Hooked

Les Edgerton knows what he’s talking about. His eBook, Hooked, lays down the law about how to begin your novel—and how, most likely, your beginning could be much, much better. Making things worse, he doesn’t just expect you to take his word for it. He gives plenty of examples that buttress his point, like Island of the Sequined Love Nun by Christopher Moore, a book now on my to-read list. Look, here’s the deal: I know my writing has been changed for the better as a result of having read Hooked. I now approach everything differently.

Having said all that, it’s not that Edgerton’s research is the last word on how you should write your novel. After all, that’s up to you, and he doesn’t pretend it should be anything otherwise. What he offers is a kind of road map on story—a little like Bickham did—except with far more emphasis on the opening bits, which are, at least in the sense of one’s writing being a commercial endeavor, the most important.

At first the terms are a bit overwhelming (especially when Edgerton talks about the ten core components of an opening scene, blasting you upside the head with shoptalk terms you’ve probably never dreamt of), but as one reads on it becomes clearer. In fact, I highlighted the crap out of my Kindle edition because Edgerton constantly drops in these little nuggets of truth and profundity that sit up and beg for it. Examples? Sure:

“The first time a scene ends in success, the story is over.”

I’m like, WHAT?!

“A protagonist should not gain anything easily.”

Okay, yeah. I knew that. No really. I did.

“Summary doesn’t convince anyone of anything. Write that down.”

Hey Les, look: I wrote it down. And now I have a bunch of fluffy crap I need to go and delete elsewhere. Thanks a lot.

In fact, Edgerton’s book is so chock-full of great resources, you should stop what you’re doing right now and download it. Seriously. If you fancy yourself a writer, if you’re an indie author, if you’re published and agented and signed and successful, you should read it. It can only help you, and Edgerton points out other excellent resources too, like Bickham’s Scene and Structure, and like another I haven’t quite gotten to yet, On Writing Well by William Zinsser (I’ll just take Les’s word for it that it’s going to be outstanding when I finally do get round to it).

I’m not joking, this book will change your professional life as a writer. What I found most alarming as I read through Hooked is that I’d been trading mostly on instinct and raw talent. The emotional quotient to that, at least as an author, is pretty much just stark terror. I was ignorant of the structure, the rules, the order of Story. And I called myself an author?! Now that my mind has been peeled open a bit, I’m soaking this stuff up like crazy. I really can’t recommend it highly enough. Go get yours now.

Scene & Structure, by Jack M. Bickham

I found out about this book in the process of reading another eTome; Hooked, by Les Edgerton. Edgerton’s is an instruction manual for the modern author that induces a lot of #facepalm action, to say the least, and Bickham’s Scene & Structure is the same (More on Hooked in another post). In other words, if you’re an author or writer, or even an aspiring wannabe with good intentions and several partial chapter ones lying around, these books ought to be on your reference shelf. Period.

I edit manuscripts. I’m quite good at it, but this book has been a godsend, allowing me to refine my craft. Mostly what I’ve done in the past has been to follow my gut and play devil’s advocate, asking questions the author hasn’t thought of. I drop comments like this into the middle of everything: “If Jack is so smart, how come I figured Jill out three chapters ago? ARGH.” I also have an eye for spelling and grammar, which has served me well. But Scene & Structure goes well beyond all that, and it’s going to help me provide much more value for money to my clientele, as well as an increase in my rates.

On with it, then. Bickham starts small and simple by giving us the big picture. He outlines the structure of modern fiction, tells us how to begin a story and what’s essential—and furthermore, what needs to get deleted from or changed in our manuscripts (which in most cases will be a quite a lot).

What really hooked me, though, was his detailed analysis of the scene.

Scenes are where the action is. We see the characters on the stage of the mind’s eye, which isn’t a stage—it feels real. Edgerton calls it the “fictive dream,” which is apt. That’s why it’s so electric when it’s written well—and so awful when it’s total crap. Bickham’s book will illustrate for you quite profoundly if your work is in one camp or the other, because if you don’t have a story question that the protag has to answer, if you don’t have a scene question he’s also trying to answer, if you don’t have a scene goal he’s trying to attain, and if the scene doesn’t end in some kind of disaster—a setback—for the hero, you’ve got milquetoast on your hard drive. And miles of rewriting before you’re home.

Contrast that with sequel, which is really the antidote to scene, and you’ve got something with a pattern, a pace, an ebb and flow. Scenes drive the story forward. They contain problems and cause-and-effect stimuli. They’ve got guns and daggers and car chases. They goad us into turning the page. But sequel allows the characters to take a step back and internalize. Sequels read slower, so they’re usually more effective when they’re shorter. In a sequel, we get to see more of what the protag (or the villain) is thinking, what makes her tick; we get the backstory. We understand more of the why behind a character’s actions, and the author gets to set up the next scene for us. But in order to do this well, Brave Author needs to write effectively for Dear Reader. As “they” say, if you’re gonna break the rules, first you gotta learn ‘em. I would add that one ought to add a dash of reverence as well, because the greats are great for a reason.

The biggest danger to the indie author, who nine times out of ten is ignorant and uneducated about these things, is that most of us can “feel” our way through what makes a story compelling. But just because we can write by gut feeling doesn’t mean we should. It’s dangerous to guess your way through the disarming of a bomb. Maybe it will be the red wire that needs to be cut, but maybe it won’t. This plays into Booker’s SevenBasic Plots, too, because all of us have a hard wired intuition about story. We may not be aware of the precise nomenclature or structure of what makes a story work, but we know when it rocks and when it’s a dud. Bickham demystifies all that and reveals to the reader (the aspiring author) whether or not he’s been trading on hard-won skill and understanding or just raw talent. Ouch.

