Better Than Dead

If by chance you missed this over at Nathan Bransford’s blog, Valerie Kemp has written an excellent guest blog on the subject of first chapters.

It’s got me thinking of my own first chapters from my finished novels and analyzing why they succeeded or failed. Ms. Kemp makes the excellent point that a first chapter is a promise to the reader about what the rest of the book is going to be like. If it’s a high-action chapter, the reader probably expects the rest of the book to be high-action. If it’s leisurely and contemplative, then that projects into the reader’s mind a much different book.

She makes a number of excellent points which I won’t reiterate here—go read the original. But that concept up there in my previous paragraph is one of those should-be-obvious things that often gets overlooked. I know I’ve overlooked it many times. Sometimes I catch it in the rewrites and make good on that promise to the reader, sometimes not.

I’m thinking in particular of my third novel, Shivery Bones. The first chapter was an action-filled chase scene involving the hero, Ezra. Very in media res, and at the end a burst of unexpected magic. Which was gripping, but not reflective of the story as a whole. Oh yeah, there were actiony bits, more fights and chases, and throughout the book I like to think there were bursts of unexpected magic, but the bulk of the story was much more about the internal journeys of the hero and the heroine, Jolene. She has to learn to love and trust again after terrible tragedy and to accept the natural cycle of life, and Ezra…well, pretty much the same thing, with the added twist of realizing that true love is sometimes about sacrificing your own best interests for the sake of someone else.

None of that was in my first chapter. An early critter said something of the sort to me. “If I didn’t know you wrote more contemplative books, I probably wouldn’t have read on since this chapter has a lot of adrenaline going on.” I ignored that criticism, thinking it beside the point. Very late in the game with this novel, after I’d sent it out many times, I realized the truth of this insight. But it took a rejection from an agent to drive that nail home: “The rest of this book wasn’t what I expected from the first chapter.”

I wrote a new first chapter which at least had a more contemplative and mysterious vibe to it—centering on Jolene this time rather than Ezra, then transitioning into the action chapter. I think it makes a stronger novel. Unfortunately, during the years I tried selling it with its original first chapter, the market has become saturated with certain tropes used in the story, making it a hard sell, with diminishing chances it would sell. I’d moved on to novels four, five, and six so reluctantly trunked this one.

Would it have fared any better in the market if I’d taken my early betas advice and written a new chapter one back then? Absolutely impossible to say. There are probably other flaw bombs in there that haven’t yet exploded in my consciousness. But I do know that writing a new first chapter was the right thing for this book, and the right thing in terms of that implied promise to the reader.

I like this combining old novellas with new WIPs thing. It means hitting patches where I’ve got a new chapter in two days, like I’m writing really fast, when usually I’m…not quite so fast. Maybe I’ll do this for every novel from now on. I’ve got a trunk full of old novellas, stories, and novel partials. Maybe I should spend my time figuring out how to make the dear old things work and cleaning them up rather than coming up with, yanno, fresh ideas…

Or not.

But it sure is fun to drop a bunch of text into the manuscript and spend two days twiddling and poking and prodding rather having to crank it out.

And so it goes.

Chapter 4 is complete and chapter 5 is started.

I’ve also decided my opening paragraph sucks big suck monkey straws, but I am not going to fix it again. I’m pushing forward to a completed draft. Since I’m so big on giving other people that advice.

It’s both disturbing and gratifying to read old stories I haven’t touched in a few years. Gratifying because I can see the progress I’ve made as a writer; disturbing because I realize that stories I think are pretty danged good at this moment in time will probably make me cringe at some future reading. Not all of the old stories make me cringe, fortunately, but sometimes, as now when I am rereading a novella from some years ago, I wonder what kind of line of self-delusion I might be walking. Reading this poor old thing just makes me so tired, so much so that I wrote this blog post during my writing time rather than continue reading it. Back in the day, I thought it one of the best things I’d written. It even got some recognition as an Editor’s Choice on the Online Writing Workshop. And maybe it was the best story I’d written at that point in time.

