your first page

Introduction

2011-09-09T05:20:00.000-07:00

Welcome!

I have created this post in response to the success I've had at several workshops and conferences with what at first seemed to me a brave experiment: to see how much useful critical commentary and helpful (to the author) feedback could be extracted from just a single page—the first page—of a work-in-progress.

The first time I performed this experiment was at the New York Round Table Writer's Conference, at the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen Library in Manhattan. I asked participants at the conference to submit—ahead of time and anonymously—the first page of a work-in-progress into a pool from which I would later draw at random.

About twenty authors submitted. During the conference these authors joined me in a large room packed with about seventy people. Since the submissions were made anonymously, I had no idea which faces in the room belonged to the authors whose works I would be commenting on.

One by one I extracted pages from the pile of twenty, copies of which were available to those in the audience. Together we read the pages. I gave my comments first, and then I opened the floor to discussion.

The experiment couldn't have been more successful. Just as I'd suspected, each of the first pages presented specific problems and solutions that opened up broader areas of discussion. I got the sense—as did everyone in the room, I think—that most if not all of the challenges pertaining to each of the works-in-progress we examined that afternoon were concentrated into those first pages, so that—had the full manuscripts been available, there would have been scarcely any need to read on. Most of what those authors needed to hear about their works they heard that day—enough, anyway, to return to their writing desks with a solid sense of what, if anything, they needed to do by way of revising or continuing to revise their works.

In one or two cases, what the authors heard was, "This is ready for publication." Always nice to hear.

My purpose with this blog is to offer other authors the same same opportunity to submit the first pages of their in-progress works and get feedback—first from me, and then, through comments, from others who may offer insights supporting or contradictory to mine. As the Italians like to say, "Tutto fa brodo"—everything makes broth.

There is no cost. I ask only that those who submit their first pages for discussion here allow the pages to be posted, and understand that the discussion is to be open to all followers of this blog. Also, I ask that any first pages submitted here be made available for use in a future print and or book use, with the same theme, structure, and purpose.

So—do consider sending me your first page. First pages (only, please!) should be sent to me as word.doc attachments. For my contact information please see the submissions sidebar at the top side of this page, or click HERE.

Taking a Break

2011-04-16T15:54:00.001-07:00

"Your First Page" followers will have noted a hiatus in my postings. The silence you hear is in fact the sound of your editor at work on his own fiction, toiling at Draft # (fill in outrageous figure) of his novel-in-process, making glacial progress. If you've submitted your first page and have yet to hear from him by way of a critique, this is why. Be forgiving: for he must write.

By way of compensation--and as proof of the above—I offer my own first page (after prologue). Have at it. Go ahead: make my day!

As for when I'll resume the blog, that will depend on the kindness of my muse, agents, editors, and how busy I find myself otherwise.

Meanwhile I invite all new visitors to this blog—as well as those who aren't new—to read and comment on the existing posts. And do check out the column in The Writer magazine.

Also, for any of you who may be interested, my O'Connor Award-winning short story collection, Drowning Lessons, is now available in paperback from the University of Georgia Press. And my first memoir/essay collection, Confessions of a Left-Handed Man, is due out in the Fall of 2011 from the Uiversity of Iowa Press / Sightline Books. Look for it!

Yours,

—Peter Selgin

Painting the Nude

2011-02-26T07:06:00.000-08:00

I remember the first time I was confronted with a nude model. I was a freshman at the Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, nineteen years old. The drawing studio was on the top floor of an old building with arched windows. I stood behind my drawing horse—a wooden platform with a graded surface—with my newsprint pad ("penny paper," we called it) and charcoal sticks and pencils. This would have been in September, but I remember the studio being cold, perhaps because come November it would be an igloo, with us all huddled in winter coats and scarved, our breaths fogging an atmosphere already murky with charcoal dust. Ms. Helmann, our instructor, didn't let us draw faces or genitals. "Distractions," she called them. "No lines," she used to say. "There are no lines in nature, just planes and shadows; a line is a concept. We're not here to draw concepts. You can do that at home."

One thing I remember about those drawing sessions: they were not the least bit sexy. No matter how good-looking the model was (and some of them were quite good-looking), after staring at them long enough through curtains of dust, with eyes aching, feet sore, and fingertips blackened with charcoal, you grew blind to abstractions like "beauty" and "woman," which was the point. You got so you only saw light and dark, shapes and values, negative and positive spaces. That these shifting patterns of light and dark added up to a beautiful girl was beside the point; anyway you were too busy drawing to notice.

Most writers, when writing about visual artists, what they do, and how they think while doing it, get it all wrong. For one thing they assume that the artist is consumed with the significance and meaning of his subject—which may be so, but not while he's working. While painting or drawing he's concerned with one thing only: seeing. He's measuring shapes, shadows, proportions. Labels don't exist. This is as true whether the subject is a haystack or Marilyn Monroe.

Of course, the artist may be an amateur, or a charlatan. That is the conclusion pointed to by this first page, since—first of all—no serious artist tackles his very first nude in oil on canvas: he'd have sketched her first, many times. That he's already gotten around to "jabbing paint into her eyes" also raises suspicions. By then our tongue-tied Picasso would have had to at least sketch in the rest of her, and should have calmed down. As for his speechlessness, it seems as suspect as his art. To have talked her into posing for him in the first place, he must have a way with words, or is his affliction triggered only by those "surfing" freckles?

Much that seems forced here might be alleviated given the proper context. But since we're given no context, we can't be blamed for imposing our own. Are they in his studio, or her boudoir? Is he a professional, or an imposter? Whose idea was it to paint her in the nude? Nor do we know, apart from his stupor and her freckles, who these two are, let alone what they mean to each other.

Imagine how much better all of this might have worked were we told from the start that he met her the week before at the Brass Jail, a local bar where, under the influence of one tequila shot too many, he foisted himself off as a portrait artist (N.B. he installs mufflers for Meineke, but he has doodled on a napkin or two). Over a few more drinks he talked her—and himself—into a commission, for which in the intervening days he has invested a small fortune in paints, brushes, easel, et cetera, and even squeezed in an art lesson or two. And now—

Well, you get the idea. And you get the scene, too, which isn't so bad after all, now that it comes with some context.

Brighter than Bright

2011-02-21T13:43:00.001-08:00

Everyone loves a love scene, especially one where, for a change, it's the man who's reluctant. As an opener, who but the stoniest puritan can resist this:

It’s New Year’s, the girl sitting next to me keeps patting the space between my knee and my crotch, but I don’t feel a thing. Not a damn thing.

The scene: a New Years Eve party; the mileau: the 70's or late 90's—so one assumes, since the music alternates between Nirvana and "Stairway to Heaven," and everyone's stoned or getting there. The sense memory of those days is in itself enough to give this reader a dope-induced headache. As for the narrator, he's way ahead of me—as narrator's should be. "Jesus," he says. "I wish I had some aspirin" . . .

Corks pop, and this huge pressure fills my chest and I push myself up, I can’t deal with this now, all these smile-plastered people partying and dancing, but the girl pulls me down by my belt and her tongue probes my teeth. I kiss back. We make-out for a while. It feels okay, so I slide my hands down her back to the edge of her panties. But then she kisses deeper, and harder, a lamprey sucking me down her gullet, and my heart races but for all the wrong reasons. I pull away.

I've heard probing tongues described in several ways, but "a lamprey sucking down [a] gullet" isn't one of them—not that I recall. Nor can I remember the last time I felt so sorry for a guy who's biggest problem (aside from a headache) is that some "cute, with a Christmas-in-the-Caribbean tan" woman wants to make out with him. Poor put-upon fella! Yet we buy it; or anyway I do, for the details are too many and too specific ("My fingers trail abstract circles over the skin below her throat") to shrug the scene off as adolescent male wish-fulfillment:

She tilts towards me, fingers glued to my leg, and talks and talks, but between the music and my pounding head, her words blow past my cheek. Her lips stop moving and she tilts her head, like she’s waiting for me to say something. My breath catches.

The best thing about this opening—apart from it's being well-written, with an artlessness that makes it look easy, is that it never takes a predictable or wanton turn. Okay, so the guy doesn't especially feel like making out, but, hey, "it feels okay," and so he goes along for the ride, until the lamprey attacks, and then he demurs. We wonder why—and also, for that matter, why he's not stoned like everyone else? What is his problem? "This is a fucking party," the scorned lover reminds him. And we're right there with her, for we, too, want an explanation. For which we must read on.

And the pared-down, rapid-fire, un-self-conscious style is just what's warranted here. Folks, this isn't War & Peace, or Ulysses; it's a callow dude making out at a New Year's Eve party. Style and substance are perfectly wed, for the substance here is the narrator, who, along with his author, is as guileless as can be.

But what about that Rilke quote topping the page? What are we to make of the combination of Rilke, marijuana, and casual sex? It's the one place where the author gives the nod to high art. What is your most suffering experience? To believe this narrator, it's being forced to make-out to strains of Nirvana with a pot headache when you'd rather be home reading the Duino Elegies.

Smoke & Mirrors

2011-02-21T11:14:00.001-08:00

Some readers of this column will remember The Honeymooners, in particular Ed Norton, Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason)'s sidekick, the vest-and-tee-shirt wearing municipal sewer employee played to a fare-the-well by Art Carney. In one of his better schticks, Norton would confront some trivial undertaking with extravagant overtures, rolling up his sleeves, loosening his shoulders, licking his lips, approaching the task like a pool player trying for a 3-ball shot the hard way, until frustrated Ralph would bellow, "Will you CUT THAT OUT?"

Reading this ornately vacuous opening, I feel like Mr. Kramden. Or—to borrow another analogy from Hollywood—like Dorothy confronting what she thinks is the Wizard of Oz, when in fact she's seeing a sham operated by a humbug.

In The Wizard of Oz the illusion is achieved via smoke, flames, a thunderous basso profundo, and 1939 cinema's equivalent of a hologram. In this opening it's obtained through language as oozing and pungent ("gnawed at the gnarled roots of my soul" "a landscape that the sun shined on" "juice of the mundane") as an overripe camembert, language that doesn't convey content so much as it camouflages and conceals the lack thereof.

In the absence of a story, we get a narrator narrating—rolling up his sleeves, clearing his throat, wetting his lips and rubbing his hands together ("Will you CUT IT OUT!"). The prose—though metaphorically overdone—is amusing in its way. To be sure, a strong voice is achieved, but one wonders: in service of what?

Picture Orson Wells stepping—like The Third Man—out of the Viennese shadows, or Vincent Price peeking around a velvet curtain with one funereal eyebrow raised. Both men had magnificent stage presence, and so does this narrator. All he needs is a good story to tell.

Of that, alas, there is no trace here.

Tell, Don't Show

2011-02-21T07:48:00.003-08:00

You know the old chestnut: "Show, don't tell." It's what our English teachers from eighth grade onward have always told us, and what I tell my students, too, when they fail to render through drama material that ought to be dramatized.

But there are times, too, when the opposite needs to be said, when fleshing things out in the form of action and dialogue lends little or nothing to a moment, and may even detract from it; when ideas or information are best conveyed expediently, through summary.

