Posts by Kathryn Craft
photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Many writers of contemporary fiction start their stories with their protagonist in a fairly low place, barely tolerating his existence. It’s a modern-day, first-world setup: without trees to chop and a cabin to build and fields to plant, our hero-to-be is disillusioned in some way, unable to kick into gear and effect change. Then something unexpected happens, knocking our hero all the way to rock bottom, from where he must either choose to change or die. It is a fight for psychological survival.
This is a hero’s journey that many writers have experienced. We may have plenty to say about it that could be meaningful to others who are struggling. It may even be the reason we write.
But when translating this story to the page, there is something writers often leave out: proof of your protagonist’s agency. We may care about the problem, but why should we believe this sullen soul is capable of showing us the way beyond his ennui?
You need to give us some hint, early on, that the protagonist has the potential to greet change head-on and conquer whatever obstacles might stand in his way.
To demonstrate how an author might embed such proof of agency, let’s look at the opening of Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love. Our narrator is octogenarian Leo Gursky.
Paragraph 1
When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, LEO GURSKY IS SURVIVED BY AN APARTMENT FULL OF SHIT.
Okey dokey. I think this “hero” will serve our discussion.
Continuing on with the rest of the long first paragraph:
I’m surprised I haven’t been buried alive. The place isn’t big. I have to struggle to keep a path clear between bed and toilet, toilet and kitchen table, kitchen table and front door. If I want to get from the toilet to the front door, impossible, I have to go by way of the kitchen table. I like to imagine the bed as home plate, the toilet as first, the kitchen table as second, the front door as third: should the doorbell ring while I am lying in bed, I have to round the toilet and the kitchen table in order to arrive at the door. If it happens to be Bruno, I let him in without a word and then jog back to bed, the roar of the invisible crowd ringing in my ears.
Paragraph 2:
I often wonder who will be the last person to see me alive. If I had to bet, I’d bet on the delivery boy from the Chinese take-out. I order in four nights out of seven. Whenever he comes I make a big production out of finding my wallet. He stands in the door holding the greasy bag while I wonder if this is the night I’ll finish off my spring roll, climb into bed, and have a heart attack in my sleep.
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Kathryn’s post today is part of the “All the King’s Editors” series, in which WU contributors will edit manuscript pages submitted by members of the larger WU community and discuss the proposed changes. This educational format is intended to generate useful comments on what changes work, which may not work as well, and in either case, why.
The posts will appear on WU ~twice monthly. Each participating editor will have a unique approach, and speak only for him or herself. If you’re interested in submitting a sample for consideration, click HERE for instructions.
* * * * *
Today’s submission is an excerpt from a second chapter. What happened in the first? I haven’t a clue. Has our point-of-view character, Luna, already set a story goal, and is she pursuing that goal in this chapter? I don’t know that either, although more explicitly goal-oriented behavior for Luna in this scene would (and should) clue me in. Clarifying the characters’ scene goals, and looking at how doing so can fuel higher octane writing, will be the focus of this developmental edit.
The main action in this opening is driving. The driving is not complicated by any story-relevant obstacle, so the action serves no purpose except as a container into which the writer can dump the character’s thoughts. This is a familiar part of the creative process: the writer casts around inside her character’s head for story motivation. The emotions she uproots are like an author’s note to self: these are the emotions that should drive the scene to come.
In order for the scene to grow in power, the author must go back and rewrite to make sure it is her character’s goals and motivations that are driving the scene. This is an important distinction. Story works because your reader bonds with your protagonist through her goals and motivations. Once it’s clear what Luna wants, we’ll orient to the story in a way that allows us to say, “Oh, Luna will love this” or, “Uh-oh, it’s not going so well for Luna right now.” Her desires allow our heartbeat to connect with hers, creating the all-important psychological tension that keeps us turning pages.
These explorations were clearly an important part of the process for this writer. While she stopped shy of determining what Luna wants by going to see Nico, she came up with some images that can be used to better advantage, such as the sunset and Luna’s concern for her appearance. She determined that Luna is having a tug-of-war between her head and her heart (or perhaps her mind and sheer sexual desire?—as yet unclear) in these pages. That’s good internal conflict, so let’s explore how we can externalize it so the story will leap out of Luna’s head and play out in scene, where it belongs.
