Elmore Leonard’s tenth rule of writing is: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” Excellent advice for standing out in a slush pile or on crowded shelves. But of course, readers are not uniform and so in the end we do well to write for ourselves, toward what we love.
Or you picture your ideal reader. Mine sustained me through many drafts, although recently she gave birth to triplets and that has put a bit of a damper on my fantasy of her lounging with my book. On the other hand, maybe this encouraged my recent severe edit. Who has time between diapers and pumping to read meandering passages of whimsy?
Saturday I taught “Crafting Unforgettable First Pages” at Book Passage, and we looked at what we require of those pages. Here’s what we came away with–well, one of many strands of a rich conversation about openings of narrative: conflict is essential and it happens fast. We looked at the openings of Wild and of The Language of Flowers. Immediate, high-stakes trouble in both.
In one student’s submission, the trouble was evident in the way everyone else in her world treated our protagonist. It was subtle–no throw-downs or explosions (or lost shoes as in Wild or bed fires as in The Language of Flowers) but it hooked us as readers: we wanted to know what was wrong and what she would do about it. What makes the conflict high-stakes is that it matters to the character.
Two avid and intelligent readers (one mentioned having a PhD in English Lit) confessed to skipping prologues. I think I am too “good girl” (despite myself and my history) to blatantly skip a prologue. But I am not all readers. I do know that as human beings we are expert at sussing out what’s going on in a situation we have been dropped into the middle of–we can tease out a first date from across a cafe. It’s the teasing out that we enjoy–figuring out what’s going on from the observable clues. And so what we want from our authors and from first pages is observable clues. We pick them up, turn them around, and carry them forward, growing more and more curious.
I am teaching a version of this class online this Sunday, Aug. 11, 1 – 4 p.m. PDT. (Register here, now, and then email me your pages and any questions about editing that you want me to address!) I will edit 500 words of each person’s opening–short story, essay, novel, memoir, etc. I will use these to discuss in class what makes an opening work. And then we will go on from there to address general questions about editing for publication–making that final pass through a whole manuscript where you take your labored over and excellent manuscript and make it irresistible.
For those of you not in the class (as well as those in it already, of course), I invite you to consider what you love about openings. Tell me about in the comments below and let’s talk: What pulls you in, makes you take it to the register and buy it? How are you applying that to your own writing?
Re-working first page for my 12k contribution. Never give up. Try and try again. I will succeed… if not soon, eventually.
Bill
Yay, Bill! That’s exactly the right attitude.
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