaks the rule about not opening with a character sleeping. He gets away with it because his character is literally shocked awake.
The more kinds of conflict you can use in your story opening, the bigger the impact on your reader. Think of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which so many types of conflict occur:
- Man vs. Man: Hamlet clashes with his uncle King Claudius, his mother Gertrude, and his beloved Ophelia, among others.
- Man vs. Society: Hamlet rages against the power of the monarchy, represented by his treacherous uncle, who has killed Hamlet’s father and married his mother, setting his dead brother’s crown upon his own head.
- Man vs. Nature: Hamlet’s beloved Ophelia, distraught by his rejection and her father’s death at his hands, festoons herself with garlands of flowers and falls into the weeping brook, and drowns.
- Man vs. Self: Hamlet is the king of inner conflict, and his indecision and melancholy contribute to his fall—to be or not to be, indeed.
- Man vs. Fate/God: Hamlet worries that the ghost claiming to be his father’s spirit may instead be an agent of the devil, and he hesitates to kill Claudius while he is praying.
- Man vs. Paranormal: Hamlet’s encounters with his father’s ghost disturb him and provoke his desire for revenge.
- Man vs. Technology: Hamlet uses a number of tools that might qualify as technology in his era—a poisoned sword, forged documents, the “play within a play” reenactment of his father’s murder, among others. The poisoned sword results in multiple deaths, including Hamlet’s.
Jump-Start
How might you arrange for your characters, like Hamlet, to experience each of these types of conflict? Brainstorm lists of possibilities for each kind of conflict; come up with at least ten for each type. Which combination would prove most effective for your story opening? Aim for at least three kinds of conflict in your story opening, one of them being the ubiquitous inner conflict.
“The story ... must be a conflict—and specifically, a conflict between the forces of good and evil within a single person.”
—Maxwell Anderson
Dialogue
“All the information you need can be given in dialogue.”
—Elmore Leonard
Readers love dialogue. Good dialogue is fun to read, moves quickly, and even looks good on the page. In fact, readers love dialogue so much that before they decide to buy a book, many readers flip through the pages to see how much dialogue is in the story. They can tell at a glance: The white space, indents, and quotation marks that characterize pages blessed by dialogue mean they’re in for an engaging read, as opposed to long paragraphs of prose with no dialogue, which promise a denser reading experience.
The best dialogue enlivens a scene, brightens the page, and provides much opportunity to reveal character and propel the plot forward. As Chuck Wendig says, dialogue is the “Swiss Army knife of storytelling.” What’s not to like? The trick is to write good dialogue. Doing so will impress agents, editors, and readers, but writing bad dialogue will immediately expose you as an inexperienced writer who has not yet mastered the craft. Here are the dos and don’ts of writing dialogue.
Do Listen to How People Talk
As a writer, your role as eavesdropper cannot be overrated. You need to get a sense of the rhythm and syntax of your characters’ speech and then enhance it. Your characters need to talk like real people, only better.
Think of David Mamet, whose characters talk like real people, only sharper, snarkier, and edgier. In his play Glengarry Glen Ross, Ricky Roma lambastes poor Williamson in a speech marked by venom and obscenity, the least of which follows.
You, Williamson … I’m talking to you, shithead … You just cost me six thousand dollars. Six thousand dollars. And one Cadillac. That’s right. What are you going to do about it?
Aaron Sorkin is another writer whose characters always talk like real people, only smarter, faster, and more articulate. Just look at a magnificent blip from the wicked-genius diatribe delivered by Jeff Daniels as news anchor Will McAvoy in Sorkin’s The Newsroom, where Daniels goes off on a co-ed about how the United States is failing its citizens across the board and is thus no longer the greatest country on Earth.
… none of this is the fault of a twenty-year-old college student, but you, nonetheless, are without a doubt, a member of the worst-period-generation-period-ever-period, so when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about! Yosemite?!
Note: This is a classic modern-day soliloquy; for the full speech, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zqOYBabXmA.
Judy Blume’s characters talk like real people, only with more honesty, vulnerability, and poignancy, as in this snippet of a scene from her ever-popular novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Nancy spoke to me as if she were my mother. “Margaret dear—you can’t possibly miss Laura Danker. The big blonde with the big you know whats!”
“Oh, I noticed her right off,” I said. “She’s very pretty.”
“Pretty!” Nancy snorted. “You be smart and stay away from her. She’s got a bad reputation.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“My brother said she goes behind the A&P with him and Moose.”