Since we do not need to watch Luna drive in order to believe she got to her new location, I’d cut the entire first page here—all of the material between the red brackets, and above the asterisks I inserted to mark the suggested beginning.
As written:
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
When protagonist Josie Tyrell mentions that John Lennon had just been shot in the opening of Janet Fitch’s novel, Paint It Black, we immediately know that this story is set in 1980.
Having served its primary purpose, some writers would drop the historical reference and move on. Not Fitch. She makes such good use of Lennon’s death in her opening that one wonders if she chose that era just so she could have access to it.
Let’s look at how she drops this information into the second half of her first paragraph, after a few sentences that establish that Josie Tyrell is modeling for an artist friend:
Henry Ko wasn’t painting well today. He had to stop every few minutes to wipe his eyes on the back of his hand, while Double Fantasy circled around on the studio stereo. Everyone was playing it now. John Lennon had just been shot in New York, and wherever Josie went, people were playing the same fucking Beatles songs until you wanted to throw up. At least Double Fantasy had Yoko Ono.
Already Fitch has used the event to characterize Josie, who does not want us to forget the woman behind the man. But Fitch also uses the event to create subtext. I’ve added footnotes to show a connection to the story to come, illustrating how Josie’s perception of Lennon’s murder will weave into the fabric of her story:
On the cover that leaned against the dirty couch, John and Yoko pressed together for a kiss they would never finish.1 People were always trashing Yoko Ono, blaming her for breaking up the Beatles,2 but Josie knew they were just jealous that John preferred Yoko to some bloated megaband.3 Nobody ever really loved a lover. Because love was a private party, and nobody got on the guest list.
Then, Fitch adds in another, more esoteric historical fact:
Henry kept crying about John Lennon. Josie felt worse about Darby Crash. Darby had just killed himself in an act of desperate theater,4 a gesture swamped by the Beatle’s death like a raft in the backwash of a battleship.5
Back to the painter’s studio. When Ko ends the session, he and Josie get high together. More foreshadowing:
She toked along with him, knee to knee, and thought about the guy who shot Lennon. Shot by a desperate fan. On the news, fans were always desperate.6
Still high, Josie heads back to the cabin she shares with Michael, hoping he has returned home from his painting trip.
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Do you strain to find little bits of action to enliven your dialogue that rise above “he ran a hand through his hair,” “she raked her fork through her potatoes,” or my favorite riveting action, “he leaned in”? This scene from Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, suggests we may not be giving ourselves enough to work with.
The set-up: Joe Cavalier has escaped Nazi-invaded Prague and landed in New York City, where he hopes to create superhero comic books with his cousin. At an artsy party in a mansion belonging to the family of young Rosa Saks, he hurts his finger in an oddly heroic way. Rosa invites him upstairs to see her paintings.
The question tosses Joe into a quandary. Chabon then provides subtext that infuses the scene to come [portions excised for brevity]:
From the time of his arrival in New York City, he had never permitted himself to speak to a woman for pleasure…he had not come here to flirt with girls…he could justify his own liberty only to the degree that he employed it to earn the freedom of the family he had left behind.
Sounds like a no, right? But then Joe experiences an irritant that drives him into the very sort of scene he’s been trying to avoid: he overhears a German accent. Enraged, Joe says, “I would love to see your work.”
In excerpts from this long “getting to know you” dialogue between Joe and Rosa, which begins on p. 246, watch for two dialogue techniques that effectively bring to life this dialogue: misdirection and modulation.
Misdirection unfolds as if a deck of questions and a deck of answers have been shuffled together incorrectly. Because questions are not paired with their answers, the reader has to pay closer attention to understand what’s going on.
Modulation uses setting and narrative commentary to extend the scene’s complexity. Each spoken line invites the artful layering of meaningful detail or memory.
Yet Chabon isn’t all about craft here; he’s also using the nature of the dialogue to evoke the artistic process itself. Here are some examples.
“Speaking” is not limited to the characters
Watch as the room speaks to Joe of Rosa’s character.
In addition to her tiny, girlish white iron bed, a small dresser, and a nightstand, she had crowded in an easel, a photo enlarger, two bookcases, a drawing table, and a thousand and one items piled atop one another, strewn about, and jammed together with remarkable industry and abandon.
