It’s Your Party

Whilst driving back from the office supply store the other day, my car radio graced me with Rick Nelson’s 1972 hit, Garden Party

And here came the lyrics that have such meaning for writers:

You can’t please everyone,
So you’ve got to please yourself

The story goes that this song came about because of a concert that Nelson did in which he had changed markedly in appearance, with shoulder-length hair instead of his usual bob. He played a couple of his old hits, and then started playing Country Honk, a country version of a Rolling Stones hit, Honky Tonk Women. The crowd booed. It upset Nelson hugely, and he walked off the stage. He wrote Garden Party about that experience of breaking the “rules” about what kind of songs he should play and how he should look.

Rules, Schmules!

But Rick’s experience turned out to be a career-changer for him. He moved into a country sound and is credited for having created the country rock genre. And Garden Party became his last big hit song.

We writers encounter all kinds of “rules” that purport to guide us in the best ways to tell a story.

Whenever a submission to my blog, Flogging the Quill, starts with a single-sentence paragraph, one of the writers who contributes regularly to the critiques, often with good insights, feels strongly that a narrative should NEVER start with a single-sentence paragraph, and that it’s not good form to do so.

Hmm. Allow me to pick up a couple of books on my table. Ah, here’s bestseller Tess Gerritsen’s latest, The Silent Girl. I read it and enjoyed it thoroughly, and even gave it a “storytellers review” on my blog. It begins with this paragraph:

All day, I have been watching the girl.

Sure enough, that critic gave a comment that said, “The single-sentence-paragraph opening is gratuitous.” Not for me. Its singularity allowed it to stand out for maximum impact, and enabled it to instantly raise a ton of story questions. There was no way I could not read more. This is, by the way, the function of the first sentence in a story—to get the reader to read the next one.

And here’s the opening paragraph from Erin Morgenstern’s debut novel (getting tons of praise), The Night Circus:

The Circus arrives without warning.

Again, story questions run rampant in my mind. No warning? Why? Who ever heard of a circus coming to town without being preceded by tons of hoopla? Mysterious, eh? A little further down the page, you are rewarded with more mystery, a sign on the gates that says “Opens at Nightfall, Closes at Dawn.” Really? I want to read more—I haven’t yet, but this one is next.

I’ll bet you’ve heard this one:

Never start a story with a dream. Never. Never-never-never.

I think this “rule” came about because of stories that started with a dream but didn’t let the reader know that it was a dream, and then suddenly came the “then she woke up” part, and that was hugely disappointing to readers.

Sure, don’t start with a dream in that way. The reader rightfully feels cheated. But now it’s a knee-jerk judgment—”Oh, you started with a dream. How wrong. Bad show!”

But is it automatically the wrong thing to do? Is there no way to begin a narrative with a dream that serves both the reader and the story? I’ll admit, not knowing this “rule,” the first page of my novel, “We the Enemy,” a character-driven political thriller, opens with a dream in progress. But italics signals that it’s not the main narrative, and then . . . well, see for yourself. The first page:

The young woman laughed and swung the child back and forth.

Words came from Jake, but he couldn’t make them out because they were muddied and slow, as if made of molasses.

The woman frowned at him. She pulled the child in and said underwater words that made no sense. The look on her face was angry. Wild.

A nasty mechanical buzz blasted him—his alarm clock yelling at him. Jake groped and turned it off, then realized that he was holding his breath, his jaws clenched.

Why?

As he did every morning, he turned to a snapshot in a plain black frame on his nightstand—Amy in her favorite flowery party dress, forever five years old. He touched the tiny silver crucifix hanging from the frame by its chain. Amy wore it in the picture.

Why could he see her face in the photo but not in his memory? The crucifix glittered, and he couldn’t look at her picture any more.

He swung out of bed and his foot came down on an empty wine bottle. God, his head hurt—the price of self-medication. He scowled at all the damn sunshine coming in the window.

Should he blow off his meeting with the attorney general of the Unites States? After she’d come all the way to Chicago so she could keep the meeting secret? Should he stiff a woman who has lots of (snip)

I hope you don’t feel cheated. The dream bears on his internal conflict, and how he reacts to it testifies to the conflict inside him, and the reader sees it. Hey, it works for me.

So you’ve got to please yourself

Writers are never without feedback and input. Hell, we seek it out with critique partners and groups, we pay editors for it. And we get plenty that’s diametrically opposite, both boos and cheers. I think the way to handle all that, especially in the writing stage, but after you’re published, too, is to listen, think, analyze—and then do what resonates with YOU, with your muse, with your sensibilities. Some of it may be a form of fertilizer, but fertilizer stimulates growth.

Yeah, you may never be published if you do that . . . on the other hand, you could end up with a hit.

I say that if your narrative does what you want it to do—creates a story that COMPELS a reader to keep reading—there are no rules, just results.

How about you? What “rules” do you hear? And which ones have you broken?

For what it’s worth.

Image by ~complejo.