This first page offers such a moment. While driving somewhere, John Baran, the protagonist, gets a call on his cellphone, one that "send[s] a chill through him." Having switched to "hands-free mode," he learns from his CEO's secretary that a man named David has suffered a massive stroke that has left him completely paralyzed in Philadelphia Hospital. Who this David is we don't yet know, but we learn that he and John met each other while being trained "as members of the Army's Special Operations Command" at Fort Benning.

The phone conversation conveys information, but in the absence of character, with John asking obligatory questions to which the secretary responds as generalized secretaries will, with secretarial propriety. As dialogue, then, the conversation fails, since whatever else good dialogue does it should also reveal character, and, as a consequence of doing so, entertain. But the secretary has no character—certainly she's not developed as one—and so what we get here is at best a Q & A session designed to deliver exposition to the reader, at worst an example of what Frank Conroy of the Iowa Writer's Workshop used to call "ping-pong" dialogue ("Hi, how are you?" "I'm fine, and you?" "Okay.")

Since the two main components of drama are dialogue and action, and since the dialogue here leaves something to be desired, we're left with action, that of someone talking on a phone while driving, a static action, at best, in which the setting—the passing (Philadelphia?) scenery that might have lent some grit, is entirely absent. Hence drama without drama, or only the intrinsic, implied drama of a man reacting to the news of an associate's paralyzing stroke. And being intrinsic and implied, it is best dispatched through summary.

The author's decision to dramatize this moment, while understandable ("show, don't tell!"), is misguided, and the result—while technically competent—is gratuitous. The moment doesn't demand dramatization.

One solution: enter the story later, with John's arrival at the hospital, when he first sees his old friend lying paralyzed in a hospital bed, the genuinely dramatic scene to which this superfluous drama points. The drive, the phone call—these things belong in the background and are best left to the reader's imagination, and should be left there.

A Woman of Valor

2011-02-20T09:56:00.000-08:00

Nature abhors a vacuum and so does good writing. When writers fail to specify, when they leave the devil—in the form of details—to readers, they have only themselves to blame when those readers fill in the blanks with less-than-authentic material. In fiction what rushes in to fill the vacuum is cliché.

And cliché is the Number 1 enemy of good fiction. As Martin Amis has said, clichés don't just take the form of familiar phrases or figures of speech. There are also "clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart." Like a cancer, cliché, according to Amis, "spreads inwards" from a book's language to its soul.

But clichés don't thrive exclusively on pedestrian language; in fact they're known to flourish in the absence of words. I'm not (heaven forfend) talking about language for its own sake. I mean language that specifies, that lends authenticity through judiciously chosen details.

Hannah Tinti's Home Sweet Home" tells the story of Pat and Clyde who "were murdered on pot roast night." What raises Tinti's story high above the typical murder mystery is her emphasis on character, on providing each character in her tale with a set of ironclad specifics that render a generic reading impossible.

Take Pat, for instance, the adulterous housewife who falls victim to her lover's vengeful wife. On the eve of her murder she is

thinking of James Dean. Pat had loved him desperately as a teenager, seen his movies dozens of times, written his name across her notebooks, carefully taped pictures of him to the inside of her locker so that she could have the pleasure of seeing his tortured, sullen face from East of Eden as she exchanged her French and English textbooks for science and math.

Another writer might have written "as a teenager she had loved James Dean" and left it at that. But Tinti goes further—and further still ("When she graduated from high school, she took down the photos and pasted them to the inside cover of her yearbook")—to substantiate this particular specimen of a star-struck teenager. Similarly, in The Corrections, when Jonathan Franzen takes us on a tour of the flotsam in an aging couple's attic, he presents us not merely with a box of old recipes, but "recipes on brown paper calling for wilted lettuce." The level of specificity matters. Among other things it makes the difference between a good writer and a great one.

Over this nominally well-written first page the generic rules. Except for the temperature (which, though much is made of it, "hardly register[s]" with the protagonist) little is specified. A woman wanders through a generic library, scanning its generic stacks in search of a generic "list of book titles." She's looking for books about getting pregnant, but the author fails to share with us either the titles on Rebekkah's list or those she encounters on the shelves.

It's too bad, since it drains the scene of tone and texture, but also because it sacrifices humor, since those titles would surely occasion a chuckle. Even when Rebekkah pulls the first book on her list from a shelf, beyond its having been "recently published" we're left to imagine everything about it, from its cover illustration to its title. Another opportunity lost. A perfunctory scan of fertility book titles demonstrates that truth—if not stranger than fiction—is certainly as funny. Imagine Rebekkah's inner take on some of these:

The Rough Guide to Pregnancy and Birth
The Mother of all Pregnancy Books
Taking Charge of Your Fertility
The 5 Best Ways to Get Pregnant

Because the scene is rendered generically, there are no titles for Rebekkah to respond to, and so the chance to display her wit is likewise squandered.

Nothing wrong with engaging readers' imaginations and letting them do some of the lifting. But if readers are to do a good job—not the hatchet job of cliché —we have to provide them with some tools. A few telling details go a long way, blossoming in the reader's mind into lush renderings. Think of specific details as the ropes, nuts, cams, and hexes mountain climbers use, with the summit of vivid description their devoutly wished-for goal.

Song of the Dust Bowl

2011-01-26T11:46:00.001-08:00

Often in fiction writing workshops and guidebooks much attention is paid to what, for lack of a better term, is called the author’s “voice.” Though almost everyone talks about it, no one seems to really know what it means. Are we talking about a character/narrator’s voice, or the author’s voice? Are they one and the same? Is voice the same as style? If not, what’s the difference?

I tend to tell my students, “Pay no attention to voice or (for that matter) to style. Instead, focus on three other words: clarity, concision, and precision.Write clearly, efficiently, with as few wasted words as possible, and choose those words you do use with the precision of a surgeon choosing his instruments. Do those things, and 'style' (or 'voice') will take care of itself."

I dispense such advice in earnest, because I believe it, and because I think any other approach to style is a recipe for self-consciousness, and self-consciousness is the surest way to doom a piece of prose. To try for a "unique" or "poetic" or "interesting" or "effective" style, to make style the object of one’s efforts and not what it should be, an organic consequence of an author’s genuine desire to connect with readers, is to court failure, embarrassment, and disgust. To think about style is to put ego ahead of what we writers exist to serve: stories.

Some may argue that in swearing allegiance to the same three gods (clarity, concision, precision), we'll all end up sounding alike. But I doubt it. There are so many ways to be clear, precise, and concise. And even if there weren't, still, we're all trying to be clear, precise, and concise about different things. Given these same humble goals, each of us finds his or her own way. One writer needs a sentence to be clear; another needs a whole page. All of which is to say that the author whose urgent wish is to connect with readers, will, through that sincere need, arrive at not only a good voice, but a unique one.

This first page presents us with a strong voice born of urgency. Under a bright blue sky riddled with “mocking” clouds, twelve year-old Julie tends a parched garden, “a few scraggly rows of whatever we were able to keep alive.” The year: 1936, the last year of the so-called Dust Bowl that ravaged a hundred million acres of farmland in the Great Plains. Even without those mocking clouds that blue sky would be ironic, its cheerful hue teasing at best, a stark contrast to the faded blue of the mother’s (probably gingham) dress as she bends to harvest the garden with her daughter.

From the house comes an infant’s cry. Julie—the girl—is sent inside to tend to her baby brother who has kicked away his covers and whose wailing face is “as red as an over-ripe tomato”—riper, for sure, than any tomato likely to sprout from the dessicated land outdoors. Nothing on this first page escapes the Dust Bowl’s merciless heat. Everything—sky, earth, vegetables, baby, mother and daughter—burns with it. The absence of adult males is duly noted. Where have they gone, why, and will they return? For the time being, in any event, these women are left to their own devices, at the mercy of the elements and of their powers of faith and endurance.

I wish that the opening lines of this first page engaged the first person narrator, and not just clouds and sky. Stories are about people, not weather, and I'd like to experience that blue sky and those clouds through the narrator's eyes, and not apart from her, as here. Beyond that, I've no complaints.

As for the “voice,” there’s something stark, dry, and dusty about it, something of the faded blue gingham cloth of which the mother’s dress is doubtlessly made: utilitarian, without zippers or frills, and yet not without its humble charms. Like water from a well dug deep into the dry earth and served in a spatterware cup, it may not be much. But considering the source it’s something to sing about.

Mean December Wind

2010-11-24T07:37:00.000-08:00

The opening sentence of this first page puts us in capable hands:

"They came to us with the mean December wind, three cars in all." The cunning juxtaposition of a personified wind (picture a cartoon character with furrowed brow, puffy ruddy cheeks, quivering jowls) with those three matter-of-fact cars, is unsettling, as it's meant to be. It thrusts us into the psyche of the narrator, a child whose home on Christmas Eve receives an uninvited visitor—not by Santa with his brimming sleigh of gifts, but the grim reaper who comes for his mother.

Several things account for the effectiveness of this opening. For one, it appeals immediately and thoroughly to the senses. First, we have that "mean" wind; we don't need to be told that it's cold, or harsh, that it lashes cheeks and draws tears. Next, we are treated to the ominous rumbles of those approaching cars, "their exhausts reverberating off mounds of snow, then the moaning of their engines." Note the choice of words: "muffled rumble," "moaning"—sounds that connote the mother's dying breaths and moans of agony during her death throes. Drawn by the "moaning" of those engines, the narrator rushes into the living room where he "[pulls] the drapery back." I can feel those heavy drapes parting under the influence of small hands as the boy "[presses his] nose to the pane." What the narrator sees through that icy pane is no longer the benign world known to him the day before, but a world transformed by death.

According to the boy's father, the cars hold "relatives coming to pay their respects." And though the boy may not say so, or even know it, we feel that for him those three cars with their ominous rumblings stand for death itself.

Is it a stretch to assume that the breath with which he fogs the glass is as fleeting as the oval of fog itself? And that the dust he tastes on his lips is the dust from which we're all born, and to which death will return us all—and sooner than any of us care to think? I think not.

The narrative's retrospective approach is likewise well-handled. The story is set in the now fairly distant past—1956—long before many if not most of today's readers were born. And yet it opens with a sensual immediacy that brings the past into the present, that makes it as real to us as our own breaths and sensations. By the time we learn that "It was the day after Christmas, 1956," we are already there, inhabiting that past as though it were ours.

And that's crucial, since, whether or nor we admit it, ultimately the only stories that matter are those we inhabit personally, not just with our minds, but with our senses. The fiction writer's job (or that of any storyteller, where the stories are real or imagined) isn't to report experience, but to create it. And experience is processed in the mind by way of the senses.

Here, the author skillfully tucks exposition into narrative: "Watching the cars approach I wondered . . ." Though background information if supplied ("It was the day after Christmas, 1956 . . ."), we are never once lifted out of the scene, out of the psyche of the boy whose nose is pressed to the cold window as he peers out at those arriving cars. Like a sponge, the vividly rendered moment soaks up all background exposition introduced into it. We are never once removed from the scene, or from the psyche of the boy whose experience we share.