“This is your studio?” Joe said.
A smaller blush this time, at the tips of her ears.
“Also my bedroom,” she said. “But I wasn’t going to ask you to come up to that.”
There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not “decorate” it; she infused it.
The characters bring the setting to life as the setting brings them to life
We are told to use all of the senses; here Chabon offers good reasons to use them. Rosa goes over to the phonograph and switches it on.
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Busy readers love novels that pull them right into a novel’s core conflict. You’re busy—let’s see how it works.
Example 1: Bel Canto
Here are the opening sentences to Ann Patchett’s breakout literary novel, Bel Canto [additional lush sentences cut for length]:
When the lights went off the accompanist kissed her. Maybe he had been turning towards her just before it was completely dark, maybe he was lifting his hands. There must have been some movement, a gesture, because every person in the living room would later remember a kiss. They did not see a kiss, that would have been impossible. The darkness that came on them was startling and complete. [paragraph continues]
After raising this question of why the lights went out, Patchett uses a couple of sentences to define the context—those gathered had not all been opera lovers, for instance, although they are now—and then brings us right back to the room:
No one was frightened of the darkness. They barely noticed. They kept applauding. The people who lived in other countries assumed that things like this happen here all the time. Lights go on, lights go off.
She follows this with “the pleasant scent of candles just snuffed, a smoke that was sweet and wholly unthreatening.”
The stated lack of threat is, of course, fiction speak for “the threat is real and imminent.” Why had the candles also gone out? By page twelve we will learn that the loss of light in this South American home is a prelude to an invasion of guerilla soldiers planning a military coup. While Patchett will cut away several times in this long first chapter to contextualize why people from all corners of the world had assembled there that night, her initial focus on the kiss and the music promises that the politics of this story will focus on interpersonal relationships.
Example 2: Someone Else’s Love Story
Joshilyn Jackson uses a similar method to plunge us into the opening action of her women’s fiction, Someone Else’s Love Story:
I fell in love with William Ashe at gunpoint, in a Circle K. It was on a Friday afternoon at the tail end of a Georgia summer so ungodly hot the air felt like it had all been boiled red. We were both staring down the barrel of an ancient, creaky .32 that could kill us just as dead as a really nice gun could.
Three paragraphs later she backs up to tell us what had happened earlier that day in the life of our first-person narrator, adding a full fifteen pages of additional context before telling us how she, her friend Walcott, and her son ended up at the Circle K convenience store. Unlike Patchett, Jackson does not continue to baste this backstory to unfolding action at the Circle K. She doesn’t need to; we sense the eye of that gun trained on this character even as she orients us to her other current dilemmas.
Setting genre expectation
Both novels plunge us into armed conflict in the first chapter, yet they are not thrillers, murder mysteries, or suspense novels. To thwart such genre expectations, their authors used an interesting technique: they embedded their endings into their […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
For an outsider, life is a lock to be picked. It’s human nature to want in, and gain the acceptance that will let us rest easy in our skins. Outsiders become keen observers of how the walls between them and others are built, and how gates allow or deny entry.
Our emotions speak of the numerous ways we can be left out. Were you a geek? Sickly? A product of family dysfunction? Perhaps you had the ‘wrong’ skin color or body type, or drew the short straw when it came to birth order (#13, anyone?). On the flip side, perhaps assumptions were made because of your beauty when all you ever wanted was to be taken seriously. Perhaps you were destined for the depths but were plopped into a wading pool.
It didn’t feel good, did it? Don’t repress these painful emotions—lend them to your characters. It makes for great story.
Let’s look at examples of authors who have used the outsider perspective to propel them to bestseller status.
KL Going
In an interview on her website, this young adult author says she had an idyllic childhood growing up on the Borden (of dairy fame) estate. She was not a Borden. Her family lived not in the mansion, but in a small apartment in half of the property’s converted dance hall. (Hmm, outsider?) Of her work, she says, “I draw extensively on how I remember feeling throughout school. I’ve always been small and thin, (4’11 and ¾”!) but I’ve spent a vast amount of my life feeling like the ‘fat kid’—namely, self-conscious.”