The other cringe-making thing is that I reworked this novella so many times I edited some of the life out of it. Now that I’m incorporating it into my WIP, I’ve gone back to an older version to compare/contrast. Some of what I cut out to streamline can probably be added back into the novel with no harm, reincorporating some of the richness that got rinsed away.

Or I may wind up cutting it out all over again.

That’s the thing about writing. One has to stay true to the current moment: pushing and expanding outside the comfort zone, climbing the next hill, and the next. I have to keep learning my craft, not resting on what I learned last year or the year before. It’s a constant climb up the rock face, scrabbling for finger and toe holds. Sometimes when one reaches a plateau, one can take a break, but there will always be another rock face. I can’t worry that some future plateau will show me what a hash I made of the last plateau and the stories it contained. I have to stay true to where I am now, either climbing or resting, and realize I’m doing the best I can now with the tools I have provided myself. And the tools that each day of writing helps me develop.

Random quote of the day:

“If I were a daring detective, I would think of a way to get the receptionist and nurse out of the way to look through the files of the dead boys.  But I wasn’t, and there wasn’t an excuse on this earth that would get the receptionist, the nurse, and the doctor out of the way long enough for me to do more than roll open the relevant drawers.  Women did this all the time in movies and on television.  They must have better scriptwriters.”

—Charlaine Harris, An Ice Cold Grave

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Two weeks ago I spent most of the week plumping up chapter one of my WIP and adding detail; last week I spent a good amount of time cutting back some of that detail (about two pages).  The result was that I had a solid start and now feel no itching need to rework it again until I have a finished draft.  Or, yanno, about halfway through when I start to panic.  But that’s another post.

I finally started on chapter 3 at the end of last week, but the crud knocked me flat and I didn’t do much new writing for four days.  The latter half of his week I’ve been inching forward again.  I think I finished chapter 3, but it’s a shorter-than-normal chapter.  I’ll have to go back over it before I decide if I’m starting chapter 4 now.  My MC (Molly) is doing web research to find out about a mystery man.  She’s sitting in her room in the Boar and Lion Inn in the fictional Somerset town of Tildham.  Really, the scene isn’t as boring as it sounds.  Really…

I’m only slightly disingenuous there.  The opening of the scene does a great deal of in situ describing, the kind of detail that I know, even as I’m writing it, will have to be cut or reduced.  But I have to write it that way the first time through.  It’s the way I make the setting come alive in my skull.  Once it’s a living entity inside me, I can skinny it down in later drafts, but that first time through is for me.

I love that little room that Molly’s sitting in, though it really isn’t much to look at.  It very much harkens back to a tiny room I stayed in for a couple of days on my second trip to England, in a little village called Coxley, on the Glastonbury Road between Wells and Glastonbury.  I have such lovely memories of that place, and it’s been fun ensorcelling them back to life in my head.  I loved that room—or rather, I loved the inn itself and the countryside around it.   At one time it had been a farm, so it wasn’t in Coxley village proper.  Open fields stretched on either side, and black and white cows roamed the one outside my window.  The fence was quite close to those windows and sometimes when I opened the drapes, a big bovine head would be leaning over it to stare in at me.  I may have mooed at them a time or two—not saying I did, just that it is a possibility.

I drove by it again during my trip in 2004, or thought I did—quite disappointed because the area was more built up than I remembered.  The place I tentatively identified to my friends as the inn was now surrounded by other buildings.  Turns out, I was wrong.  I found the correct place on a Google satellite yesterday from 2007.  It’s still there, still as I remember it, surrounded by open fields.  And it isn’t creepy that I looked it up because, like, I’m doing research for a story, right?

That’s one of the great things about writing.  Getting the details right is a great excuse to get nosy, maybe even a little creepy.

Still home with the crud, but there are signs that health may be returning. I will almost certainly go back to work tomorrow.