Tanks & Miracles

2010-11-13T08:37:00.001-08:00

Displaced by the Soviet Union's invasion of 1968, a young man and his Czech family relocate to Canada, to fulfill "the promise of yet another new life" there. That's one way to sum up the material in this first page of what I assume is a memoir.

But slipping out from under the treads of Soviet tanks is only one of many "miracles" that the narrator has either witnessed or benefited from directly in his life. I put "miracles" in quotation marks, since here they are conflated with other things, with magic and with prayers, and hence the term's meaning is broadened to include everything from surviving an invasion by some 2000 Warsaw pact tanks, to the "miracles" of marriage, childbirth, and "cranky old men seeing their tumors disappear overnight."

This expansive definition of miracles makes for a good attitude toward life (though the cynic in me can't resist wondering what prayers are answered by the existence of tanks and tumors in the first place). Whether it makes for a good memoir opening is doubtful.

Clearly, the narrator has a story to tell. Indeed, he seems to have a grab-bag of stories, surviving Brezhnev's tanks being one of many. He has also survived another displacement, that of his father (whom his mother "sent packing") by her "new man, the Doctor Professor." This domestic restructuring happened eight months before those Soviet tanks rumbled into town, causing the already unstable ground under the narrator's feet to tremble that much harder. From Bratislava he and his family escaped to Vienna, and from there to Toronto—on a plane which, we're told, "did not crash"—in itself, according to the narrator, another miracle.

In selecting "miracles" as his theme, and then defining them so loosely, the author casts such a wide net over his material that it's hard to say what, exactly, this memoir is about, other than the narrator's very eventful life in general—which, however eventful, isn't a fit subject for a memoir, but instead launches this project into the territory of autobiography. Not a good thing.

While an autobiography is essentially a first-person account of someone's life, a memoir has a thematic focus to which the memoirist's history s subordinated. The key to a good memoir, as someone once told me, is that it's not about the memoirist, but about something that the memoirist has experienced first hand—an ordeal or challenge (Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, Swimming to Antarctica, by Lynn Cox), or a relationship (Tobias' Wolff's This Boy's Life, Jeanette Wall's The Glass Castle), or life in a particular time and place (Cross Creek, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, This House of Sky, Ivan Doig), or a revolution (Red Scarf Girl, by Ji-Li Jiang), or a spiritual crisis or journey (Practicing Resurrection, by Nora Gallagher, Dan Barker's Godless).

Unless you're already a public figure, or known for some other reason, it's questionable whether anyone will want to read your life story; anyway they would need a reason to read it. The memoir form supplies that reason by treating the author's biography as the well from which a particular story is drawn, and not asking readers to drink the whole well dry.

Here, with this first page, the author suggests many intriguing tales, but unless he draws his thematic net tighter and narrows his focus, he'll drown himself— and his readers— in autobiography. Which would be a shame, since not only does this author obviously have a story to tell, he has estimable gifts of language and voice with which to tell it:

Our father had been laughter, but mainly absence. The stepfather was rules and rigidity. The new regime together was marked by clenched teeth on all our parts. My mother was, I think, happier than she had been, but not when all four of us were together; then she was tears and apologies.

This is good writing. It only needs to serve an equally good purpose, and that purpose should be not to illuminate a whole life, but a particular experience—in this case, I think, how the "miracle" of survival, while it holds out the promise of "yet another life," also subjects its benefactors to further, and sometimes even greater, perils.

As for which portion of his eventful life best illuminates that theme, the author must decide, and cast the rest of his life into the background where it belongs.

An Arrow into the Heart of a Story

2010-11-12T13:21:00.001-08:00

Ideally, the first words of a work of fiction should point like an arrow to the heart of the story—not, necessarily, to the middle or the climax, but to any point within the story, including the very beginning, otherwise known as the inciting incident.

The inciting incident is what propels a character or characters out of their status quo routine and into that terrible thing that all writers must sooner or later grapple with: a plot. But to qualify as a plot, events needn't be sensational, or even all that dramatic: they simply need to be out of the ordinary; to depart from routine. Otherwise, no circumstances exist by which to put that routine into perspective so it can be properly appreciated. The characters and circumstances merely exist; they lie inert on the page.

Which is pretty much what happens here in this otherwise very nicely written first page. Roused from her early morning sleep by the sound of a hammer striking wood ("thunk, thunk, thunk"), the narrator walks into the bedroom of her forty-eight year old brother. But as we discover via a very lovingly rendered description, this is no ordinary forty-eight year old:

. . . he sits on the floor, cross-legged, with his back to the door. Above his ears that protrude a little too prominently from his head, his short brown hair is sticking up in several places. Not a gray hair in sight for him.Sometimes when I see my brother’s innocent joy, it is easy to forget that he’s a forty-eight year-old man. A two by four board is across his legs. His right hand grips the top of the hammer to gain more control.He only moves the lower part of his arm as he taps on the wood. Yes, he is trying to be quiet for my sake.

By way of this careful, sensitive description, the author avoids stating what soon becomes obvious to the reader: that the brother is mentally handicapped. This judicious description, which broadens to include the brother's room, takes up the rest of the first page, and never ceases to be wisely and carefully observed, down to the structure the brother has assembled from his Lincoln Logs, "shaped like a square, missing the bottom rung on one side, so it leans to the right."

The trouble with all this carefully wrought description is that it lacks that crucial arrow. What it says essentially is "I have a retarded brother." Note the passive verb. What it doesn't say is "Something happened" or better still: "Something is going to happen." The thing "happening" here is, or seems to be, a meticulously described routine: the brother playing with his hammer and nails. In a word, this opening is static.

Here is what I would ask the author: what is the inciting incident, the event that propels these characters out of their routine? At what point in the story, as written, are the words "One day," or their equivalent, stated or implied? Begin there, and let the status quo emerge in the context of extraordinary events so it won't be static, so it has something to play against.

Routine cannot be dramatized. It is antithetical to drama. And that's true even if the routine is unusual or exotic, like having a mentally handicapped brother, or disarming land mines, or carrying water for elephants in a circus.

An exercise to help writers discover whether they are writing routine: see if the words "as usual," "normally," or "always" can be inserted in the prose. If so, the answer is yes.

A Self-Conscious Queen

2010-11-12T10:57:00.001-08:00

In the dressing room of the "Lipstick Lounge," the Lady Javana "straighten[s] her wig" and "dab[s] lipstick from her teeth." Lady Javana, we're informed, is neither a man nor a woman, nor "a boy in a dress" nor "a female impersonator" ("what female wears glitter on her eyelids, pink beehives and six-inch heels?"—Quite a few do, as a matter of fact, but never mind).

No, in her own overdetermined estimation, Lady Javana is a queen. I've italicized the word since the author goes to such great lengths to emphasize it.

Which points to what I feel is wrong with this opening. Rather than present us with a character, instead the bulk of this first page is taken up with a series of terms and metaphors by which Javana either identifies his/her self, or that he/she refutes. What starts out promisingly as an evocative, concrete scene ("She had to plaster down those eyebrows with the glue stick, beat her face with the powder, chisel new features . . . with foundation and blush") in which the particular (drag queen putting on makeup) stands for the general, breaks down into an exercise in denotation, such that, by the end of the page, what we've read feels more like a jacket blurb than a scene.

It's a shame, since the writing is strong:

Lady Javana—who spent most of her days as Joseph Ryan Gainer, library assistant—hated the tired metaphor of the caterpillar and the butterfly, but could not dispute its relevance. Because the holometabolism of the butterfly was a complex transition. It was sticky, confusing and savage.

As prose this can't be faulted, but the issue here isn't so much whether or not the metaphor of the caterpillar transforming into a butterfly aptly conveys the experience of a drag queen. The metaphor may or may not be apt; but the harping on it here conveys a self-consciousness that would seem to apply more to the author's fascination with his subject than to the character in question. Though hatched from its "self-mutilating" chrysalis, this butterfly never takes flight: like a lepidopterist's specimen, it's been pinned to the page and pasted with labels.

Butterflies don't go around self-consciously inventorying their butterfly-ness. Nor do readers of fiction especially want labels, and if they do want them they prefer their own. Nor do readers want judgments imposed by the author on a character or by characters on themselves. What readers want is experience evoked concretely through action, dialogue, or through a character's internal responses to particular events, challenges and situations—illuminated, perhaps, by a sympathetic or worldly narrator, and possibly by the character's own reflections, but not sewn up and boiled down into shrunken headed judgments and epithets.

Here, the only behavior exhibited aside from the application of lipstick and eye-glitter is the character's self-conscious pursuit of a label for him/herself. Even accepting that this pursuit is real—that is, belonging to the character and not to an author overly fixated on the presumed novelty of his subject—still, it's hard to imagine such self-conscious soul-searching taking place, as suggested here, on a regular basis for any duration. Surely this queen doesn't spend his/her days (or nights) mulling over what to call himself? If so, one wants to say to him/her, "Get over it, already." Perhaps folded somewhere into the meat of the story such reflections wouldn't be so out-of-place. But as an opening gambit they misfire.

What's sacrificed here for the sake of a story about someone "being a queen," is a better story about a man—a librarian—who just happens to be one.

Drive-by Girl

2010-11-12T07:37:00.001-08:00

A woman fresh out of a mixed-bag relationship is harassed by the specter of her ex-lover as she goes about her routine chores.

This opening scene finds Dana taking the long way to her supermarket to avoid the school where Jerry teaches, and where he's known to remain long after the last bell on behalf of his students, "correcting papers, offering extra help, and throwing baskets in the gym." One gets the feeling that Jerry's solicitous nature did not extend to his relationship with Dana—a suspicion confirmed later at the Stop & Shop deli counter, where Jerry's ghost berates her for buying mashed potatoes to go with her rotisserie chicken.

The technique employed here is interior monologue, also sometimes referred to as stream-of-consciousness after the term coined by psychologist William James. But while the stream-of-consciousness technique tends to encompass narratives as a whole (such that descriptions, setting, dialogue, and actions are all conveyed, as it were, by the flowing stream), interior monologue functions as a distinct device within a traditional narrative—as in the given scene, where Dana's thoughts enhance the narrative, but don't subsume it.

Compare with this passage from the most famous stream-of-conscious narrative of them all:

... Mulveys was the first when I was in bed that morning and Mrs Rubio brought it in with the coffee she stood there standing when I asked her to hand me and I pointing at them I couldnt think of the word a hairpin to open it with ah horquilla disobliging old thing and it staring her in the face with her switch of false hair on her and vain about her appearance ugly as she was near 80 or a loo her face a mass of wrinkles with all her religion domineering because she never could get over the Atlantic fleet coming in half the ships of the world and the Union Jack flying with all her carabineros because 4 drunken English sailors took all the rock from them and because I didnt run into mass often enough in Santa Maria to please her with her shawl up on her except when there was a marriage on with all her miracles of the saints and her black blessed virgin with the silver dress ...

With this sort of stream-of-consciousness, the author relinquishes—or appears to relinquish— control of the narrative to the mind of his protagonist. In fact that "loss of control" is entirely and cunningly contrived to give the appearance of spontaneity and randomness, much as the drips and spatters on a Jackson Pollack appear to be random and spontaneous (they aren't).

