Get On With It!

A lot of people are talking about beginnings this week, for obvious reasons. A new year is upon us, what new things shall it bring? I don't know, but I've been thinking about beginnings myself. The beginnings of novels.

I just read Jaclyn Dolamore's novel Magic Under Glass and didn't need the jacket blurb to point out similarities between it and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. It wasn't merely that we have a poised, erudite young woman in somewhat unfortunate circumstances being hired by a well-to-do widower whose house may or may not be haunted and whose wife may or may not be dead, the novels have a lot of the same atmosphere, which I described in a tweet as “rather creepy in a beautiful way.”

There are obvious differences, of course. Unlike Jane, Nimera's an exotic foreigner. She's not a governess, she's a singer. She isn't hired for the benefit of a ward, but to sing accompaniment to a piano-playing automaton. Her employer's a sorcerer. And there's a bunch of stuff about fairies.

All that's set-up. From that point, the stories diverge almost completely. This isn't a steampunk fantasy retelling, just something with a few familiar elements. You may be thinking to point out that Jane Eyre didn't actually start with Jane finding employment, so allow me to admit, in a somewhat ashamed whisper, that I always thought it should have.

In Magic Under Glass, we start off with a girl performing in a show that's clearly beneath her, but she isn't bitter about it so much as sad. She has a backstory, yes, but we don't need to know it on page one to understand she's fallen from a height and is the sort of person most of us feel bad to see this happen to. We know her life hasn't been easy, we know she longs for more but is afraid to put that in words from certainty it's never going to happen. We learn how she came to be on that stage latter.

I suspect that if Ms. Bronte had written the story, we would have started out in Nimera's homeland. We would have seen her as a happy child, would have seen what happened to make her leave, would have seen the passage to the country she's in now, would have had two hundred pages or so of how bad things are in this new city. Nim wouldn't have stepped foot onto the stage until around page three hundred.

I'm possibly exaggerating. It's been a long time since I forced my way through Jane Eyre and the main thing that stuck with me about the novel was all that trudging through what happened before Jane even met Rochester, the whole while I was going, “Uh... Isn't this supposed to be a romance? Doesn't that require, oh I don't know, someone to have a romance with? Is this ever going to get to the point?” It's always been my feeling Charlotte Bronte was good enough that she could have skipped all the whining about how terrible Jane's life was yet still make us feel for her because we don't have to witness all the bad stuff to care about it. In fact, I would even hazard that we may care more when we don't see it, particularly if seeing it seems somewhat pointless.

Clearly, Charlotte Bronte had something going to create a work that's still being read a century and a half after she wrote it. However, while the opening drudgery of Jane Eyre made a strong social statement, it doesn't work at all for most modern readers, who are likely to tune out before ever caring about Jane and very likely before even meeting Rochester. (It took me several attempts to get that far.) Maybe we're impatient because we watch too much TV, as people often allege, or maybe it's just that we have so many options. I can't read every book that comes out this year, I can't even read every book that comes out in a genre I enjoy. You need to grab me from the start so I know what the point is in taking the time to read this novel. Life's too short to read boring books.

So, this New Year's I'm thinking about where novels should begin and how that isn't necessarily at the start of the main character's story. It's a very tricky business, knowing not just how to start, but when. And it's not just about knowing the story, it's also about knowing the audience. Jane Eyre worked when it was released, worked for people who would have found the opening of Magic Under Glass abrupt, or possibly confusing or vague. It still works for a few, but most of us are left sighing and urging, “Come on, Charlotte, get on with it!”

The door is shut.

There was a post last week on Edit Torrent about sentence fragments,here. Alicia, one of the editors who blogs over there, isn't a big fan of fragments. Since I'm guilty of using a fair number of them, and feel it's part of my conversational first-person style, I paid attention to what she was saying in case I was getting something horribly wrong. My conclusion at the end wasn't that I need to go through everything I've ever written and remove all sentence fragments, but the post reinforced my compulsion to do something I was doing anyway – going through and asking if each fragment helps or not.  Just saying, "Well, my voice likes fragment," isn't enough.

Below I'm putting some exercises I did based on two sentences Alicia gave. She wrote as an example of a fragment that probably wasn't needed, “He headed for the door. Which was closed.” My first instinct was the I could work with that, so I wrote a few snippets based on it.

I think these blurbs show the difference in my character voices. Some of them use fragments. Some don't. And, yes, that's part of the voice.  That's not the only difference between them though. Placed in the same situation, walking to a closed door, each girl has a different reaction. And, yes, one of then was comfortable with Alicia's fragment, though it could be written “It's closed,” just as well.

 

Drew (from Shadow) -

I head to the door. Which is closed. Naturally. Because why would the universe allow the door to be open when it could so easily mess with me just by closing it? Hell, what am I talking about? Universes don't close doors, people close doors. And I bet I know who did it too. Cooper Finnegan.

Poor Finn. He may well have shut the door, but it probably had nothing to do with annoying Drew, who's a ghost and can't open most doors. He was probably trying to keep the ferrets safe or something. Though I could be wrong, couldn't really blame the guy.

Michaela (from Werestory) -

I trot toward the closed door. How am I going to open it without shifting into human form? Too bad it doesn't have a pet flap.

Unlike Drew, Mike notes the door's closed before she's trying to go through it. It's not that Drew couldn't see the door was shut before walking to it, it's just that it wasn't important to her before then. Mike thinks ahead more than Drew does. I think that's part of why I sometimes worry that Mike's a little boring. She isn't really, it's just that she's so much more subdued than Drew is.