Let’s see how she tapped those feelings in the opening of her wildly successful first novel, Fat Kid Rules the World, a Michael Printz Honor Book that became an award-winning film:
I’m a sweating fat kid standing on the edge of the subway platform staring at the tracks. I’m seventeen years old, weigh 296 pounds, and I’m six-foot-one. I have a crew cut, yes a crew cut, sallow skin, and the kind of mouth that puckers when I breathe. I’m wearing a shirt that reads MIAMI BEACH—SPRING BREAK 1997, and huge, bland, tan pants—the only kind of pants I own. Eight pairs, all tan.
It’s Sunday afternoon and I’m standing just over the yellow line trying to decide if people would laugh if I jumped.
Amy Tan
This beloved American novelist was born to Chinese immigrant parents, and time and again Tan has dipped into the deep well of this perspective to drive her fiction and memoir. Here’s the opening to her novel A Hundred Secret Senses:
My sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes. She sees those who have died and now dwell in the World of Yin, ghosts who leave the mists just to visit her kitchen on Balboa Street in San Francisco.
“Libby-ah,” she’ll say to me. “Guess who I see yesterday, you guess.” And I don’t have to guess that she’s talking about someone dead.
Actually, Kwan is my half-sister, but I’m not supposed to mention that publicly. That would be an insult, as if she deserved only fifty percent of the love from our family. But just to set the genetic record straight, Kwan and I share a father, only that. […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Understatement. Sometimes, it’s just the thing.
At certain points in your novel, in an effort to be explicit, you might be creating barriers of words that keep the reader from fully entering the story. They shouldn’t have to sift through the rubble of your exploded verbiage to find what it’s really about. Understatement invites your reader’s active participation by leaving small gaps into which the she can insert understanding from the vast warehouse of images in her own mind.
The authors we’ll look at today do an amazing job of guiding the reader toward a specific experience and then standing out of his way while he digests it.
Understated emotional peaks
Ron McLarty uses this mad skill to wonderful effect in his novel, The Memory of Running, right from the get-go. In the opening scenes, Smithy Ide is saying a poignant good-bye to his parents, who were in a horrific car crash on the way home from the family’s annual vacation and then whisked to different hospitals.
Smithy is a 43-year-old supervisor at a toy factory who makes sure the arms on SEAL action figures are assembled palms in. He describes himself as “fat and drunk and cigarette-stained.” This does nothing to endear me to him. I have a rough history with alcoholics, hate cigarettes, and was born to a fat-obsessed mother.
But then McLarty lays in an important line of subtext: “I would have given my car to anyone, right there, if I could have been sober.”
Bloody hell. Got me.
We’re only on page 19 when Smithy stands beside his dying mother. He listens to her little breaths. Puffs, really. He pushes her thin hair onto the pillow with his fingers, and says:
There.
That’s it.
McLarty doesn’t make the mistake of telling the reader his character feels helpless. He doesn’t have to—that one generic word oozes with helplessness that the reader can’t help but feel.
Note that while McLarty uses a generic word, he has not relied upon a generic feeling. Many openings at deathbeds and funerals fail to move readers because the writer assumes that all readers will feel sad at such occasions. Not so. Death is often a tragedy but it can also be a relief, a payback, a disappointment, a reward, or a simple closing of a door. McLarty succeeds here because he uses every blessed one of those first 19 pages to create within Smithy a mountain of character, so when he balances that one word “there’ on the summit, we’ll know that Smithy’s powerlessness extends to every aspect of his life.
If McLarty can pull this off in the first 19 pages, you can certainly use the entirety of accumulating subtext in your novel to say volumes in its one final image.
Understated endings
“Rosebud,” anyone?
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
We pulled up to the gate at Utah’s Arches National Park in an imprudent touring vehicle: a loaded U-Haul van. This would be our only sightseeing detour on the trek that would take my sister from her home in California to a new job on the East Coast. She paid the entrance fee and passed me a map. That one action would enrich our memory of the experience for years to come: the map was wrapped in a magnificent essay, “Rethinking Wall Arch.”
As our engine strained to take us up the final 1600 feet of elevation into the park, I read the essay aloud. The writing was so confident I was immediately struck by a sense of its importance.
If you’d like readers to say that your fiction conveys a sense of importance, here are some mad skills you can co-opt from this essay.