“And,” Janie added, “she’s been wearing a bra since fourth grade and I’ll bet she gets her period.”
Don’t Weigh Down Your Dialogue with Information Dumps
Many writers make the mistake of using dialogue to convey information and backstory.
“Gee, Mary,” said Harold. “I forgot that you are the incarnation of the Goddess Athena and that you only have six days to find the Owl of Knowledge before the world comes to a devastating end. What can I do to help?”
“That’s okay, Harold.” Mary held up her palm in a blessing. “I can initiate you now into the Order of the Owl, and then you can guide me through the Enchanted Forest and over the Mountain of Wonder, but we will have to watch out for the goblins and elves and giant spiders and bobcats as my spells are useless in the fourth dimension, and you as a human are so vulnerable that you could die of thirst, hunger, venomous bites, or exposure.”
Obviously, I just made this up, and it’s truly terrible, but you get the gist. And honestly, a lot of the dialogue I see in opening pages is not much better—and just as burdened with backstory and info dumping.
Dialogue must do one of two things (or do both): (1) reveal character and/or (2) propel the plot forward. The best dialogue does both and is not simply a way to “disguise” info dumping and backstory plants. You’re not fooling anyone when you burden your dialogue with backstory and info dumps, but you’re certainly sabotaging your ability to keep your readers engaged.
Breaking the Dialogue Rules
Bestselling author Wally Lamb opens his novel We Are Water with dialogue that does reveal a lot of information and backstory, but he does it skillfully, with content rich in the story’s themes of violence, race, and art.
August 2009
“I understand there was some controversy about the coroner’s ruling concerning Josephus Jones’s death. What do you think, Mr. Agnello? Did he die accidentally or was he murdered?”
“Murdered? I can’t really say for sure, Miss Arnofsky, but I have my suspicions. The black community was convinced that’s what it was. Two Negro brothers living down at that cottage with a white woman? That would have been intolerable for some people back then.”
“White people, you mean.”
“Yes, that’s right. When I got the job as director of the Statler Museum and moved my family to Three Rivers, I remember being surprised by the rumors that a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan was active here. And it’s always seemed unlikely to me that Joe Jones would have tripped and fallen headfirst into a narrow well that he would have been very much aware of. A well that he would have drawn water from, after all. But if a crime had been committed, it was never investigated as such. So who’s to say? The only thing I was sure of was that Joe was a uniquely talented painter.”
—We Are Water, by Wally Lamb
Do Use Dialogue to Reveal Character
On the very first page of Dashiell Hammett’s classic noir novel The Maltese Falcon, the author opens with private detective Sam Spade’s secretary entering his office.
He said to Effie Perine: “Yes, sweetheart?”
She was a lanky sunburned girl whose tan dress of thin woolen stuff clung to her with an effect of dampness. Her eyes were brown and playful in a shiny boyish face. She finished shutting the door behind her, leaned against it, and said: “There’s a girl wants to see you. Her name’s Wonderly.”
“A customer?”
“I guess so. You’ll want to see her anyway: she’s a knockout.”
“Shoo her in, darling,” said Spade. “Shoo her in.”
In these few opening lines, we learn a lot about our hero, Sam Spade. We learn he’s not drowning in work, that he enjoys women of all kinds, and that he has a congenial and loyal, if sardonic, employee in Effie, who knows him well and likes him anyway. We learn that he’s a pragmatist with an eye for the ladies who is not above flirting (or worse) with his attractive customers. We also get that any knockout named Wonderly is probably trouble. But Spade’s ready to shoo her in nonetheless.
We already have a good sense of our hero, and that’s a lot to accomplish in only a few lines.
Do Use Dialogue to Propel the Plot Forward
Dialogue is a great way to move your story forward right from word one and keep the readers reading. No one was better at this than dialogue master Elmore Leonard, as you’ll see in this clever and funny opening of his bestseller Freaky Deaky.
Chris Mankowski’s last day on the job, two in the afternoon, two hours to go, he got a call to dispose of a bomb.