I cannot stress to you enough how important this book is. If you’re trying to make a hobby out of writing, it’s a stimulating read. If you’re at all serious about making a career as a published author, this book is required reading. As for me, I’m going to incorporate these lessons into my writing and editing. I’ll soon finish Edgerton’s book, too, and post up my thoughts on that. These two books are changing everything about my writing—and that’s a good thing.

11/22/63

Stephen King is one of the greats, for sure. I was completely transported by 11/22/63, a novel based around this one question: what if somebody had been able to stop the assassination of JFK?

King explains a little about it here.

I love that when I read one of his books, I’m completely unaware of the shoptalk side of novel writing. I’m just taken in and along for the ride. I think that’s a mark of excellence, if there is one. I had to force myself to notice that it’s written in the first person, that he juggles tenses, that he uses fragments, that he has lots of subplots going on in the background. I loved it all.

I was telling a friend that King must have done scads of research, because he completely nailed it. It wasn’t just the socio-political climate of the late fifties and early sixties, which was much closer than we are to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, World War II, the Cold War, segregation in the South and Jim Crow, and the kind of relations between the sexes that one can see in an episode of Mad Men. Not to mention the boozing and the smoking. Plus, it was before all those major watershed moments that have defined our contemporary world: the civil rights movement, Vietnam, the eighties obsession with materialism, 9/11, Y2K, the internet age, and digital this and that.

There were good parts to the fifties and sixties as well, and King nails those, too. Not that I was there. But I felt like I was. There was real root beer in real glasses. Ice cream made from real cream and sugar. Bicycles and paper boys. Telephones on kitchen walls, their numbers with the exchange letters as a prefix. Cars without any plastic in them or on them. Libraries with card catalogs. Banks without security cameras. And a whole bunch more that was implied or left to the reader’s imagination; another mark of excellence.

It was a world more innocent. It was delicious to linger there. It reminded me of my childhood a little, of low sunset light streaming in through single pane windows in a farmhouse kitchen that always had a certain aroma to it. It was like sinking into the perfect easy chair.

There was also, though, the lingering aftertaste of…well…dissatisfaction. If I could wish for anything, it would be a more tightly wrapped ending. There were a lot of questions left dangling out in the breeze because of one little detail at the end of the book. It didn’t cancel out the magnificence of the work, though. I’m more and more inclined to think lately that the great novels are like the master works on canvas: there’s no disputing the touch of a master’s hand, but one has to account for tastes and preferences in the reader too. After all, a story is an expression of the storyteller, and if the beholder doesn’t connect, he doesn’t connect. Authors spin a good yarn, but we're not magicians. I can amend that by saying some of us appear to be wizards. That would be King.

I connected with the vast majority of this book. King is still a little too broad-brush chummy with leftist Democrats and their assessments for my taste, but then again, he’s always been that way and I've liked him anyway. He managed to pull off a story centered on politics with reasonable poise and balance. He did it better than I probably could. But another thing I didn’t like: the love scene sections that were full-bore erotica. It was an endearing character study on humanity, sure. But it’s not my cuppa. And I thank God we don’t have a meddlesome federal government trying to protect us from books yet. The last thing I want is for my books to carry labels for content; I’m not complaining. “Just an observation,” as James May might point out.

What he wrote, and the skillful way he wrote it, is food for thought for me for the next little while. He managed a large cast of characters really well. Much better than another book I tried to read recently, which introduced ten characters on the first two pages; yikes. Nope. King is really good. This book was masterfully paced, clearly thought out, and a heck of a lot of fun to read. Good fiction is so hard to find these days. But not when it has these four letters on the spine.

Follow Through

Art can exist within the shroud.

I have to wrack my brain to remember, but I’m pretty sure the first time pen hit paper in regard to my debut novel K [phantasmagoria] was about two years ago. That would mean I started writing the first bits of the concept right about the time I was just starting to pull out of a debilitatingly vivid depression over what the experts call a “life event.” Suffice it to say that personal loss can drive an artist to produce amazingly potent and relevant work, which I believe this work will be. Never mind that it’s taken so long to write it.

It’s funny that when I set off on K [phantasmagoria] I wasn’t much of a writer. I didn’t know much about fiction beyond what Aldous Huxley and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had donated to me from beyond the grave. I had no concept of what passive voice might be. I was unaware of the dangers of direct address in fiction. I didn’t know the rules. So I started to make some of my own. I’m vaguely aware that it’s a no-no to use contractions in the narrative now. But I do it when it fits, for instance, because it just reads better.

Basically there are no sacred cows. Including that old chestnut about not dwelling over the work. And not re-writing anything until the rough draft is done. And the whole idea of NaNoWriMo, which encourages writers of all stripes to bust something out from start to finish every November. Sorry, mate. Not this time round, anyway.

You ever hear that old joke about how something happened on the way to the theater or whatever? Yep. It’s the same with me and my novel, only my novel is what happened to me on my way to finishing it. I’m sure someone out there can relate.

It’s not that it’s in need of salvage. Far from it. It’s just that, in a way, I started writing it too soon. Again, I’m sure there’s a writer out there who can relate.

All of this baggage conspires against completion, though, y’know? It’s true. Better to get things done quickly. Better to resist some of the more controllable, optional distractions and slug it out, get it done. All that conventional wisdom.

But as it turns out, all the delays and distractions have served a greater purpose. They’ve given me time to think my way through the plot forward and backward, get to know the premise, lay things out just right, fine tune everything…and learn how to write, let alone write a novel.

This is just to encourage you. Follow through on that project that’s been shelved for God knows how long and for God knows how many reasons. Follow through on it and start to finish it. It will be worth your time. Your effort. Because it’ll be as much a part of you as you are of it when all is said and done. Follow through.