The plot focus of the essay is the final event in the life of Wall Arch, which at 71 feet long was one of the main attractions at Arches National Park. The author immediately establishes his unique perspective:
Sometimes I’m considered bad luck. Things tend to fall wherever I work.
After a brief laundry list of unfortunate events, we learn that Wall Arch collapsed the morning this writer took a new job at the park, which sets up a specific—and humorous—perspective. No one else could have written this piece quite this way (which makes it all the more startling that no byline was given. But I digress.).
We learn that Wall Arch has stood since “time immemorial”:
It was already curving gracefully when the Egyptian pyramids were still under construction. It stood defiantly while the mighty Roman Empire was collapsing an ocean away. It was still holding strong when the Declaration of Independence was being signed in 1776. And, most notably, it was still there on August 4 when everybody went to bed.
The way the author delivers us right back to his personal experience is a clever twist.
When faced with a calamity of epic proportions, the first thing we do is gather what facts we can.
One answer is fairly straightforward. Erosion and gravity reign supreme over sandstone. For countless eons, rain, ice, and groundwater slowly but relentlessly ate away at the natural calcium “cement” holding the arch’s sand grains together. Eventually there wasn’t enough of this cement left to withstand the pull of gravity, and so the whole structure finally came crashing down.
Facts alone rarely tell a compelling tale.
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
As avid readers, writers have an intuitive sense of when to include backstory. Their efforts, however, can come across as either boring (in the case of info dump), laughable (in the case of random irrelevance), or disruptive (in the case of backstory delivered too soon).
Clearly, these reactions are not ideal. What’s going wrong?
In each case just mentioned, the backstory inclusion is driven by the author’s goal to deliver information and not, as it should be in every scene, driven by the demands of the protagonist’s story.
The purpose of backstory is to motivate your characters for the actions they take in the current story. Unless something from the past had a powerful influence on the way the characters are acting now, you’ll be hard-pressed to defend the relevance of its inclusion. In fact, you may not have the chance to try—you may already have lost your reader.
Accept these cold, hard facts about backstory
One mad skill will address all three of these issues, and I’m shocked that more writers don’t use it.
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Stories open in any number of ways, but ultimately, all point toward the current circumstances of a character and his desire to work through some sort of initial, story-relevant task. As your reader peruses your opening, she will want assurance that this story will be worth her time. You can suggest that import by stitching opening action to context.
Even while pushing ever forward, backstory can provide that context.
In the way a dash of salt can either bring forward the full flavor of a dish or ruin it, you’ll need to use a light touch. Right up front is rarely the time to break away for an extended backstory scene:
The wood hissed and spat as heat built within the campfire. In the distance, loons cried out their haunting calls. A pack of coyotes yipped.
Uncle Bob rubbed his hands and then raised them to the fire, as if these motions were needed to conjure his tale. We all leaned forward so we wouldn’t miss a word.
But before I tell you what he said, you have to know a few things about Uncle Bob. Born in Syracuse, New York, he was quite the punster…
Kind of breaks the spell, right?
So how can we weave in the kind of context that will extend our story’s frame and strengthen its import, right from the start, without breaking the spell? Here are a few nuts-and-bolts examples.
Use continuity words
A word that suggests continuity or repetition is a subtle yet effective way to suggest there’s a larger story at play than the specific action you are about to read. Once the writer has hinted at a pattern, our own history with story kicks in: we know that this is a pattern about to be disrupted. Look how casually these simple yet impactful words are dropped into these openings (emphases mine):
From This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolf:
Our car boiled over again just after my mother and I crossed the Continental Divide.
From Waiting by Ha Jin:
Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.
From The Bigamist’s Daughter by Alice McDermott:
She is almost beginning to believe him.
From Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier:
At the first gesture of morning, flies began stirring. Inman’s eyes and the long wound at his neck drew them, and the sound of their wings and the touch of their feet were soon more potent than a yardful of roosters in rousing a man to wake. So he came to yet one more day in the hospital ward.
Prolific short story writer Alice Munro is a fan of this technique. She uses it to great advantage in these openings:
From “Walker Brothers Cowboy”:
After supper my father says, “Want to go down and see if the Lake’s still there?”
From “Dance of the Happy Shades”:
Miss Marsalles is having another party. (Out of musical integrity, or her heart’s bold yearning for festivity, she never calls it a recital.)