What happened, a guy by the name of Booker, a twenty-five-year-old super-dude twice-convicted felon, was in his Jacuzzi when the phone rang. He yelled for his bodyguard Juicy Mouth to take it. “Hey, Juicy?” His bodyguard, his driver and his houseman were around somewhere. “Will somebody get the phone?” The phone kept ringing. The phone must have rung fifteen times before Booker got out of the Jacuzzi, put on his green satin robe that matched the emerald pinned to his left earlobe and picked up the phone. Booker said, “Who’s this?” A woman’s voice said, “You sitting down?” The phone was on a table next to a green leather wingback chair. Booker loved green. He said, “Baby, is that you?” It sounded like his woman, Moselle. Her voice said, “Are you sitting down? You have to be sitting down for when I tell you something.” Booker said, “Baby, you sound different. What’s wrong?” He sat down in the green leather chair, frowning, working his butt around to get comfortable. The woman’s voice said, “Are you sitting down?” Booker said, “I am. I have sat the fuck down. Now you gonna talk to me, what?” Moselle’s voice said, “I’m suppose to tell you that when you get up, honey, what’s left of your ass is gonna go clear through the ceiling.”
This is dialogue propelling the plot forward in a big way. And note how Leonard breaks the “never open with a phone call” rule of beginnings with such panache.
Do Make Your Dialogue Do Double Duty
The best dialogue both reveals character and propels the plot forward. Certainly in the scene from The Maltese Falcon, we know that everything is about to change when Sam Spade agrees to see this new customer, Miss Wonderly. That’s plot in action. And in the scene from Freaky Deaky, we not only see the action unfolding before us; we also get a real feel for Booker, his bodyguard Juicy, his girlfriend Moselle, and even the guy called out to dispose of the bomb, Chris Mankowski.
Here’s another example of plot and character revealed in a short snippet of dialogue, this one from the opening scene of Anita Shreve’s The Pilot’s Wife.
“Mrs. Lyons?” he asked.
And then she knew.
It was in the way he said her name, the fact that he knew her name at all. It was in his eyes, a wary flicker. The quick breath he took.
She snapped away from him and bent over at the waist. She put her hand to her chest.
He reached his hand through the doorway and touched her at the small of her back.
The touch made her flinch. She tried to straighten up but couldn’t.
“When?” she asked.
He took a step into her house and closed the door.
“Earlier this morning,” he said.
“Where?”
“About ten miles off the coast of Ireland.”
“In the water?”
“No. In the air.”
“Oh …. ” She brought a hand to her mouth.
“It almost certainly was an explosion,” he said quickly.
“You’re sure it was Jack?”
He glanced away and then back again.
“Yes.”
Here we see a woman open her door to the stranger who’s come to tell her that her husband is dead. We see how perceptive she is, how observant, how she knows before he can tell her that the worst has happened. And we know that the event that took her husband was no accident and that she’ll want to know the truth, no matter where it takes her. This is dialogue that works on many levels, revealing several aspects of the story, including plot, character, and foreshadowing of more terrible disclosures to come.
Do Capitalize on Subtext in Your Dialogue
Subtext is the true meaning of the words being spoken—what is left unsaid, in effect. We all know people for whom replying to the question “Are you alright?” with “I’m fine” rarely truly means “I’m fine.” The subtext here is often more like “I’m angry,” “I’m hurt,” “I’m frightened,” “I’m frustrated,” or “I’m homicidal.”
Similarly, we know people for whom a reply of “nothing” when asked, “What’s wrong?” rarely means “nothing.” The subtext here is often more like “I’m angry,” “I’m hurt,” “I’m frightened,” “I’m frustrated,” or “I’m homicidal.”
Use subtext appropriately, and you can amp up the drama of your scene exponentially. In the old days of Hollywood, when censors would have forced any direct mention of sex to be edited out, writers perfected the art of subtext as innuendo. Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart milked the subtext for all it was worth in this racy scene supposedly about racing in The Big Sleep.
Vivian: Speaking of horses, I like to play them myself. But I like to see them work out a little first, see if they’re front runners or come from behind, find out what their hole card is, what makes them run.
Marlowe: Find out mine?
Vivian: I think so.
Marlowe: Go ahead.
Vivian: I’d say you don’t like to be rated. You like to get out in front, open up a little lead, take a little breather in the backstretch, and then come home free.
Marlowe: You don’t like to be rated yourself.
Vivian: I haven’t met anyone yet that can do it. Any suggestions?
Marlowe: Well, I can’t tell till I’ve seen you over a distance of ground. You’ve got a touch of class, but I don’t know how, how far you can go.
Vivian: A lot depends on who’s in the saddle.
One of the most splendid examples of subtext in literature comes in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in the famous scene where Gatsby shows Daisy his shirts.
“I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall.”
He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher—shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.
“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.”
Of course Daisy doesn’t care about shirts; no rich girl ever cried over a shirt. She rejected the dynamic but poor Gatsby years before, and now he’s drowning in the money that’s paid for all those fine shirts. But Daisy is already married to the dull but rich Tom Buchanan.