Lucia (from Imagine) -

I head over to the door. Which is locked shut. Lovely. Annoyed, I sit down and wait for someone to come open it. It isn't long before the door clicks open, thanks to hastily imagined stick figure holding a key.

Hmm... Yeah. I did say the story had problems.

Althea (from High Sorcery) -

The door's closed. Assuming it's really there. I walk over and lay a hand against the wood. If it's an illusion, it's a good one.

It surprised me she thought the door might be fake. I guess she was thinking there was something weird going on, what with her not remembering how she got into this room in the first place. Al lives in the sorcerer story, which is going to be re-written almost entirely soon. Being whisked to an imaginary room with an illusion of a door in it is the sort of thing that would happen to her.

Joanna (from Succubus)-

The door's shut. Pretty sure it's locked too. I go to the window and try to judge whether it's safe to jump or if I'd wind up splattered on the ground.

Screw the door! I don't need no stinking door! Oddly enough, she doesn't. She can walk through walls. It's just so well ingrained in her that she can't do that lest someone notice that she's considering leaping from a second floor window rather than just walking out of the room.

Maggie (from Faerie Story) -

I head to the door, but the knob doesn't turn when I try to open it. Damn. With a deep breath, I hold my hand out and focus my thoughts on imagining the key in my hand. There's a faint tingle as it appears in my palm. I undo the lock, then send the key back to wherever it was in the hopes no one noticed its brief disappearance.

She probably could have walked through the door too. Or thought herself on the other side of it. But that wouldn't have unlocked the door and she was apparently more concerned with that than with leaving the room she was locked in.

Kyra (from Earth and Fire) -

I head to the door. It's locked, but it doesn't stay that way long. It takes me about a second to convince the metal in the bolt to open itself for me.

Apparently Earth Dragons make good thieves. Go figure.

Terra (from Vampires of Summit County) -

The door's closed and the knob doesn't budge when I try it. Sigh. Probably just as well, I doubt I want to see whoever's on the other side anyway. I drag my phone from my pocket and type a message to Ian, telling him I'm going to be late for gaming tonight, might even miss it altogether.

This message is important. Bad things will likely happen to her character while Ian is NPCing her, but worse things would happen if Terra simply failed to show up. Terra will likely start worrying about herself now, will realize she has GPS on her phone, and will figure out where she is. She may pass that on to Ian as well, although I imagine he'll have already tracked her by then trying to tell if she's gotten herself in trouble or if she's just blowing the game off.

Andy (me) -

I frown at the door as I pull out my phone. Loading Ubertwitter, I type out a tweet. “Am in a strange room with a locked door. No idea how I got here. WTF?"

 

Anyone else want to play?

 

 

Post-NaNo Reflections

Dear Ms. Brokaw,

Thank you for contacting me in regards to IMAGINE. I see much merit in your project's premise, but unfortunately I did not love the execution of your plot as much as I had hoped.

Please feel free to contact me with future projects should you elect to move on to something else.

Best wishes,

Yourself.

So... Yeah, I hereby officially reject my own novel. But it could be worse. I mean, it's not a complete form letter, I at least pasted my title in along with my name and gave a hint about why I'm passing. And I did tell myself to contact me again with other work, that's promising...

I'm unwilling to say writing Imagine was a complete waste of effort, but I don't love the story enough to continue working with it. Which is somewhat sad as I've been wanting a do a story with a pooka for a very long time. Maybe one day I'll lift Seeley out of this story and drop him into another one. (Yes, yes, voice of Seeley in my head, I'll take Cia too. Sheesh. I'll just rework her circumstances and give you a better storyline.)

This story illustrated a few problems about me and my writing. Or my writing as evidenced by this work, anyway.

1. I don't handle ensembles well. At least, I lack confidence in my ability to handle them. People get lost too easily. I literally had people dropping out of the party at random, then I had to go find them, then I wondered why they were around at all since I obviously didn't really need them. I think I can usually handle books with a lot of people in them, but I can't handle scenes with a lot of people in them. So having a lot of people who decide to go on quest together probably isn't something I should do.

2. My characters tend to be a bit too open too soon with one another. This makes for less tension than there could be.

3. My leads don't seem to have much connection to anyone other than each other. Sure, I'll put in a best friend and an entire family, but they all get forgotten really easily. On one hand, this is slightly true to life when love is new, so it makes since in a romance and especially in romances involving teens, who are notorious for ignoring their families under regular circumstances. On the other hand, the other people in your life don't vanish just because someone new becomes important to you, no matter how obsessed you are.

4. When magic is involved, I have a tendency to make characters too powerful. It wasn't just that Cia could do too much, it was that she didn't have to work at it. Once she knew she could do something, all she had to do was concentrate on doing it. There's no reason I can't write a book about an all-powerful goddess, but she needs to be up against other freakishly powerful deities. And even then, it's not that much fun.

I'm happy to say I don't think any of these things are true of Shadow. I'm thinking they're not even true of Werestory. My other stories have at least one of these issues in each of them though and they're things that really could be avoided at the outline stage now that I'm more aware of them.

Speaking of outlines, I'm working on re-outling both my sorcery tale and my dragon story.  Not sure which I'll seriously start working on again first, but I'm hopeful for both of them.