From “Material”:
I don’t keep up with Hugo’s writing.
Description as backstory
Literature gives us all the tools we need to enter a moment fully, evoking both a character’s past as well as his present. This can be accomplished right on page one if you set aside attention to his three-day scruff and her red, flowing locks to […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Among the advice indelibly ingrained in me from working at a newspaper for many years:
Oops.
Opening with one strong image invites the reader into the dark house of story by switching on a light in the entryway; opening with a list is more like assaulting the hapless guest with multiple floodlights. Instead of gaining the orientation he seeks, the reader is overwhelmed with images you’ve given him no context for sorting.
Some authors use lists to great advantage, however—and later, you’ll see some right in the novel’s opening. Let’s look at some examples.
Elizabeth Joy Arnold’s Promise the Moon explores a family’s healing after the young father’s post-Gulf War suicide. After a one-page introduction from the man’s wife, Arnold switches to the perspective of the young daughter, Anna. The list is found as this POV opens:
My dad was a hero soldier. I looked up hero in my dictionary, and this is what it said:
1) A person who is admired for great courage, noble character, and good deeds.
2) A sandwich, usually made with crusty bread, a.k.a. submarine, hoagie.
3) An illustrious warrior.
My dad was the number one and number three kinds of hero both. A double hero.
Seeking a dictionary definition not only shows Anna’s innocence as she tries to sort through a monumentally complex subject, it reveals her story goal: she wants to know her father. Other lists this character offers throughout the story, such as the top three awkward things people said to her after her father’s death, show that this is how she processes the chaos in her life. The humor promises that this book will encompass the full range of human emotions.
In my novel The Far End of Happy, an accumulation of lists suggests the burden my protagonist suffers while dealing with her husband’s downhill slide toward suicide. These include a fix-it list for the aging farm, a bulleted list of emotions she off-loads into her journal, mental health resources of which her husband would never take advantage, a list of creditors and amounts owed, and a list of reporters wanting to talk to her during the standoff.
Opening with a list
In a bold move, Colum McCann opens his novelization of dancer Rudolph Nureyev’s life, Dancer, with a list that is one-and-a-half pages long. I can almost hear my newspaper editor saying, “If you’re going to break a rule, break it big.” Here are a few of my favorites.
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
**Giveaway alert for Banishing Verona by Margot Livesey—see info at the end of this post! Now on with today’s topic…
If I set up a soapbox to read a politically charged excerpt of my novel in front of City Hall, one or two curiosity seekers might stop to listen. But if fifty thousand marched with me to City Hall, and we read in unison, not only would many more onlookers take notice, but the mayor himself would come to the window, the whole thing would be captured on television, and then become a YouTube #flashnovel sensation (hmm, promo note to self).
You know it to be true: the voice of a group is more powerful than the voice of an individual. Since the earliest staged tragedies, storytellers have made creative use of groups to comment with a collective voice on a story’s dramatic action. Known as a Greek chorus, its sole purpose was to amplify the effect of the action onstage through unison movement or speech.
Uses for a Greek chorus might be to:
The technique is still alive and well. In her debut, The Lace Reader, author and WU Contributor Brunonia Barry bolstered the perspectives of individual characters through a variety of Greek choruses. My guess is, the rich “types” of characters you might expect to see in her setting of Salem Massachusetts—witches, the religious conservatives who hunted them, and tourists—were the jumping off point for her New York Times bestselling novel.
Story is internal conflict made external
One reason we love story is the way it brings internal conflict out into the light of day, where we can more easily examine its components. Each of Bru’s groups amplifies one of the warring influences within protagonist Towner Whitney.
The witches
The witches, to me, represent Towner’s attempt to own her power as a woman as well as her inheritance of the gift of lace reading (a form of fortune telling). They lend heft to a passage like this:
Ann’s evolution into “Town Witch” was gradual. To hear Eva tell it, you’d think that Ann woke up one day and realized that she was a witch. In fact, it wasn’t a decision; it was an evolution. But her family history was what made her famous. The witches of Salem—the locals who have taken up the practice or the ones who’ve been practicing and have come to Salem because it has been declared a safe haven for witches—have all rallied around Ann Chase. They wear their association like a badge of courage, one that proves that the Salem witches really did exist here all along, a kind of “Look how far we’ve come” thing.