Subtext is fun to read and very true to life. Readers love subtext because we spend our lives trying to figure out what people are really trying to say—or not say. So use subtext when you can; your readers will love you for it.
Subtext, She Said
Take one of the early scenes in your story, and rework the dialogue to milk the subtext. How does it change the scene? How does it reveal character and propel the plot forward?
Don’t Write in Dialect
Don’t write in dialect, and don’t spell dialogue phonetically. Ever. For the most part, it’s considered outdated even in the right hands and potentially racist/sexist/xenophobic in the wrong hands. Never mind that it drives editors crazy because (1) it slows down readers, often taking them right out of the story, and (2) it’s a pain in the butt to fix; they know they’re the ones who’ll have to fix it. So you’ll lose the sale of your book right there.
I know you sometimes see this rule broken—see “Dialects: Don’t Try This at Home” later in this chapter—but if you’re a debut author, you break it at your peril. You’ll invite criticism, rejection, and maybe worse if you do, and even should you succeed, it will most likely be in spite of the dialect, rather than because of it.
Do Use Word Choice and Sentence Structure to Indicate Speech Patterns
This is the preferred method of revealing ethnicity and place of origin today. Writers sometimes insist that they can’t infuse the flavor of their characters’ speech patterns into their dialogue without resorting to dialect, but they’re wrong. And their stubbornness is often what can derail them on the road to publication.
There are writers who have made it work, but they are truly masters of the craft. Let’s look at a few openings by writers known for tackling dialect, for better or worse.
You better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy.
DEAR GOD,
I am fourteen years old. I am I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me.
Last spring after little Lucious come I heard them fussing. He was pulling on her arm. She say It too soon, Fonso, I ain’t well. Finally he leave her alone. A week go by, he pulling on her arm again. She say Naw, I ain’t gonna. Can’t you see I’m already half dead, an all of these chilren.
—The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
“Jeeves,” I said that evening. “I’m getting a check suit like that one of Mr. Byng’s.”
“Injudicious, sir,” he said firmly. “It will not become you.”
“What absolute rot! It’s the soundest thing I’ve struck for years.”
“Unsuitable for you, sir.”
Well, the long and the short of it was that the confounded thing came home, and I put it on, and when I caught sight of myself in the glass I nearly swooned. Jeeves was perfectly right.
—My Man Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse
August 1962
Mae Mobley was born on a early Sunday morning in August, 1960. A church baby we like to call it. Taking care a white babies, that’s what I do, along with all the cooking and the cleaning. I done raised seventeen kids in my lifetime. I know how to get them babies to sleep, stop crying, and go in the toilet bowl before they mamas even get out a bed in the morning.
—The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
“Oh, Miss Inez,” Mrs. Reilly called in that accent that occurs south of New Jersey only in New Orleans, that Hoboken near the Gulf of Mexico. “Over here, babe.”
“Hey, how you making?” Miss Inez asked. “How you feeling, darling?”
“Not so hot,” Mrs. Reilly answered truthfully.
“Ain’t that a shame.” Miss Inez leaned over the glass case and forgot about her cakes. “I don’t feel so hot myself. It’s my feet.”
“Lord, I wisht I was that lucky. I got arthuritis in my elbow.”
“Aw, no!” Miss Inez said with genuine sympathy. “My poor old poppa’s got that. We make him go set himself in a hot tub fulla berling water.”
“My boy’s floating around in our tub all day long. I can’t hardly get in my own bathroom no more.”
“I thought he was married, precious.”
“Ignatius? Eh, la la,” Mrs. Reilly said sadly. “Sweetheart, you wanna gimme two dozen of them fancy mix?”
—A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
In these examples, the writers make good use of colloquialisms, speech patterns, and syntax to indicate dialect without overdoing it. But these are writers working at the top of their craft—and even then, they make risky choices. Toole was not published in his lifetime, and Kathryn Stockett was described as “a Southern-born white author who renders black maids’ voices in thick, dated dialect” by no less than the New York Times.
So again, when it comes to dialect, remember: Less is more.
Dialects: Don’t Try This at Home
Even in 1884, when Mark Twain first published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he worried that readers might not appreciate or understand why he used so many different dialects in the story, including these of Huck, Jim, and Tom, respectively.
You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.
Say, who is you? Whar is you? Dog my cats ef I didn’ hear sumf’n. Well, I know what I’s gwyne to do: I’s gwyne to set down here and listen tell I hears it ag’in.