With interior monologue the author never quite lets go of the reins. In the given example the narrator (as distinct from the protagonist) remains behind the wheel, as it were, telling us, between forays into his character's thoughts, how, having choked back the bile inspired by a vision of Jerry shooting hoop with his charges, Dana "took a left and another left, heading toward the Stop and Shop." The narrator goes on to explain that in shopping Dana "is all business, plucking apples, bananas, strawberries, and raspberries—expensive, but she deserved them." Note how with that "but she deserved it" we are dunked, however briefly, into the protagonist's subjective stream, back into her interior monologue. That she plucks apples and strawberries is an objective fact; that she deserves them is purely her subjective opinion, a taste of interior monologue.

This subtle mixture of objective authorial narration and a character's subjective perspective goes by its own names. Called close third person by some and free indirect style by others, it lets narrators move seamlessly between objective reporting ("Dana wheeled her cart over to the deli counter") and a character's thoughts ("Oh, mashed potatoes."), to where at times one can barely distinguish the two ("she planned to enjoy these mashed potatoes").

The virtue of this technique (aside from dispensing with all the "she thought"s and "it struck her that"s), is that it flavors the whole narrative with a character's feelings—as a sliced onion, left next to the butter in the refrigerator, flavors the butter with onion. Yet unlike the aggressive stream-of-consciousness technique, it gives authors full control over the degree of objectivity.

In this opening the free direct style is well-employed, though one might quibble that if Dana's brain is indeed "working overtime" to avoid picturing Jerry in his classroom, that hard work hasn't paid off well, as we are treated to the very images she's intent on avoiding. Better perhaps to have her inadvertently drive by the school, having neglected to take an alternative route, and thus the image of Jerry gyrating on the basketball court with his charges will be both better motivated and inadvertent.

It seems to me, too, that if indeed Dana is haunted by Jerry, better use might be made of his specter, who ought to be right there in the driver's seat beside her, telling her to change lanes and use the turning signal and that she almost cut that curb. The supermarket scene likewise feels stingy. Why not have Jerry's take on more than mashed potatoes? Why not see him micro-managing Dana's shopping list? Though he may not be there physically, Jerry is a character in this scene—or should be. Under the influence of Jerry's ghost she might hesitate to drop that quart of mashed potatoes into her cart—and then defy him. Surely that beats telling us that this is what Dana would not have done in the past.

However skillfully or seamlessly rendered, a character's inner thoughts are no substitute for actions.

The Substance Abuser's Wife

2010-10-30T22:47:00.000-07:00

In choosing her subject, it's not a bad idea for the memoirist to imagine that many others in her audience have undergone the same or a similar experience, and to write with that in mind. Any assumption to the contrary may prove fatal.

Here, the subject is living with a substance abuser, and the substance is cocaine. Assuming no shortage of coke addicts in the world, one may also assume a proximate number of used and abused significant others to go with them. The theme, in other words, is familiar, so much so that there are even organizations like Al-alon and Cocaine Anonymous devoted to it. True, not all spouses, lovers, and other co-victims of substance abuse have written or intend to write their memoirs. But for better or worse more than a few of them have, or will.

And there've been very good books about drug abuse, both from the point of view of the abuser, and from that of someone emotionally attached to him or her. Alexander Trocchi's Cain's Book plunges us into the mind—and even the philosophy—or a heroin junkie living on a gravel scow in New York harbor. Presented to us as a novel in the form of a journal, it begins:

My scow is tied up in the canal at Flushing, N.Y., alongside the landing stage of the Mac Asphalt and Construction Corporation. It is now just after five in the afternoon. Today at this time it is still afternoon, and the sun, striking the cinderblocks of the main building of the works, has turned them pink. The motor cranes and the decks of the other scows tied up round about are deserted.

Half an hour ago I gave myself a fix.

Turning from heroin to its older cousin, opium, there have been memoirs going all the way back to De Quincy, whose Confessions of an English Opium Eater is the first and most famous. Novel with Cocaine, set in Moscow on the eve of the Russian revolution, does for that time and place about what Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City did for Manhattan and cocaine in the late 1980's. As for narratives about or by people living with abusive family members, there's been no shortage of those, either. Jeanette Wall's Glass Castle is a recent example. In it she chronicles (among many other things) growing up with an eccentric mother and alcoholic father. It opens:

I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a dumpster. It was just after dark. A blustery March wind whipped the steam coming out of the manholes, and people hurried along the sidewalks with their collars turned up. I was stuck in traffic two blocks from the party where I was heading.

Right from the start each of the books I've quoted offers to us something above or beyond substance abuse or its direct or collateral consequences. Trocchi gives us the atmosphere of the New York waterfront, with its deserted motor cranes and sun-spackled cinderblocks, while Wall juxtaposes, to heartbreaking effect, party-going yuppie with dumpster-diving Mom.

Which leads to the next good question for the memoirist to ask herself: What can I bring to my familiar subject that no one has brought to it before? How will it be different not only in its particulars, but essentially—substantially, stylistically, and/or structurally, so that readers won't have read anything quite like it?

The first page under discussion here calls no attention to its style, nor does it break any formal ground. And yet by means of her italicized opening paragraph the author does answer, or tries to, the question: what can I bring to my familiar subject that no one has brought to it before? She does so by front-loading her story with a nod to the recent Bosnian war where, we are told, she met her future, coke-snorting husband. Like many an italicized opening, this one is meant to grab our attention, and does. But it's the war in Sarajevo that grabs it, not the husband, or cocaine abuse, and the scene in Roman type that follows it (and that is itself a teaser—the author plunging us in media res into the ostensible heart of her story), comes as a let-down. We start with a Balkan war, and end up—or rather begin again—sitting on a stateside toilet rifling a man's wallet, one that, incidentally, has nothing special in or about it.

In other respects the italicized first paragraph is distracting. For one thing it lacks focus, wanting at once to be "in a war zone" in Sarajevo and in a "pretty Connecticut suburb"; to be married and divorced; to plunge us into a dark past but also to revel in the "precious peace" of the present tense. The author wants it all ways, in few words. Or she's not sure what she wants. Nor is the reader.

Like the italicized paragraph preceding it, the scene, though quite well written beyond the first stuttering paragraph, is a red herring. So we return again to the thorny question: what does this memoir really have to offer? What will it be about other than living with a drug addict? Because just as most of us are better off not having to live with drug addicts, we can also live without more memoirs about doing—or having done—so.

Memoir, or Autobiography?

2010-10-28T15:08:00.000-07:00

Ask four people the difference between a memoir and an autobiography and odds are you'll get four different answers. For Gore Vidal a memoir is "how one remembers one's own life, while an autobiography is history." Will Rogers put it this way, "Memoir means when you put down the good things you ought to have done and leave out the bad ones you did do." Ian Jack, writing in the Guardian, boils the difference down to that between telling (autobiography) and showing (memoir).

Nor do dictionaries shed much light on the matter. According to the Oxford English, an autobiography is "the writing of one's own history; the story of one's life written by himself," while a memoir is "a person's written account of incidents in his own life, the persons whom he has known, and the transactions or movements in which he has been concerned; an autobiographical record."

For me the difference is mainly one of audience and intention. Autobiographies are penned by the famous or infamous for an audience interested to hear their life stories; memoirs are written by the relatively obscure or by those who have merely brushed up against fame, with the intent of treating a specific broader theme or issue with which the author is intimately and by personal experience acquainted, but which is not purely personal.

Which is a long way of saying that a memoir is about something other than the life of its author. If you're Dolly Parton or Bono, you write your autobiography. If you're somebody like me, and feel so inclined, you write a memoir.

Memoirist Nora Gallagher sums up more succinctly still the secret to writing good memoirs. "It's not about you." When, in Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy writes about losing half her jaw to cancer and the ramifications of being permanently disfigured, she's not merely talking of her own personal ordeal; she speaks to any and all of us who've ever been self-conscious of our looks or suffered rejection or endured physical torment and pain, or who've been torn between who we are, and what we wish to be—in her case, someone with a whole face and not one torn in two by cancer. Singularly horrible though her experience may be, still, there's much in it that we can all relate to. And it's the relatable part that is her book's true and worthy subject.

The first page here is from the memoir of a pilot. The most famous example of the genre (if it can be called that) is Wind, Sand, and Stars, by Saint-Exupery. Here is how Saint-Exupery opens his memoir:

In 1926 I was enrolled as a student airline pilot by the Lactécoère Company, the predecessors of Aéropostale (now Air France) in the operation of the line between Toulouse, in southwestern France, and Dakar, in French West Africa. I was learning the craft, undergoing an apprenticeship served by all young pilots before they were allowed to carry the mails. We took ships up on trial spins, made meek little hops between Toulouse and Perpignan, and had dreary lessons in meteorology in the freezing hangar. We lived in fear of the mountains of Spain, over which we had yet to fly, and in awe of our elders.

Note how quickly the focus here switches from the narrator to his fellow pilots in the aggregate ("It's not about you."). From this opening paragraph on Saint-Exupery's book will of course be about him, but it will mostly be about pilots, flying, the mail service, the poetry of land as seen from the air . . .

By contrast, judging by its opening paragraph, the memoir being considered here, though quite well-written, is strictly personal. And that's the problem. The author has put his best foot forward, so he thinks, and its an autobiographical foot. It begs the question: what's in it for the reader? Why should a perfect stranger care that so-and-so was offered a job at TWA—a company that doesn't even exist anymore? How relatable is that?

From there the narrator treats us to the intricacies of the probationary period —but this, too, is treated not historically, or even nostalgically (by way of saying how things were different back then), but personally: this is what happened in my case, to me, at my airline. Fascinating? Yes, assuming that the reader has a personal reason to be fascinated—if she happens to have known the author, for instance. Otherwise, in spite of the good prose, I'm afraid this won't fly.

But solutions may be at hand. One might be to follow Saint-Exupery's example and switch the focus to the aggregate over the individual, to make this a memoir about flying for the airlines back then—not one man's story, but the story of an industry in its relatively glamorous days.

Dead Baby Stories

2010-10-28T05:55:00.000-07:00

In his famous introduction to "The Nigger of the Narcissus," Joseph Conrad describes his task as a fiction writer thus: ". . . to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, above all, to make you see." He might have added to make you sweat, as this opening does in more ways than one.

Fiction writers, our job isn't to teach or preach morality, decipher cryptic codes, deliver good or bad news by way of spiritual bromides or doomsday messages, or to explain the meaning of life. It isn't even to "tell" stories. It's to render experience, not to explain what happened to Goldilocks when she awoke to the three bears, but to put us in her shoes and let us see (hear, feel) for ourselves.

We harvest experience through the senses: sight, taste, sound, feeling, smell. Add the subjective organ of imagination and the rationalizing intellect, and you've got the deluxe suite of sensory equipment. This opening scene, where a young husband and wife argue over whether or not to engage a yard worker, appeals aggressively to an array of senses.

While the first, single-line paragraph rather coyly telegraphs events to come, the second embeds us firmly in a muggy summer day “with the air so sodden that, even before noon . . . perspiration had pooled itchily at the elastic of my boxer shorts.” File this under Too Much Information, if you like, but it’s information that gets us where we live, namely in our skins, making us want to wiggle out from under our own moist undergarments, or anyway inviting us to squirm a bit at the thought of moisture accumulating there. It’s disgusting—and meant to be. This discomfort is all in keeping with a scene that has the narrator cringing—not only under the influence of sweaty underwear, but at the wrong end of a discourse on lawn maintenance that has evolved into a referendum on his masculinity.

