On the other hand, when Brian Garfield told me a book idea of his some time ago I had an overwhelming urge to knock him over the head, lock him in a closet, and not let him out until I'd stolen his idea and written the book. But I suppressed the urge and Brian wrote the book and decided he'd call it Death Wish.
I should have locked him in that closet. Where did he ever get that idea, anyway?
Ê
Brian got the idea one night when he found his convertible top slashed; he turned his own righteous rage into the raw material of fiction. This chapter, I might add, was my first piece for Writer's Digest, written somewhere in the Carolinas. About a year later I sat down with John Brady and proposed a column on fiction. Meanwhile, A Pair of Recycled Jeans did sell to a magazine and was in due course anthologized.
PART THREE
Oh, What a Tangled Web:
Fiction as a Structure
CHAPTER 24
Opening Remarks
ANYONE WHO starves in this country deserves it.
Relax. The above is not this author's sociopolitical opinion. It is, rather, the opening sentence of the first short story of mine to see print, published in Manhunt just a year or two after Grant took Richmond. The story wasn't a bad one, but no one could call it the greatest ever told. I suspect its opening lines had a great deal to do with its acceptance for publication.
Well, openings are always important. Writers of non-fiction are well aware of the importance of getting things off to a good start. In a straight news story, the lead is literally everything, embodying in a sentence or two the who-what-where-when-why-how of it all. In a magazine article the lead is no less vital, although there may be less urgency about jamming all the facts at the reader right off the bat. In any event, the lead has the job of catching the reader's attention, involving him in the story, and establishing that the paragraphs to follow will be sufficiently useful and interesting to warrant his reading them.
Short stories and novels have leads, too, and their openings perform much the same functions. It's said that you never get a second chance to make a good first impression, and that old bromide is as valid in fiction as it is in life itself. And, in fact as in fiction, a good first impression is essential.
I think this is even more the case for the beginner than for the established professional. When an old pro submits a story, the editor who reads it knows who wrote it. It's brand-name merchandise. Even if the first paragraph's a wee bit blah, the editor knows the story's likely to get better as it goes along. He may well wind up rejecting it?old pros get rejected left and right, just like everybody else?but at least he'll probably read it all the way through.
The beginner, coming in cold over the transom, had better connect in the first paragraph. Because that is very often all an editor will read. Anyone who's read slush will tell you that it is a fundamentally unpleasant way to spend one's time, and that only a masochist reads unpublishable material through to the end. Editors are a busy lot, and it's essential that they wade through the slush as quickly as possible.
Your story, of course, is not garbage, to be returned unread to whence it came. And, while every sentence you write must be designed to convey this message to the reader, the first sentences have the most work to do.
Such as?
1. GETTING THE STORY MOVING. The worst thing about the openings of most stories by new writers is that they take more time getting started than an old Studebaker on a cold morning. This flaw was very much in evidence among the entries in the Writer's Digest short-story contest; I couldn't tell you how many stories began with the lead character getting out of bed, taking a shower, getting dressed, and going through a quarter or more of the two-thousand-word maximum length before presenting the reader with the story's central problem.
In contrast, here's how Richard Stark opened his novel The Outfit:
When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed. He heard the plop of a silencer behind him as he rolled, and the bullet punched the pillow where his head had been.
Stark gets things going, doesn't he? He opens with action?right in the middle of action, as a matter of fact?and you're caught up in what's going on before you even have time to wonder who these people are. He'll tell us in due time who Parker is, who the woman is, and why all of this is taking place. And we'll keep reading until then, because he's done a good job of attracting our attention.
This sort of opening doesn't have to consist of action. Here's how Joyce Harrington starts The Old Gray Cat by letting us listen in on a conversation:
I should kill her. I should really kill her.
Yeah, yeah. But how, how?
I could find a way. I bet I could.
Oh, sure.
You don't think I could? I could put poison in her cocoa.
What kind of poison?
Ah, you know, arsenic. Something like that.
This is a teaser?two characters are discussing the murder of a third and we don't know anything more about them than that the prospective victim is female and drinks cocoa. But the situation's compelling and we keep reading.
2. SETTING THE TONE.
The elevator, swift and silent as a garotte, whisked the young man eighteen stories skyward to Wilson Colliard's penthouse. The doors opened to reveal Colliard himself. He wore a cashmere smoking jacket the color of vintage port. His flannel slacks and broadcloth shirt were a matching oyster-white. They could have been chosen to match his hair, which had been expensively barbered in a leonine mane. His eyes, beneath sharply defined white brows, were as blue and bottomless as the Caribbean, upon the shores of which he had acquired his radiant tan. He wore doeskin slippers upon his small feet and a smile upon his thinnish lips, and in his right hand he held an automatic pistol of German origin, the precise manufacturer and caliber of which need not concern us.
The paragraph above is the opening of a story of mine, This Crazy Business of Ours, which concerns a meeting of two professional killers. I could as easily have opened it this way:
When the young man stepped off the elevator, Wilson Colliard was pointing a gun at him.
