I have a Kindle Unlimited subscription, so I start a lot of self-published books. Many of these are bad (don’t take this the wrong way: 90% of everything is bad).
I don’t want to criticize specific people or their writing, but I really want to dig into some of the fundamental problems with some passages I’ve found out in the published world.
I’ve decided that I’m going to take real passages and change the verbs and nouns and names (but in a way to not create a new problem). This is so you can’t go find the passages easily.
Most of the time proper grammar and so on is used. It’s even possible they hired an editor. The issue is that when certain fundamental problems exist, the work isn’t ready for an editor.
The Opening Scene
Here is the opening passage to a novel. Sorry for how long this excerpt is, but context is needed to understand the fundamental problem:
A 23 year old girl named Veronica who had just ended her relationship with her boyfriend found herself alone. After a few years of being with him, she decided to follow her instincts and have a relationship with an older man. Veronica had always been with people her own age but she secretly found them immature.
One day in the afternoon Veronica was bored at her house and decided to go out and visit some friends to chill and have some fun. When she got to their house, they were talking to a coworker named Sam …
We could take a few directions with this.
First off, every single one of those sentences is telling the reader what happened instead of showing it. In addition, most of what we’re told is completely irrelevant. An agent or publisher wouldn’t have to read any further to know it was a hard reject.
It might be instructive to see how to change some of this to show more and tell less. Let’s do that for a moment, but there’s actually a more fundamental problem than that.
Find important information; cut the rest.
First, let’s think about what’s actually important in the first sentence. The age we can later infer. The relationship ending is inferred by the last part of the sentence. Already we could make a much stronger opening by changing that to:
Veronica found herself alone.
This conveys the same information in a much less clunky way. Strings of glue words like “who had just” should always throw up red flags.
The rest of that opening paragraph is also unimportant. We can show all of it better through action or dialogue.
“One day in the afternoon” and “was bored at her house” can be converted to showing. Never say “one day.” However you proceed, it will be assumed that it is a day (unless it’s night, of course).
Convert to Action
The heat of the afternoon sun beat on Veronica’s skin as she lazily flipped through the latest Cosmopolitan.
Now we’ve given the character some action that slips in the time of day and shows her being bored. With specific details like the magazine title, we’re developing characterization.
Imagine how you’d feel if instead that had said Popular Mechanics or Harper’s. It’s already infinitely better, but if we try to convert the next part, we’re going to run up against the more fundamental problem I alluded to.
There’s no good way to transition to the upcoming house party scene. We have to spend a full scene with her being bored at her house, or we should probably skip it.
Start in the Right Place
Here’s the fundamental lesson: make sure the story starts in the right place.
The original first paragraph is backstory and told motivation. There’s no need for either. The “being bored” is irrelevant.
This novel actually begins at this party scene where she’s going to try to start dating this older man.
I tend to think of novels having two good opening strategies. One is poetic scene-setting or character description. I know that’s gone quite a bit out of favor recently, but most of the masters did this.
This sets a patient tone for the novel. Here’s the opening to Steven Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon (Malazan, Book 1):
The stains of rust seemed to map blood seas on the black, pocked surface of Mock’s Vane. A century old, it squatted on the point of an old pike that had bolted to the outer top of the Hold’s wall. Monstrous and misshapen, it had been cold-hammered into the form of a winged demon, teeth bared in a leering grin, and was tugged and buffeted in squealing protest with every gust of wind.
The inventive description draws you right in. There’s no need for action because so many of the descriptors paint in an active way: stains, blood, squat, bolt, monstrous, demon, teeth bared, leering, and more. This is all just a description of the setting!
Vivid Description
We could easily do this with the example we’re trying to fix. We could dwell on the house for a while before getting to this other idea:
Fragments of sunlight cut through the clouded sky to illuminate a small bungalow on a hill. Veronica glanced out the window at her garden—at how the raindrops refracted the light on the silvery wormwood leaves. The storm had broken. Three days of being cooped up was about all she could take.
This is getting more advanced than I want this “fundamentals” series to be.
Here’s the idea.
External Description as Internal Character
If Veronica is sad about the breakup, we can symbolically illustrate this with the storm. Now that she’s about to go to this party, the sun coming out foreshadows things getting better.
She’s coming out of the post-breakup depression (and we even worked in why she was bored since this was so important to merit mention to the original author!).
So if we absolutely must start the novel bored at the house, we should use inventive description to paint vivid pictures and draw the reader in like this.
But honestly, I still feel quite strongly that this “bored at the house” idea was merely lazy writing and not the true beginning.
The more common advice these days is to start in media res, meaning in the middle of some action.
In Media Res
But in the case of the example we’re trying to fix, there’s no need for actual “action.” All this means for us is to start where the actual story starts. All the stuff that came before it was unnecessary. It will be inferred later or was too unimportant to care about.
Veronica circled the party in a slow and deliberate prowl. She watched Sam as he talked to people she didn’t know. He had a streak of silver in his brown hair, a hefty square jaw covered in stubble, and those piercing green eyes. She thought to herself: age is just a number.
Oh. What in the world is going on here? We know the man is older by the physical description, but we create mystery by leaving the exact age difference hidden.
We don’t know whether to be intrigued or disturbed yet. She’s on the prowl but why? It’s the action of the scene right upfront.
And don’t think that a good editor will tell you any of this (they’ll be thinking it, though!). Editors can only fix so much. If there’s a true fundamental problem like this one, it requires a rewrite.
Editors edit. A rewrite is part of “writing” and beyond the scope of their job. They might be generous and write things like “telly,” but you’ll have to understand that what they mean is what’s in this post.