More senses are stroked in rapid succession: the "balding patch" of a lawn, the "dry words" of a question, the yardman's truck blasting "weird staccato rhythms," its "tangy, fretless bass thump[ing] off the sides of trees and the singer's high-pitched yowl flutter[ing] up in the tall branches." The only senses left wanting here are taste and smell, but that's okay: one doesn't write fiction by the numbers.

There's also something intrinsically frightening about a scene that with its first sentence invokes dead babies only to present us soon thereafter with a couple whose own one-year old lies dozing nearby in her stroller. If this isn't ominous, it should be. Dead baby stories are the one thing the parents of an infant daughter certainly don't want to hear. Not only does the yard worker (whose impending arrival casts a shadow over the scene like Hickey's in "The Iceman Cometh") bring tales of infant death in the bed of his pickup truck; he nearly brings the genuine article by almost running over the baby carriage.

It's too bad this is written in first person; it loses some of the edge it would otherwise have. By his mere comic presence he baffoonish narrator assures us nothing truly tragic will follow. Were this in third person, the gain in terror would more than make up for any sacrificed humor.

That said, one remains reluctant to discover just how central the "dead baby" trope is to what's coming, and more afraid still to discover that it may turn out to be more than a trope. Which, of course, is what will keep us readers, born rubberneckers that we are, reading.

Up in a Tree

2010-10-27T04:30:00.001-07:00

From up in a dogwood tree a young girl watches her mother weed a garden, while down on the ground below her less tree-worthy friend Peggy watches. This opening scene from a story evoking a young girl's world, with its grudgingly shared awarenesses and insights ("I sighed, because how to climb a tree was so simple—you just did it—but I knew I would have to show her how, again.") puts me in mind of Dan Pope's delightful 2003 novel, In the Cherry Tree—and not just because of the tree, but because that book, too, does a beautiful job of rendering childhood on the verge of adolescence.

Pope's novel opens thus:

Summer days began without a plan. You got up. You had a bowl of cereal. You went outside. A lawn mower hummed. Ducks passed overhead in perfect V formation like World War Two bombers. A dog barked, and another dog barked back. Somebody was hammering nails into a roof. Somebody was bouncing a basketball three streets away. You heard the echo, not the sound itself. A cat crept across the grass an disappeared beneath a hedge. It was hot. The sun was strong. The crickets made a seething noise. A sprinkler came on and made a quiet rain sound when the water hit the grass and then a louder rain sound when the water hit the street.

The effectiveness of Pope's rendering is achieved in large part through a style that leans heavily on blunt declarative sentences ("You got up") that echo the thudding rhythms of a grade school primer ("See Jane run"). Through such artless sentences his fictional world—one readers of post-Baby Boomer vintage will recognize immediately—declares itself to us with the stark immediacy of a series of street signs: "Caution: Children at Play." No time for fancy wordplay or syntactical pyrotechnics here, only what is—or was: a world experienced almost exclusively through the senses by characters who, because they are still largely children, are natural sensualists.

Less brilliantly, the given opening page achieves a like effect. The writing, though not as stylistically pointed or original, is assured; there are few wasted words, and the sentence offer syntactical variety without self-conscious effort. ("Landing was almost as good as climbing a different kind of scary.") One can quibble that the verb "to be" is overused—and not, as Dan Brown overuses it, intentionally for its plodding, blunt-instrument rhythms, but simply through oversight. But that's a nit-pick.

I do question opening with a snatch of disembodied dialogue, a tactic that I almost always find disagreeable, as it intends by way of withholding context to catch readers by surprise and momentarily disorient them, and it does. But to what end? I have no idea who is speaking, nor does the first paragraph answer the question. I must read on to the next paragraph to even discover the presence of another character, and beyond that to discover who has spoken. Would it not be as good or better to say up front, "From down on the ground Peggy shouted up to me, 'Do you like your mom?'"?

The question is important, as it points to what appears to lie at the heart of this opening and very probably of the story itself: a question of mothers and their relationships to their daughters, and specifically of the tree-climbing narrator's relationship with her mom. It's no coincidence, I'm sure, that the story opens with the protagonist having gained the perspective offered by height. I'm reminded of Nathaniel Hawthorne's brilliant sketch, "Sights from a Steeple," which begins, "So! I have climbed high, and my reward is small." Being high up off the ground may give us perspective, but it also cuts us off, alienates us, turns us into lonesome gods.

The question lights up this otherwise nicely rendered but rudimentary scene with implications that all may not be sunshine and dogwood pedals on Covewood Drive: that there are issues here that this story intends to unearth. I would keep reading.

That First Glimpse

2010-10-19T13:22:00.000-07:00

If plot is the backbone of fiction, that which gives fiction its structure and movement, then scenes are plot's vertebrae. A concatenation of causally related scenes add up to a plot. But beyond their technical function, scenes are what we're most likely to remember about a work of fiction; at the very least, they are what we're most likely to discuss with others. Remember that scene in (fill in title) where (fill in event) happens?

Think of a particular novel or story and what you remember most about it, and odds are you'll remember a scene. I'm thinking of Catch-22, of the scene where Yossarian rips open wounded Snowden's flak vest and the "secret" he's been keeping spills out of him in the form of a heap of shredded intestines. Or the scene in Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion where Hank Stamper tries to save his lumberjack brother from drowning by breathing air into his mouth under water. Or the scene in Anna Karenina where Vronsky rips his shirt open.

Of all the scenes in fiction, none play a more crucial role than "First Glimpse" scenes—scenes were key characters see each other for the very first time. Here, too, examples spring to mind, like this one of Ishmael's first glimpse of Ahab:

He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has over-runningly wasted all of the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness . . . His bone-leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship's ever pitching prow.

Another first glimpse, this one from Zorba the Greek:

. . . the stranger opened the door [of the cafe] with a determined thrust of his arm. He passed between the tables with a rapid, springy step, and stopped in front of me.

"Traveling?" he asked. "Where to? Trusting to providence?"

"I’m making for Crete. Why do you ask?"

"Taking me with you?"

I looked at him carefully. He had hollow cheeks, a strong jaw, prominent cheekbones, curly gray hair, bright, piercing eyes.

"Why? What should I do with you?

He shrugged his shoulders. "Why! Why!" he exclaimed with disdain."Can’t a man do anything without a why? Just like that, because he wants to? Well, take me, shall we say, as a cook. I can make soups you’ve never heard or thought of. . ."

And another—from Elizabeth Smart's novel (extended prose poem?) By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, where the first glimpse is of the wife of the man with whom the narrator is hopelessly in love as she de-boards a bus:

But then it is her eyes that come forward out of the vulgar disembarkers to reassure me that the bus has not disgorged disaster: her madonna eyes, soft as the newly-born, trusted as the untempted.

The first glimpse scene offered by this author's first page presents us with Ewan, a fellow student at the narrator's university "in a small town in Illinois." About Ewan by the end of this first page we know very little; that he is a fellow student we can only assume, since we're not told as much; in fact we're hardly told anything. We don't know what he looks like, or how he walks, or—when he speaks—how he speaks. We're told that he's a "guy"—something we can surmise from his name, and that at some point he will "latch on" to the narrator: but that point exists in the future, and has no bearing here.

If Ewan emerges as a character it's through his dialogue. "Are you for or against Pro-Choice, Lilli?" he asks the narrator one afternoon as she sits at the counter of her favorite coffee shop. If these aren't Ewan's first words to her, they're close to being so; anyway they successfully evoke a man who, to put it nicely, has little patience for decorum. Those less generous would call him tactless.

If only we could see Ewan as clearly as we hear him, the way we see Zorba strut into that cafe. Since Ewan's words are what characterize him, my inclination would be to lead off with his in your face inquiry, and take it from there.

As for the first paragraph, I'd cut it. It indulges the author with a gratuitous wish that her novel were a movie—and not just any movie, but one directed by Gus van Sant. But this fantasy gives nothing to readers: in fact it discourages them. Not only is the wish doomed; it's the wrong wish to hold out to lovers of fiction. If the novelist is really so intent on Gus van Sant and Matt Dillon, she should be writing a screenplay.

The Curfew

2010-09-30T18:18:00.001-07:00

There's a reason why few stories—and even fewer novels—are written using the second person point of view. It tires readers out. It says to them, in effect: here, you step into the protagonist's shoes; you play the role; you do what he/she does. Depending on who the character is, and what befalls them, readers may or may not want to play along. Even assuming that they're game, they may not be willing to play for hundreds of pages.

Which isn't to say that second person doesn't have its place. It's been used to great effect, more often in short stories, most notoriously by Loorie Moore in what may still be her most famous collection, Self-Help, wherein many stories take the form of how-to guides, to wit (from "How to Be a Writer"):

First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age--say, fourteen. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire. It is a pond, a cherry blossom, a wind brushing against sparrow wing leaving for mountain. Count the syllables. Show it to your mom. She is tough and practical. She has a son in Vietnam and a husband who may be having an affair. She believes in wearing brown because it hides spots. She'll look briefly at your writing, then back up at you with a face blank as a doughnut. She'll say: 'How about emptying the dishwasher?'.

Note how easily the second person viewpoint lends itself to comedy—far more easily an willingly than it lends itself to tragedy, since though we balk at being forced to endure, say, a heroin addict's withdrawal symptoms or gang rape, we don't seem to mind being the butt of a joke or a buffoon.

At any rate, we don't mind for short intervals—say, the length of a short story. That said, the second person technique has proven extremely successful with longer forms—or anyway with one longer form, namely Jay McInerney's 1984 love letter to Yuppiedom, Bright Lights, Big City, which opens:

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian marching powder.

In fact throughout the course of McInerney's book "you" go on to do a lot more Bolivian marching powder. Here, too, the overall effect is comic—though by the book's end the comedy has turned to pathos and arguably to self-pity (but then the self being pitied is, well, you).

Owing to the tortured metaphysical logic of second person narrations, we have, in a sense, ourselves to blame for whatever weaknesses endow their characters. We bear their burdens and their faults—and, to some extent at least, the faults of their authors. Call it guilt by association.

Then again many readers will cross their arms and say, "As a matter of fact, no, I am not in a nightclub talking to a girl with a bald head." And that will be that. In using the second person you throw a gauntlet to the reader. Supposing the reader doesn't pick it up?

In the given example "you" (a teenage boy) wait on the balcony of your parents' home to be picked-up by some friends for your "first-ever party." Just thinking of it "your heart beats fast," for you know it's not just a party that awaits you at the far end of that ride: it's a right of passage, an initiation. There will be "beer and liquor and girls." You almost can't believe it. It even seems to you, as you stand there waiting, that the likelihood of your actually achieving this milestone is about as great as that of "a snowstorm in San Antonio."