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
No matter how you look at it, a “hook” is a perfect metaphor for what your opening must accomplish. Held like a “J” it dangles bait, upside down it’s a question raised, sideways it’s a crooked finger saying come hither. One way or another, the hook asks the reader to bite into your story.
Today I want to look at the barb—that element the reader never saw coming that, once set, will not let go of her imagination. Let me take you back to 2002, when I was at Sewanee Writers’ Conference, to show you how well a barb can work.
Writers jump through hoops to attend this conference, for one main reason: the opportunity to gain feedback and glean wisdom from well published authors. Yet scheduled across from their workshops, in another venue, a stream of events unspools whose educational potency was underestimated by many.
Author readings.
Sound anticlimactic? I’ll admit that at first I didn’t get Sewanee’s emphasis on readings, either. But after a couple of days, as readings mounted into dizzying dozens, a cool thing happened. I started to get to know myself better as a consumer and writer of stories. What works for me, what doesn’t.
It was at one of those readings that bestselling author Margot Livesey showed how to set a hook deeply with an unexpected element. Livesey read the first chapter from her then novel-in-progress, Banishing Verona. It began:
He had replaced five lightbulbs that day and by late afternoon could not help anticipating the soft ping of the filament flying apart whenever he reached for a switch. The third time, the fixture in the hall, the thought zigzagged across his mind that these little explosions were a sign, like the two dogs he had come across in the autumn, greyhound and bulldog, locked together on the grassy slope of the local park. He had given them a wide birth; still, he had felt responsible when on the bus the next day a man turned puce and fell to the floor. By the fifth bulb, though, he had relinquished superstition and was blaming London Electricity. Some irregularity in the current, some unexpected surge, was slaughtering the bulbs. He pictured a man at head office filling his idle minutes by pulling a lever. Meanwhile, hour by hour he emptied the upstairs rooms, slipping the bulbs from bedside lights and desk lamps.
He had just replaced the fifth bulb when the doorbell rang.
Lightbulb filaments as portent—cool, right?
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
A story isn’t powerful because of what happens, but what changes in your characters because of what happens. Those changes must be rendered with a deft hand so the reader enjoys a sense of discovery as small changes become larger changes in a subtle yet discernible way. These changes comprise what are known as narrative arcs.
The medium of story offers us many ways to show such movement that are more engaging for the reader than “first she felt this way and then she felt that.” In her novel, Henna House, author Nomi Eve made an effective barometer out of the protagonist’s interest in an activity—the application of henna.
Arcs are threaded through scenes over the course of a novel. Plucking them for analysis in a blog post isn’t easy. But why let that stop me? Here, without giving too much away, I hope you can gain inspiration from the many pulse points Eve’s henna arc was able to touch.
Henna as character desire
Henna House is a story of Adela, who at the start is a Jewish child living among Arabs in the Kingdom of Yemen in 1923. Why mention a child with reference to coming of age? It is when she is five that Adela is first betrothed. Her parents’ health is failing, and if she should become orphaned, she will be taken from her family and adopted into the Muslim community. To protect her from the Confiscator’s clutches, her parents create a marriage contract that will go into effect as soon as she menstruates.
Adela is in no rush to grow up, save for one thing: she is enraptured by the elaborate patterns of henna she will not be allowed to wear until she becomes a woman. Until then, Adela watches “greedily” as the women of her community adorn one another. Telling the story from the perspective of someone who desires henna instead of, say, from the perspective of the henna dyer herself, was a great choice. Intense desire bonds us to Adela, and sends her along her arc.
Henna as culture-made-personal
Henna doesn’t make an entrance until Adela’s cousin Hani moves to town on p. 85, but oh what an entrance it is—Hani is a year older and “the fanciest creature” Adela has ever seen, decorated head-to-toe by her mother, a henna dyer.
I learned that night that the only way to know that girl, to know her truly, was to know her henna.
Because of the way Eve sets up her story, the culture of Yemen itself creates the push-and-pull that will keep us turning pages. Along the way we learn rich details about the alchemy of creating henna dye, as well as the mechanics of its application with a stylus.
Henna as indirect emotion
Such details aren’t info dump; in Eve’s hands, they create opportunities for henna to carry emotional load in the novel.
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