Why, blame it all, we’ve got to do it. Don’t I tell you it’s in the books? Do you want to go to doing different from what’s in the books, and get things all muddled up?
So the great writer prepared people for the dialects by including a note to readers in the book, before the story’s opening.
The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.
I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.
That was back in the nineteenth century, and still Twain figured he might be on shaky ground. So here in the twenty-first century, well, just don’t try this at home.
Do Use Dialogue Tags Wisely
Nothing says amateur in dialogue faster than “creative” dialogue tags. Don’t use dialogue tags like queried, proclaimed, pondered, replied, grinned, screeched, expounded, etc. Stick to said, or use action instead.
“Don’t move,” she exclaimed. (bad)
“Don’t move,” she said. (better)
“Don’t move.” She pointed a pearl-handled pistol straight at me. (best)
Ditch Dialogue Tags Altogether
Craig Johnson never uses dialogue tags, preferring to only use action statements when he needs to identify the speaker. This takes enormous discipline, but it’s effective, as this exchange in the opening pages of his Walt Longmire novel Dry Bones shows.
“Hey, Omar.”
He started, just visibly, and spoke to us over his shoulder as he continued throwing pebbles into the water. “Walt. Vic.”
“What are you doing?”
He glanced at us but then tossed another stone. “Trying to keep those snapping turtles off that body out there.”
We tiptoed to the edge of the bank in an attempt to keep the water from seeping into our boots, and Vic and I joined Omar in his target practice, Vic showing her acumen by bouncing a flat stone off the shell of small turtle that skittered and swam into the depths. “Any idea who it is?”
Omar leaned forward and lifted his Oakley Radarlock yellow-tinted shooting glasses to peer into the reflective surface of the water at the half-submerged body. “I’m thinking it’s Danny.”
Even in this short exchange, you can see how using action statements keeps Craig Johnson focused on the bigger picture while he’s writing a scene—that is, how it looks, what’s happening, where it’s happening, and not just on what’s being said.
We’re not all Craig Johnsons. Writing an entire novel, much less a series of novels, without ever using dialogue tags requires vigilance and discipline. And it certainly forces you to weave other elements such as action, setting, character, and inner monologue into your conversations.
You don’t have to go that far. But reminding yourself to mix up dialogue tags with action statements is good practice. Too many writers tend to fall into stripped-down exchanges that read more like scripts than novels when they write dialogue. They miss the opportunity to weave in those other fictive elements and fail to write fully realized scenes as a result.
Jump-Start
Take a look at the dialogue in your opening. How do you identify who’s speaking? If you use any dialogue tags other than “said,” swap those out for “said.” Read it again, and compare it to your original. Now swap out all of your “said” dialogue tags for action statements. Compare that with your second draft. How did using “said” dialogue tags and action statements change the scene?
Do Not Break the Fourth Wall
Addressing the reader directly is called breaking the fourth wall. We see this in films, most famously in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, when Ferris Bueller talks to the audience, and in nineteenth-century novels, as when Jane addresses the reader in Jane Eyre.
Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonized as in that hour left my lips: for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.
Matthew Broderick’s beloved Bueller and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane aside, this is a very risky business. When you break the fourth wall, you jolt the readers out of their fictive dream—sometimes never to return. Worse, you taunt the reader, promising good things to come, telling them they’re not ready to hear this or that or to pay attention. Whenever you do this, you risk the reader saying, “I don’t think so,” and just closing the book. Readers don’t like to be told what to do; they are waiting to be entertained by the story, not told when and how to think about that story.
That’s not to mention that editors hate this, often dismissing it as an indulgence on the part of the author, and that alone will ruin it for some. So comb through your prose, and get rid of the sections where you break the fourth wall, wherever it appears. You may be reluctant to do that because it would mean losing what you may think (wrongly) are your best lines.
But do it; let the action stand on its own.
“Our eyes flow over dialogue like butter on the hood of a hot car. This is true when reading fiction. This is true when reading scripts. What does this tell you? It tells you to use a lot of dialogue.”
—Chuck Wendig
Theme
“For me, not knowing your theme until you’re finished is like using a scalpel to turn a kangaroo into Miss Universe—there will be a lot of deep cuts, and there’s a high chance it won’t work.”
―David G. Allen
Theme is what your story is really about, grounded in the emotions that drive us: the search for love, the desire for revenge, the lust for power, the need to belong, the impulse toward violence, and the instinct to nurture. The sooner your reader knows what your story is really about, the sooner they can relax into your narrative. Readers want stories that are about something, stories that enlighten as well as entertain.