All this is well done; the author does indeed put us (or rather forces us into, for the second person is never quite voluntary) the psyche of an adolescent boy, a psyche beside itself with nervous erotic energy and anticipation. The details are convincingly precise, down to the grackles whose cries make a laugh track of the night—fittingly, for here, too, though there's drama, it's underscored by comedy. It makes for a strong opening to a story whose theme is the heady anxiety of adolescence—a story I, for one, wouldn't mind reading. Or playing the lead in.

Living With Lyle

2010-09-13T08:14:00.001-07:00

A young woman runs into an old friend in a grocery store—at least she thinks he's an old friend. In fact the man Eleanor mistakes for "Lyle" is fresh out of prison, sent there for what crime we don't know. But rather than correct her, "Lyle" let's the mistake stand.

"I don't believe it," Eleanor responds. "After all these years . . . How insane is that?"

"More insane than you know," the narrator answers—and he means it.

This opening has a lot going for it, in fact it's hard to find fault with it. The first line thrusts us into the heart of the story, with the paragraph that follows setting the scene for the inciting incident—the unique event that wrests the character or characters out of their status quo and into something worthy of being called a story. Here, that unprecedented event is the meeting of not-Lyle and Eleanor, an encounter that turns on a case of mistaken identity. Not one but two lives are about to be derailed from their routines—or, in not-Lyle's case, from whatever passes for routine in the life of an ex-con fresh out of the slammer. The question now is what's going to happen with these two? It's the right question, the very question that will propel us through this narrative. Will he take advantage of her? Will she fall in love? Will she uncover his criminal past along with his deception? Is he a petty-thief, or a murderer? Will he love her in turn, or will he rob, beat, or kill her? Or combination of these things? The possibilities are, if not limitless, rich.

How would this story read from Eleanor's point of view? As a point-of-view character, pseudo-Lyle has his charms. But then he also knows he's an ex-con, just as he knows what sent him up the river in the first place. It will be much harder, and may require manipulation on the part of the author, to withhold his knowledge from the reader so as not to give a big part of the game away. If she manipulates too much, the author exposes herself to the charge of creating false suspense—suspense achieved artificially by withholding information from the reader that the character (or characters) are fully aware of. In that case it may be better to experience this relationship from the point-of-view of the character who's totally in the dark: Eleanor.

But in that case the author faces another challenge: namely, how to plausibly render a case of mistaken identity from the viewpoint of the person making the mistake. Will we be treated to Eleanore's perspective after she has already survived her experience—such that, as she begins the tale, she knows it is one of mistaken identity? If made such a choice would result in a great loss of tension and suspense. For a start we'll know she survives to tell the tale.

Hmm, maybe our author had the right idea: maybe it's better to stick to his viewpoint.

You see the sort of decisions writers wrestle with. There are no absolute or easy solutions. In the end, it may be best to rely on gut instincts. Here, so far at least, those instincts seem to be paying off.

Flying With Father

2010-09-12T08:06:00.000-07:00

In Latin there's a phrase for it: in media res. It means "in the middle of things," and it's where many authors like to begin their books. By starting "in the middle of things," authors avoid the long and potentially tedious expositional climb to exciting scenes and dramatic events, while at the same time plunging readers headlong into a story's central issues, themes, and conflicts. By starting in medias res, they front-load their tales with action and suspense.

But when starting in medias res, it's important to choose a moment or scene that not only gains a reader's attention, but is relevant to the work as a whole, providing a tantalizing glimpse of what's to come, while also raising the right questions—namely, those questions which the book as a whole exists to answer. An opening that's sensational but with only a tangential or tenuous relationship to the book's overall theme may pull in readers, but it may also lead them to disappointment and, possibly, frustration and resentment.

The Duke of Deception, Geoffrey Wolff's brilliant memoir about his con-artist father, opens not in the middle but toward the end, with Wolff learning of his father's death. While Wolff and his family are summering in Narragansett, a telephone rings. The telephone belongs to a friend on whose "shaded terrace" Wolff is relaxing, "sitting in an overstuffed wicker chair . . . glancing at sailboats beating out to Block Island . . . smelling roses and fresh cut grass" and drinking rum "with tonic and lime." His soon-to-be four year old son Nicholas is with his mother-in-law, out for a ride in her black Ford sedan. Nicholas' little brother Justin is with his mother at the beach. "It was almost possible to disbelieve in death that day," Wolff writes, "to put out of mind a son's unbuckled seat belt and the power of surf at the water's edge." The opening continues:

In my memory now, as in some melodrama, I hear the phone ring, but I didn't hear it then. The phone in that house seemed always to be ringing. My wife's brother-in-law John was called to the telephone . . . John returned . . . As I stared down the terrace at him, Kay and her children quit talking, and John's cheeks began to dance. I looked at the widow Kay, she looked away, and I knew what I knew. I walked down that terrace to learn which of my boys was dead.

In fact neither of Wolff's sons has died. The bad news has to do with his father. "Your father is dead," John tells him. To which Wolff replies, "Thank God." That "Thank God" is what Wolff's book exists to explain. That "Thank God" frames the tale that follows, puts it into context, while at the same time raising a pertinent question: why, on learning of his father's death, would a man say "Thank God?" Had one of Wolff's sons indeed died, it would still have made for a powerful prologue, but one for a different memoir.

Here, in this memoir of a woman whose father was a pilot, we open with her in her father's plane as it accelerates down a grassy runway. The airplane's wheels strike a pothole, and the narrator's skull is bashed against an instrument panel. Too late to abort takeoff, the father lofts his injured daughter into the sky while her mother "wipe[s] away the blood" from the "long, deep gash to [her] head which would need six stitches." Since Mom is a nurse, she tends her child's wound with expert calm,"scrunching up her dress and press[ing] it firmly" into the gash.

All of this is described well, and it is certainly dramatic. Yet the scene is at best gratuitous, and at worst misleading, since it conveys nothing essential about the father or his relationship to his daughter (nor does it illustrate his piloting skills, since anyone can hit a pothole). What's best demonstrated here is the mother's nursing skills, yet my sense is that these are not central to the memoir. Ultimately, because it fails to point to the crux of the story, this opening scene feels anecdotal—a curious event, but not an exemplary one.

The second part of the opening crash-lands us into pure summary exposition about the father's impoverished Ugandan past. Might it not be better to choose an opening scene wherein somehow that past intrudes on the present: where, for instance, the father flies his daughter over the land of his birth? By such means one can have action, drama, exposition, and relevance all at once.

Suspense: False & Real

2010-09-11T13:19:00.000-07:00

In works by inexperienced authors suspense tends take one of two forms. The first kind of suspense, the good kind, raises questions like the following:

What will happen to X when Y happens?
How will Character X solve Problem Y?
How will X respond to Y?
and so on.

With the second type of suspense, what I call "False Suspense," the questions raised in the reader tend to fall along the following lines:

Who is X?
What is Y?
Where is this?
What's going on?
What in blazes am I reading, and
Why am I reading it?

Both kinds of suspense create tension in the reader, but in the first case the tension created in desirable. Though eager to arrive at answers to the questions raised, the reader of a narrative that generates true suspense is willing to be teased, knowing that the answers will come in due time, and confident that when they do come they'll be satisfying and worth the wait. And while waiting for answers to genuine suspense questions, readers are provided with enough answers to inhabit the world of the story, to fully appreciate and experience its characters, settings, events, moods and themes.

With false suspense many if not all of the virtues of true suspense are sacrificed. Instead readers are treated to the extremely circumscribed and dubious thrill of wondering, for instance, in what part of the world a scene is taking place, and in what year, and who are the characters involved, what are their names, how old are they, how are they related to each other? Such questions are rotten fruits of the practice of withholding information: denying readers access to basic facts perfectly well known both to the writer and his or her characters.

That practice is hard at work in the opening scene of this novel, in which a woman named Janice watches a man cross a street toward her. From his "stuttering gait" to "the too-short sleeves of his tightly buttoned jacket exposing his bony wrists" to the "inches of vivid red sock above each dusty shoe" the man is carefully and vividly rendered. Though syntactically awkward in places ("she saw relief flood his face when he saw her in the corner"), on the whole the prose is solid, the actions—albeit laced with melodrama—duly observed.

And yet because the scene raises and answers the wrong questions, because its author is bent on false rather than real suspense, it falls flat. Instead of asking, "Who is this strange, raggedy man walking toward the protagonist?" (a false suspense question, since the protagonist knows perfectly well who it is) we should be asking, "Why has this woman not seen her brother for so long? Why does he look like a bum? Why is he shuddering? And what brings them together now, after so many years?" These genuine questions—questions the answers to which may justify the rest of the novel—are undermined by that one question, "Who is he?"—a question with no relevance to the situation at hand: and one no sooner answered than the scene ends, as if it had nothing better to accomplish.

Why do writers generate false suspense? For several reasons. First, because in reading works by other authors they confuse real suspense with a general state of confusion, or because in reading such works, even by celebrated authors, they encounter the same false suspense: i.e. Steven King does it, so why can't I? But a third explanation is the most likely: they lack sufficient confidence in the ability of their material to generate its own, authentic suspense, so they give it a leg up by capriciously withholding something here and there—in this case, the fact that the man crossing the street toward the woman is her brother.

Unfortunately, often this third explanation points to a deeper problem, namely the reason why authors lack confidence in a story's ability to generate authentic suspense: they don't yet know, or aren't sure, where their stories are going, or if they have a story to tell.

In this case I'm willing to give the author the benefit of any doubt. In fact I'm sure that Janice and Luke have had an intriguing past, and are headed for an even more intriguing future. I just wish their creator were as confident as I am.

The Year of 14 Jobs

2010-09-08T09:00:00.000-07:00

One of the hallmarks of good writing is its power to suggest. This is true not only for poetry and fiction, but for works of nonfiction, too, for essays and memoirs, even sometimes for journalism. Conclusive statements may or may not always convince us. But when authors provide readers with the raw, visceral evidence from which such conclusions may be drawn, allowing us to reach them on our own, then the conclusions are a lot harder to argue with, since the only person we have to argue with is ourselves.

In this opening passage from a memoir-in-progress about a year in a woman's life, everything is stated, and little if anything is implied. We are told, among other things, that during the course of that year she held fourteen jobs:

Some wild women may have 14 lovers in a year. More introspective types may read 14 books or see 14 movies annually. Some fun-loving women might purchase 14 swimming suits (my friend Dottie owned 18), swim in 14 different swimming pools, or scream through 14 roller coaster rides. In 1969, I held a total of 14 different part-time jobs ...

The last sentence here ("In 1969, I held a total of 14 different jobs") states the memoir's central subject, which the passage as a whole puts into perspective, or tries to, with its series of obsessed women. At the same time the passage highlights the uniqueness of its subject: how many people do you know, male or female, who in the course of one year have held fourteen different jobs? On the whole the paragraph is well-written. It has the cumulative power of many such parallel constructions ("It was the best of times, it was the worst of times". . . ). And it offers us something irresistible: an eccentric, struggling heroine.

Yet somehow the passage, and the opening as a whole, fails. The author seems less intent on dramatizing her material than on positioning and arguing for it, telling us not just what she has to offer, but why we should care. Because in a year other people may have fourteen lovers or fourteen books or fourteen bathing suits. But other people don't have fourteen lovers. Which may or may not be true (you see how easy it is to argue with such statements?). And even if it's true, do jobs compare with lovers—let alone with books and bathing suits? But even accepting the logic of the argument, it remains to be seen whether that argument justifies a memoir.