I’ve felt blech since Saturday so I haven’t touched Sympathetic Magic since my regular writing session on Friday. *sigh* I hope to get back to that tomorrow, too, but I haven’t had that kind of concentration. I worked through some scenes in my head as I laid around feeling blechy. Hopefully I haven’t forgotten what I figured out in the interim. It seems a bit vague now, but I’m hopeful that when I re-read the previous session from Friday, it will all come back to me.

I have done some reading-for-critique so I haven’t been totally useless. I’ll have to go back over those comments when I’m fully sane just in case…I wasn’t fully sane when I made them.

Life creeps forward, and so do I.

Once I gave my main character, Molly, in the new WIP permission to tell me about herself, she’s been going crazy with the information.  Chatter, chatter, chatter.  Her, her Uncle Dray, her Grandma Theodora.  Which is good—it adds all those nice layers I need.  Which could be bad down the road—too much information, probably, that will have to be cut.  But I don’t seem to be able to do this process any other way.  I seem to be stuck with writing large and cutting down.

I’ve essentially rewritten the same three pages for the last three days, which is not as grim as it sounds.  I start off on page one to read through it and before long, Molly’s off on some tangent, adding and padding material.  What was originally page three now begins on the bottom of page five.  I’ve added about 1100 words to the opening.  More than that, I’ve added pages and pages of notes and charts, figuring things out, seeing where the connections take me, broadening the picture of this family.  It’s all good, all what I need to know.

Even if I wind up cutting a lot of it.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the title poll.  Sympathetic Magic edged out Time in a Bottle, and after giving it due consideration, I decided to let my prejudice against Time in a Bottle make my decision.  I’m going to be calling this novel Sympathetic Magic for the time being.

For health reasons, Albert Camus spent several months in the winter and spring of 1942-43 at Panelier, near Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, where the altitude approaches 3000 feet.  From Notebooks, 1942-1951, translated by Justin O’Brien:

Panelier.  Before sunrise, above the high hills, the fir trees are not distinguishable from the rolling ground on which they stand.  Then the sun from a great distance behind them gilds the crest of the trees.  Hence against the but slightly faded background of the sky they look like an army of feathered savages rising over the hill.  Gradually, as the sun rises and the sky brightens, the fir trees grow larger and the barbarian army seems to move forward and become more compact in a tumult of feathers before the invasion.  Then, when the sun is high enough, it suddenly lights up the fir trees, which pour down the slope of the mountains.  And it seems like a wild race toward the valley, the outbreak of a brief and tragic battle in which the barbarians of daylight will drive out the fragile army of nocturnal thoughts.

With no context, just which appeals to you the most.

Time in a Bottle

Sympathetic Magic

Of course, neither may work for you, and if that’s the case, feel free to comment as such.

I’ll be honest. I don’t like Time in a Bottle as the title of my current WIP so I’ve been casting about for another title. It is, however, more accurate than the other title. It may be more intriguing? I dunno. That’s why I’m asking.

In other related news, I’ve been working on the opening chapter of the novel currently called Time in a Bottle. When I posted chapter one on OWW, I got two common complaints: people wanted to know more about Molly’s background and her quest sooner, as well as the specific nature of her magical gift. So I’ve been dutifully filling in her background.

If I may be frank, Frank, I had only the essentials of her character down when I wrote the exploratory first chapter. It showed. So now I’m filling in the gaps, excessively, obsessively, even including a genealogical chart. Which isn’t just about blowing hot air out my *** or wanting to make pretty! charts! Molly’s family history is vitally important to the plot of this here book, so.

But being me, I am worried that I have tipped too far into the opposite direction and am now including too much damned detail. (An old and repetitive failing.) Only time will tell, whether in a bottle or not.

Random quote of the day:

“Nothing is irrelevant.  The strongest temptation is to think, Oh, but they wouldn’t be interested in that.  But the most ordinary parts of our lives are the very things that tie us to the human condition.”

—Barbara Scot, interview with Linda B. Swanson-Davies, Glimmer Train magazine

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.