Theme is where the enlightenment part comes in. Good writers know this, and they know what their stories are really about, and they tell the reader straight off in the opening lines.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
—Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
—A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
Be careful what you wish for.
—The Ice Queen, by Alice Hoffman
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
—Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
—The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion
When we read these beginnings, we are compelled to read on because we recognize the truths in their themes. We sense the scope of the stories to come—and we want to experience the journey for ourselves. As we see in these opening lines, the themes are right there, setting readers up and preparing them for the explorations of family, revolution, wish-making, courtship, and the very nature of life itself.
Opening with theme requires knowing what your themes are. What are the themes—light and dark—that drive your stories? Here’s a list of light and dark aspects of various themes that might apply to your work:
| THEME | LIGHT | DARK |
|---|---|---|
Love | Compassion | Hate |
Power | Leadership | Tyranny |
Desire | Lust | Obsession |
Sex | Intimacy | Adultery |
Loyalty | Fidelity | Betrayal |
Truth | Honesty | Lies |
Sensation | Pleasure | Pain |
Trust | Confidence | Doubt |
Admiration | Praise | Envy |
Crime | Justice | Revenge |
Family | Unity | Dysfunction |
Courage | Bravery | Cowardice |
Resiliency | Flexibility | Rigidity |
Sacrifice | Offering | Self-Immolation |
Generosity | Charity | Greed |
Friendship | Solidarity | Rivalry |
Self-Actualization | Growth | Stagnation |
Coming of Age | Maturation | Immaturity |
Faith | Belief | Skepticism |
Survival | Life | Death |
Peace | Détente | War |
Good | Indifference | Evil |
Money | Wealth | Poverty |
Forgiveness | Redemption | Punishment |
Nature | Wild | Unnatural |
Technology | Science | Inhumanity |
Make your own list of light and dark aspects of your themes. Ask yourself how those aspects drive the story you are telling and how you can weave those themes into your opening.
Look to Your Protagonist
If you’re still not sure what your themes are, look to your hero. His desires, feelings, motivations, and actions are all related to the themes of your story. Consider how you can reveal your theme in your opening through your protagonist as the following writers have done in their opening lines.
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
—Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
Here the narrator makes it clear that gender identity will be one of the main themes in this sprawling novel, which also explores nature vs. nurture, the American dream, and more. Readers are captivated by this direct and dramatic opening line and read on for the details of this transformation.
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
—Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
This classic opening lament of obsession prepares the reader for the story to come, a disturbing story about a man whose illicit love for a teenage girl remains controversial to this day.
In the time it takes for her to walk from the bathhouse at the seawall of Fortune’s Rocks, where she has left her boots and has discreetly pulled off her stockings, to the waterline along which the sea continually licks the pink and silver sand, she learns about desire.
—Fortune’s Rocks, by Anita Shreve
This very sensual beginning gives credence to the assertion that “she learns about desire,” and we read on to find out what the consequences of that desire will be—and we know there will be consequences.
I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old.
—Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson
In the opening line of Robinson’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning tour-de-force, we meet elderly Congregationalist minister John Ames as he attempts to write the story of his life and family history in the town of Gilead for the benefit of his seven-year-old son. We see from this beginning that this will be a story about faith, life, and death and all the temptations in between, and we read on.
As with these stories, the key to determining your themes is your protagonist: What does he want? How does she feel about it? What is he willing to do to get it? What does she need to learn to deserve it? Answer these questions and explore your themes, and then weave them into your opening lines. Showing your readers what your story is really about will help you engage your readers and keep them reading.
The Beginnings Rulebook Revisited
As we’ve seen, the rules that govern good story openings are not made to be broken unless you know what you’re doing and you’re sure the benefits outweigh the risks. The good news is that you should have a much better understanding of these rules and how to apply them to the beginning of your story so you can impress agents, editors, and readers with your storytelling. And when you do dare to break the rules, you’ll know the risks and write accordingly.
We’ve examined the main elements of fiction—the tools you use to craft your story—through the looking glass of the opening line, the opening page, the opening scene. But where do you go from there? In chapter seven, we’ll explore the rest of Act One—from premise to plot point—and its place within the story structure as a whole. We’ll also discuss the structural implications of genre, how the conventions of a given genre can affect the structure of your story.
“The writer who develops a beautiful style but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested aesthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger exercises but never gives a concert.”
―Ayn Rand