But analogies aren't the point; the point is, or should be, that in a given year a young woman held fourteen jobs.

That point, or something like it, provided Charles Bukowski with the subject of Factotum, his second novel. It follows Bukowski's alter-ego, Henry Chinaski, from one dreary, degrading, menial job to the next after he has been rated 4-F by the armed services and thereby exempted from serving in World War II. The novel consists of 87 brief passages or chapters, and an equal number of crappy jobs. The first passage begins:

I arrived in New Orleans in the rain at 5 o'clock in the morning. I sat around in the station for a while but the people depressed me so I took my suitcase and went out in the rain and began walking. I didn't know where the rooming houses were, where the poor section was.

I had a cardboard suitcase that was falling apart. It had once been black but the black coating had peeled off and yellow cardboard was exposed. I had tried to solve that by putting black shoepolish over the exposed cardboard. As I walked along in the rain the shoepolish on the suitcase ran and unwittingly I rubbed black streaks on both legs of my pants as I switched the suitcase from hand to hand.

So begins Bukowski/Chinaski's descent into the underworld of unemployment, with him cast to the very lowest circle, that of the unemployable. Note how, in opening his novel, Bukowski states nothing. He doesn't announce his intended theme, let alone make a case for it. Nor is there any intent to force perspective on us before we've been presented with any matter (scenes, events, experiences) to put into perspective. Instead what we get here is the matter itself: a down-at-the-heels guy in search of a rooming house in the rain, whose search will soon turn to one for gainful employment. Meanwhile his luck, like the black shoe polish on his suitcase, is already draining into the gutters.

My suggestion to the author of this memoir is that she begin similarly, with concrete matter rather than with abstract statements. In due time we will learn that her fourteen jobs "lasted anywhere from one day . . . to a few months," just as we will learn that the memoirist "wasn't like some of the other girls [she] knew at school who worked at the local drugstore." Such facts are best learned through experience. And the proper goal of the memoirist, no less than that of the novelist, isn't to present information, but to render experience.

An Opening at Odds With Itself

2010-09-04T15:31:00.000-07:00

Within the eight lines of its first paragraph, this opening scene presents readers with a melange of no less than ten metaphors for the narrator’s frustrated desire to belong fully to something, to “fit in.” The writing is passionate, poetic, full of spit and vinegar—but what is it for?

“If I could see myself plainly,” the narrator laments at the inception of this hyperextended metaphor, then proceeds to describe her spiritual condition in terms of a nut in a bolt, a knife blade, a cliff’s edge (overlooking flames), an empty skull, and something that “circles.” Having thereby exhausted nearly every available metaphor, she throws her hands in the air, declares the whole affair Kafkaesque, tosses two more metaphors our way (one reptilian, one insectine), and then abandons the whole metaphoric charade in favor of “normal, everyday” thoughts. Some readers may wish that she'd done so sooner. Whatever else it achieves, this opening paragraph convinces us, if we needed convincing, that, indeed, the narrator cannot see herself clearly.

But the real purpose served by this opening and others like it that I encounter often in novice works may be even more basic. Stated by means of another serial metaphor, it’s to get the author’s pen rolling, to blow some warmth onto the icy blank page, to get the narrative blood flowing. Others less charitably inclined may call it “throat clearing.” In any case, it should probably be cut: all of it. It's there for the author, not for the reader.

The real beginning starts with Matti inspecting a piece of restaurant china at an event, a birthday lunch. Perhaps she’s an event planner of some kind. We don’t know, but she has a vested professional interest in the affair at hand and its dinnerware. To be sure she is dressed to the hilt in her Allendi suit that “glow[s] in [its] shadows as if her body was lit by a lamp inside it”—making me wonder how much it glows in its shadowless regions.

Here the writing is comprehensible and much more effective. Still, we don’t quite know what’s going on; we can only guess. And some information provided seems misplaced. Do we really need to know that, before she married, Matti worked as a buyer for a restaurant supply wholesaler? Maybe, but within the context of so much more that remains unknown, that bit of information seems more coy than generous, more tease than enlightenment. Most readers would prefer to know who Matti is and what she’s doing, rather than who she was and what she did.

In the final paragraph again the author seems to throw his hands in the air (“Oh, God, her life is full of fucking clichés)—a comment that doesn’t seem to attach itself to anything, unless birthday lunches are a cliché, or Allendi suits, or certain types of restaurant china. But my guess is that the charge of “cliché” is a preemptive strike by the author against her own material, as if by the end of this first page she’s grown disenchanted, and declares defeat even before the first battle lines have been drawn. In each of the two sections that pattern is more or less repeated, with the author undertaking a bold initiative, then questioning it, then renouncing her kingdom before the reader has even had time to engage in hostilities. The author is her own worst critic.

All this may result from jumping into the writing prematurely, without proper preparation (like knowing, for instance, what the story is about), thus ending up like the actor in his nightmare, naked on the stage with no script.

The Season of White Flies

2010-09-04T10:38:00.001-07:00

The first part of this opening of a novel confronts us with a host of negations bound by tortured syntax. Briefly, it tells us what the narrator, an only child, will (or won’t: see below) inherit from her (Italian?) farmer father.

For all its twists and tangles it’s an alluring passage, attractively written, with Biblically incantatory rhythms out of the Song of Solomon. Indeed, the set-piece passage, which serves more as an appetizer to the story at hand than as the main course, reads like a prose poem. Not the wheel of dried figs kept in the drawer next to the sink, not the crema in the morning made on the old stove parked on a dirt floor in a kitchen the size of a walk-in closet, not the . . . The temptation to keep quoting is strong; the words having the tug and energy of a strong tide. Like most good songs they seduce by their rhythms even when their meanings are difficult or obscure. Poets can get away with that, I suppose.

Then again, as Ezra Pound once said, “Poetry to be good poetry should be at least as well written as good prose.” (Pound also said “No verse libre for the man who wants to do a good job.” He said many good things, this poet who was tried for treason during WWII and kept for 25 days in a steel cage.) Based on Pound’s dictum one may take issue with this opening passage, since—though it succeeds as prose-poetry, fails at the level of prose. It fails for being at best unclear, at worst contradictory. Is the narrator inventorying those things that she feels “already belong” to her, or those that will not?

There is more than a bit of confusion at work here especially in the opening paragraph’s final clauses, which take us back to the same war that had Ezra spouting anti-Semitism on the airwaves, when the narrator’s father “chased songbirds down with a slingshot”—birds that “he learned to cook and what he cooked, they all ate”—"they" referring, presumably, to his family, and to the narrator (“it was his home and I, his daughter and that land”)—though on the other hand it strikes me that the narrator has yet to be born, that these are not her own memories but communal ones of her father, passed down to her by others. And thus the steps “from the soles of [her] father’s bare feet”—those of the boy with the slingshot—trod a path through the woods that in turn recalls. . . the father’s feet! This bit of poetic feedback gives way somehow to one of a grandmother's “worried lungs” sending or shooting up their “soil” along with her sighs. By soil we may infer catarrh or something more sinister—chunks of the lungs themselves. It’s not at all clear, and I for one lack confidence that the confusion is mine and not the author’s. Of Wagner’s music Mark Train once quipped, “It’s not as bad as it sounds.” Of this passage I would say it’s not as good as it sounds—and it sounds very good. Its sweet music and sharp imagery are undone by sloppy syntax.

The second section of this opening is similarly compelling, and similarly challenged. Here the image is the singular one of a bed groaning under the weight of books that have displaced a romantic partner. The books are being gathered by the stack and, for reasons unspecified, weighed. Apparently, they have accumulated in the wake of a dissolved love affair or union. But here too a disregard for literal meaning in the name of poetry creates confusion and disorder where none is called for.

The scene opens with the bed groaning with books. The words “It had happened again” point to a sudden, unanticipated event, where in fact the books have accumulated over time. The next, one-line paragraph (“I had forgotten this”) suggests that the narrator has come upon this scene from a distance of time or space. From there we move to a mini-flashback of life with Sam, the narrator’s partner, with whom the need to accumulate books was “undone.” But the rest of the paragraph belies this topic sentence, telling how “when [the books] formed a perilous body” the narrator began to gather them (“. . . as I used to when I was in graduate school”). Thus we have three beds full of books to grapple with: the one before Sam, the one after, and one back in graduate school. Question: which bed are we lying in here, now?

Come to think of it, syntax has something in common with bedclothes. Though the author makes the bed, we, his readers, must lie in it.

Discovering Jenny

2010-09-04T07:46:00.001-07:00

While watching the evening news, a lawyer—Robert Leonard Singer, Esquire—learns of a woman found dead in her motel room, the apparent victim of a drug overdose. Authorities have yet to identify the victim, but Robert thinks he knows who she is. In fact he’s sure.

Her name is Jenny, and she disappeared a year before, “a year of feelings shut away like furniture crated in some dark, musty warehouse.” From this we infer that Robert and Jenny were close—involved in an intimate affair, perhaps, or a fling? At the next paragraph’s end we learn that Jenny was his wife.

Whatever relationship he had with Jenny, we know her disappearance—and now her apparent suicide—have both affected Robert deeply. Overcome by his emotions, or benumbed by them, he collapses onto his sofa, hugging its pillow “tightly” as the evening news murmurs on and the smell of leftover Thai takeout drifts his way from the dining table. Instead of attending to the dispositions in his briefcase, Robert drifts off to sleep. The page ends with him waking “to the chatter of a late night talk show” still in a torpid state and unable to work.

Though the events conveyed by this passage are sensational—a woman’s unexplained disappearance, the sudden discovery of her body in a motel room, her apparent drug-overdose suicide—the opening scene itself is as torpid as its main character. Robert listens to the evening news, lies down on his sofa, and goes to sleep. That’s an accurate if skeletal summary of the “action” here, such as it is. And though Robert’s descent into indolence is, presumably, triggered by grief, one gets the feeling—I do, anyway—that even on his best days Robert is not exactly a man of boldness and energy—witness the takeout cartons on his dinner table. He seems to have been depressed long before he switched on the television news. The news of his missing wife’s death plunges—though that may be too active a verb—him into a deeper indolence, one that, on the emotional altitude meter, drops him from something like two feet down to one and a half: not exactly an ear-popping descent.

But Robert’s emotional torpor goes beyond numbness into oblivion, to where, moments after learning of his wife’s death, having decided at some point to call the authorities and verify things, his thoughts wander to getting dressed for work in the morning, to tying “the tight Windsor knot on his tie and spend[ing] the day reviewing documents and dispositions.” From there his thoughts drift even further away, to a contemplation of his name, from which he has recently shed the “Junior” and replaced it with “Esquire.” But what in blazes has any of this to do with the shocking news of his wife’s dismal suicide? Nothing—which may be the point. We are witnessing the extent of Robert’s disconnect from his emotions. We're dealing with an unhinged personality, with a man losing, or having already lost, part of his sanity to grief.