Neither opening is necessarily better than the other. I chose the one I did because I wanted to begin by setting a particular tone for the story. I used the image of the garotte at the start to suggest that the story would be a grim one, then described Colliard at some length to give him a particular presence. I wanted the reader to get a sense of the man before finding out that he had a gun in his hand. The final clause in the paragraph is an arch touch deliberately designed to remind the reader that he's reading a story; I use this kind of distancing device now and then because I think readers have an easier time enjoying a grim story if they know they're not supposed to take it too seriously.
For all of that, this opening does get things going; by the end of the paragraph we've got two men facing each other over a gun.
Sometimes a particular detail, perhaps one which has nothing much to do with the story to follow, can serve to set the tone. Here's how Russell H. Greenan begins The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton:
On Beacon Street near the corner, a mutilated ancient elm tree stands. Having been shorn of all its limbs by the Brookline Forestry Department, it is now only a tall stump. Soon the stump too will be amputated, but meanwhile a twig has started to grow out of the raw chain-sawed surface at the top, and from it a few tender ovate leaves are sprouting.
This visual detail inspires the narrator to meditate on the nature of life and death, and life in the midst of death, and so on. The image of the tree stump, so vividly described for us, prepares us not only for the narrator's rumination but for the ensuing narrative. It sets the tone, and we're ready to be drawn into what follows.
3. ESTABLISHING THE PROBLEM. Sometimes a writer's foremost concern in opening a story is to present the central plot-problem to the reader as expeditiously as possible. Here's how Jack Ritchie uses dialogue to acquaint the reader with a complicated situation:
I had just retu
rned from my vacation and Ralph began filling me in on the case assigned to us.
Three members of the jury were murdered, he said.
I nodded wisely. Ah, yes. I see it all. The jury convicted a felon and he swore he would get his revenge.
Not quite, Ralph said. Actually it was a hung jury. Four for acquittal and eight for conviction.
But of course, I said. So the criminal promptly proceeded to kill three of the jurors who had voted for his conviction.
Not that either, Henry. All three of the jurors murdered had voted for his acquittal.
Why the devil would he want to murder three jurors who voted for his acquittal?
He didn't really murder anybody, Henry. He couldn't because he was dead.
The problem here is extremely complex; Ritchie's opening draws us in simply by having one detective explain things to the other.
In The Problem of Li T'ang, Geoffrey Bush gets things going by summing up the problem, one that can be stated much more simply than Ritchie's:
I had a problem. I had sixteen midterm papers from my course on Chinese painting, the first papers from the first course I'd ever taught, and one of them was brilliant.
In a sense, of course, most effective openings do several things at once. They get the action going, set the tone, and establish the problem?and while they're at it they may sketch a character or two, convey some important information, take out the garbage and sew a button on your cuff.
The opening's not everything. You can start off with Call me Ishmael and still lose your reader down the line if you're not careful. But your opening has to be good?or the rest of the story won't have a chance because nobody'll stick around to read it.
CHAPTER 25
First Things Second
NEVER EAT at a place called Mom's. Never play cards with a man named Doc. And never lie down with a woman who's got more troubles than you.
These precepts, according to Nelson Algren, are What Every Young Man Should Know. I came upon them at an early age and never forgot them, and indeed I've never ordered an omelette at Mom's CafŽ or dealt aces and eights to Doc McGee.
I figure two out of three ain't bad.
All the same, Algren's admonition isn't the best advice I ever received. That designation has to be reserved for a watchword I was given many years ago by Henry Morrison, boon companion and my erstwhile agent. Candidly, I feel a certain amount of reluctance about sharing this kernel of wisdom with you. It's stood me in such good stead over so many years that I'm not altogether certain I should let the world in on it.
Oh, what the hell. We're friends, aren't we? We're members of that international brotherhood of hacks and scribblers, so why shouldn't we share a trick of the trade. There are indeed tricks to every trade but ours, as the carpenter said while hammering a screw, so don't blab this one around. Keep it to yourselves, gang.
Don't begin at the beginning.
Let me tell you how I first came to hear those five precious words. I had written a mystery novel which I called Coward's Kiss, and which Knox Burger at Gold Medal in his finite wisdom retitled Death Pulls a Double-cross. The book is mercifully out of print and we can all be happy about that. It was a reasonably straightforward detective story featuring one Ed London, an amiable private eye who drank a lot of Cognac and smoked a pipe incessantly and otherwise had no distinguishing traits. I don't believe he was hit on the head during the book, nor did he fall down a flight of stairs. Those were the only two clichŽs I managed to avoid.
As I wrote the book, it opens with London being visited by his rotten brother-in-law, whose mistress has recently been slain in such a way as to leave the brother-in-law holding the baby, or the bag, or what you will. In the second chapter London wraps the young lady's remains in an Oriental rug, lugs her to Central Park, unrolls the rug and leaves her to heaven, or to whatever necrophiles are prowling that expanse of greensward. Then he sets about to solve the case.
I showed the book to Henry. He read it all the way through without gagging. Then we got together to discuss it.
Switch your first two chapters around, he said.
Huh? I said.
Put your second chapter first, he said patiently. And put your first chapter second. You'll have to run them through the typewriter so the transitions work smoothly but the rewriting should be minimal. The idea is to start in the middle of the action, with London carting the corpse around, and then go back and explain what he's doing and just what he's got in mind.
Oh, I said. And looked up quickly to see if a light bulb had perchance taken form above my head. But I guess it only happens that way in comic strips.
Now this change, which was a cinch to make, didn't convert Death Pulls a Doublecross into an Edgar candidate. All the perfumes of Arabia wouldn't have turned that trick. But it did improve the book immeasurably. By beginning with Chapter 2, I opened the book with things already going on. There was action. There was movement. There was tension and suspense. The reader had no idea who Ed London was or why this young lady was wrapped up in her Bokhara like cheese in a blintz, but the reader had plenty of time to learn this later on. After he'd been hooked.
I'll tell you something. As far as writing is concerned, I've learned a tremendous amount from reading what other people have done. And I've learned quite a bit from my own work. But over the years I've rarely been told anything about writing techniques that has done me much good. The outstanding exception is this one precept, which I'm going to say again to lessen your chance of forgetting it.
Don't begin at the beginning.
In the suspense novels I've written since I saw the light, I've followed that advice far more often than not. At the risk of doing an And Then I Wrote number, let me page through some books to give you an idea of how all of this has worked out in practice.
After the First Death concerns a college professor who is sentenced to a life term for murdering a prostitute during an alcoholic blackout. He goes to prison, his wife divorces him, and after a couple of years he gets released on the grounds that his confession was improperly obtained. He returns to a drifting kind of life, and one morning he wakes up in a Times Square hotel room and finds he's not alone. On the floor is a hooker with her throat cut. He thinks, God, I've done it again, and bolts. Later, threads of memory return and he becomes convinced he didn't commit this crime and sets out to discover who framed him.
The book opens with him waking up in the hotel room. I think it's the most effective first chapter I've ever written.
The Girl With the Long Green Heart concerns a retired con man who's euchred into going back to his trade for one last operation. It's a caper book; the con job goes through until a wheel comes off and various people betray one another and so on. I opened the book with the lead and narrator arriving in Olean and setting the job in motion, then flashed back and said who he was and how he got there. If I were writing this book today, I'd have opened the book a little further along in the story.
I wrote seven books about a whimsical adventurer and secret agent named Evan Tanner, and every last one of them followed this pattern. Each book began with Tanner involved in some kind of tense situation, then paused to explain how he'd managed to get into such a bind, generally out of friendship or as a result of his penchant for championing lost causes.
In The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep, Tanner starts out in a Turkish jail. In The Canceled Czech, he's on a train in Czechoslovakia, where he's the most non grata of personae, and a cop asks him for his papers. Two for Tanner opens with our hero suspended in a bamboo cage like some giant canary bird; he's about to be informed that they're going to lop his head off come sunrise. Tanner gets buried alive in the first chapter of Me Tanner, You Jane. He slips through the Iron Curtain in Tanner's Twelve Swingers.
In Tanner's Tiger he's prohibited from entering Canada. And in Here Comes a Hero-
Enough. You get the idea. Sometimes I've simply opened with a chapter with Tanner in a tight spot, then flashed back to a chapter of explanation
. In other books the action has gone on for two or three chapters before the explanatory material is provided. In these books, a secondary purpose was served by this technique. The opening chapter or chapters generally left Tanner up against the wall to a greater or lesser extent, and this tension was maintained and even heightened by forcing the reader to pause for a flashback.
This business of beginning after the beginning is a natural for novels of suspense, for novels of adventure and action in general. But it also works very well in an altogether different sort of novel. Innumerable examples of mainstream fiction of the highest order are structured along these lines. They open with a scene that is dramatic or revealing or in some other way serves to get things off to a good start. Indeed, I've read a slew of novels in which the first chapter poses a crisis, the ensuing thirty chapters recount the hero's entire life up to that crisis, and the final chapter resolves it. (The Enemy Camp, by Jerome Weidman, is a vivid example of this approach.) By and large this strikes me as too much of a good thing; if the problem can be stated and resolved in ten thousand words, what's the point of wading through another hundred thousand words of background?
Ahem. I've also written quite a few suspense novels which do not follow the pattern I've described. While I think it's a wonderful way to structure a book, I certainly don't think it's the only way, and there have been many occasions when I've deliberately begun at the beginning.
For example:
Deadly Honeymoon features a honeymoon couple. On the first night thugs kill a man at a nearby cabin. Almost as an afterthought, they beat up the husband and rape the bride. The two do not report this to the cops; instead they hunt down the villains themselves. Here the rape is of paramount importance. It supplies the motive for everything that follows and makes their vigilante activity acceptable and even praiseworthy. There are no flashbacks in this book.
Such Men Are Dangerous is about a burnt-out case on the verge of a breakdown who hies himself off to an island in the Florida Keys and lives a hermit's existence. Then a CIA type drops in and involves him in a caper. This would have been a natural for the second-chapter-first approach but I was more interested in establishing the lead's character at the beginning since that to me was the most important single element of the book.
Manual For Fiction Writers Page 16