But since Robert’s feelings—along with that measure of his sanity—were already “shut away like furniture . . . in a dark, smutty warehouse” what we're met with here is the spectacle of his musty, crated feelings sprouting a fresh layer of mold and mildew. And watching mold grow isn’t very exciting, even when the mold is fertilized by dramatic, sensational events.

Ordering Chaos

2010-09-04T05:52:00.000-07:00

Among a fiction writer’s greatest challenges: how to evoke chaos while still making sense. The phrase “making sense” here is key, since ultimately the question boils down to whose sense is being rendered.

If the chaos confronting the reader is genuine chaos as experienced by the point-of-view character or characters—as opposed to an inadvertent, accidental, and hence inauthentic chaos arising from the author’s lack of command over his or her materials—then that chaos is welcomed, or anyway not entirely pointless.

In the given passage, one evening on his way home John Zambelli is rudely met by police officers who are, let us say, disinclined to ask questions first. In its particulars the scene is convincingly and vividly rendered. We are treated to the “rough hands” and “gruff voice” of Sergeant Molinski as he frisks his quarry, who lies prostrate across the paving stones of his front walkway. As the Sergeant works him over, a second officer, a woman named Dobbs, jabs her nightstick into John’s rib cage. Satisfied that Zambelli is unarmed and having duly blinded him with a flashlight, the officers learn his identity.

All of this is presented clearly enough for me to furnish this summary. Yet in the passage as written there are small points of confusion. In the opening sentence, we are told “John’s hands searched for comfort in the familiar stones beneath him.” From this we reasonably conclude that he is either on all fours or lying flat on the stone path onto which he has presumably been shoved hard. Did John have a chance to see his assailants before they tackled him? Unclear. But a moment later, where the gruff voice says, “He’s clean,” we are told—from John’s point of view—that the voice comes from “behind him” and that it “belong[s] to the cop holding the nightstick.” It’s logical, then, to conclude that John has not only glimpsed his attackers, but is able to positively identify them as police officers. In fact he's already done so, since in the first paragraph he describes the object being jammed into him as a nightstick as opposed to an unidentified blunt object.

Two paragraphs later, after John has “rotated his body slowly” to confront the officer’s flashlight beam, Molinski “ease[s] onto the landing and click[s] off the flashlight”, allowing John his first real glimpse of the cop, whose “service cap . . . barely reached John’s shoulders.” For this to be so the Sergeant would have to be very short indeed, considering that John still lies or sits on the ground.

These are small issues in a scene that, for the most part, is neatly written. The disorientation that has John Zambelli experiencing the “familiar stones” of his front walkway as alien objects now that they touch his hands rather than his feet is nicely observed. But however well established, John’s viewpoint isn’t followed through consistently such that we see, feel, hear, and touch as John does; so that his confusion makes complete sense, so that we know, for instance, that he is standing and not sitting or lying when he compares his height with that of his attacker. It’s a very small issue, but small issues like it add up and give way to larger problems: namely a lack of sufficient immersion on the author’s part in her viewpoint characters' perspectives, and the attendant overall murkiness resulting thereof.

The difference between ordered and disordered chaos is one most readers may not notice, but they’ll still feel it. Since fiction’s goal is to convey experience, even a very slight mishandling of POV will result in an obscuring or dilution of the fictional experience. An orchestra needs a conductor. What’s being orchestrated in a work of fiction is the reader’s senses through those of her fictional character or characters. When POV is mishandled, the instruments keep playing their parts, but the symphony is discordant. If that analogy won’t do here’s another. Reading fiction in which the viewpoint isn’t perfectly handled is like kissing a beautiful person with bad breath. You still get the kiss, but it’s not the kiss that might have been.

A Rude Awakening

2010-08-22T06:37:00.001-07:00

Deep into her alcohol-ridden sleep, a woman is summoned by the ringing of her cell phone. Phone calls deep into the night rarely portend good things, and the given scene offers no exception. Here, via her sister, the phone delivers the news that the woman’s mother has died in an accident.

The scene is rendered vividly, with loving detail lavished on both the condition of Charley’s bedroom (“among piles of smoky clothes, outdated magazines, and empty bottles”) and of her drunk (“The room spun and dipped around her”), disorderly, and disoriented body to which a cigarette butt clings.

But some of the vividness here works against the material by violating the author’s presumed intent: that of rendering this moment from deep within the mental state of her protagonist. I’m reminded of some American movies where the director feels compelled to “caption” everything with broad gestures such that intelligent viewers feel insulted. Here, the caption reads “Rude Phone Awakening,” and the scene proceeds to see too it that we “get it”—and we do, but what we get is more clichéd than need be, while the inclusion of certain details is more intrusive than organic.

Since the scene is written in close third person, presumably we inhabit the protagonist’s viewpoint. But in the same opening paragraph that has Charley wondering if the ringing she hears is “the beats and thumps left in her head after another Saturday night downtown,” we’ve already been told that the ringing is that of her phone. Later in the same paragraph we learn that Charley’s bedmate has “slipped out,” but in her freshly awakened state Charley can’t know this, or she can know it only once her senses have provided her with that information. The attempt to evoke a character’s subjective state is in conflict with the author’s wish that we readers should understand exactly what is going on. The author wants it both ways, and risks achieving neither.

The same disconnect between author and heroine invests the next paragraph, where Charley answers the phone with words that belie her disoriented state—or has she just looked at the time on her cell phone? We don’t know, nor do we hear through Charley the voice at the other end of the phone. Her sister and she have not spoken for some time; but wouldn’t she still recognize the voice? At any rate, even in her hungover condition, she would find it familiar. (It also begs the question: what were the caller’s first words?).

Other details—like the piles of clothes and bottles in the bedroom and the mounds of cigarette ash—likewise seem more the product of overzealous art direction than of a character’s sensory experience (contrast the first invocation of “piles of smoky clothes” with the later rendering of the same clothes by the light of the phone’s flashing screen—what the character experiences).

In an effort to pump-up an inherently dramatic scene’s atmosphere, mood and drama, the author forsakes her protagonist’s viewpoint, sacrificing authenticity, and serving up a Hollywood version of her scene. Less would be more:

While reaching for the phone she knocked down her ashtray.

“Charley—it’s Lizzie.”

Her hands shook as she lit a cigarette. By the phone’s flashing screen she saw the piles of clothes next to her bed.

“What time is it?”

“Mom had an accident.”

The room spun and dipped. Charley could not remember the last time she spoke to her sister, or the last time she’d been so drunk.

“She didn’t make it,” Lizzie said.

Waiting for the Abbot

2010-07-28T04:02:00.000-07:00

How do you generate drama or elicit any kind of interest—let alone excitement —from a scene the main action of which consists of a group of people sitting in chairs? That's the challenge that the author of this memoir presents himself with. The story takes place in Tibet, where the author, his wife, and two daughters are visiting one of the monasteries in the Kangra Valley, presumably on a pilgrimage. They are not alone. With them in the abbot's waiting room is the Dalai Lama's English translator, wearing a "full length brown Tibetan chuba," as well as a younger assistant, and a German "emissary," an older man in a pinstriped suit. They form a motley crew.

This is hardly the first narrative to open with a scene of people waiting. It's been done before, and to great effect. Norman Mailer's first novel, The Naked and the Dead, opens with a group of soldiers waiting, essentially, to face death. They're supposed to be sleeping, but

Nobody could sleep. When morning came, assault craft would be lowered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge ashore on the beach at Anopopei. All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead.

To make for an engaging opening, a “waiting scene” need not hold such high stakes. In The Disenchanted, another novel written in the same period, author Bud Schulberg presents us with Shep Stearns, a young, callow writer seated in the antechamber of Hollywood mogul Victor Milgrim, who, at long last, has called him to a meeting to discuss his next project.

It’s the waiting, Shep was thinking. You wait to get inside the gate, you wait outside the great man’s office, you wait for your agent to make the deal, you wait for the assignment, you wait for instructions on how to write what they want you to write, and then, when you finish your treatment and turn it in, you wait for that unique contribution to art, the story conference.

The rest of the chapter takes us back to Shep’s arrival in Hollywood six months before, and through those events that have led him to Milgrim’s waiting room. Eleven pages of backstory later, Shep finally enters Milgrim’s office.

And yet those pages—and the long wait suggested by them—are full of dramatic tension, since they inform us of what Shep has gone through to arrive at this point, and also what’s at stake for him. The rest of Schulberg’s brilliant but forgotten novel tells of Shep’s gallant efforts to keep Manley Halliday, a once great but fallen author (based on Fitzgerald) sober through their collaboration on a screenplay for Love on Ice, a college musical. Needless to say, Shep fails, and the rest of the novel chronicles Halliday’s hilarious but ultimately tragic descent into drunkenness and death.

The structure in this well-written memoir opening is similar, with the first paragraphs describing the pilgrims awaiting their audience with the abbot. But here, rather than take us through a flashback recounting the purpose and tribulations of their journey to this greatly anticipated moment, instead we are presented with a fairly innocuous breakfast meeting with the same abbot “on the hotel terrace” the morning before, in which “over a cup of strong Indian chai” the abbot boasts of his long relationship with the Dalai Lama, while dismissing as “all the puja stuff”— “the burning of incense . . .the mantras and prayers . . . the salutations and prostrations . . . ”—in short, the trappings of Tibetan Buddhism that the narrator and his family have come to Tibet to appreciate and study.

A “waiting scene” depends on having something to wait for. Here, the flashback fairly obliterates any tensions or expectations we—and the protagonists—might have entertained with respect to the anticipated meeting with the abbot. It lets the air out of the balloon, so to speak, so there’s nothing left to wait for.

It might be better to lead with the first meeting with the abbot, with anxieties and expectations still running high and not already discharged.

Cookbook of the Dead

2010-07-19T07:59:00.000-07:00

In these personality-driven times we tend to associate the word "conceit" with its adjectival cousin conceited, meaning (according to Merriam-Webster) "to have or show an excessively high opinion of oneself." In fact the first meaning of conceited is "ingenuously contrived." One could argue that conceited people have contrived ingeniously to think more highly of themselves than they should.

As applied to literature, a conceit is a fanciful idea or extended metaphor with its own logic that governs a passage in a creative work or the work itself. In this opening passage (of what, for lack of a better label, I'll call a sci-fi fantasy), the main conceit is that of a book as both narrator and protagonist.

As extended metaphors go, it's both bizarre and mundane—bizarre since, in the ordinary world, books are inanimate objects without volition or the power of speech; mundane, since, in a quite literal sense, all books narrate themselves. They "speak" to us in individual voices—or rather, their narrators do.

Here that notion—that conceit—is carried to an extreme, since the narrating book (or Tome, to use the given designation), isn't just a peripheral or detached narrator, but a main character in the story we are about to read, one whose plot turns on the rivalry between the narrator and his more accomplished brother. This brother is not—as one might reasonably expect—himself a Tome, but "the Necronomicon"—an apparently powerful entity who on the continuum between "might[y] demon lords" and "insignificant cultists" lies closer to the former.

That's quite a mouthful of conceits to swallow. In fact—for me, anyway, it's a few too many. Three paragraphs into this story and already I'm experiencing "conceit reflux."

Ideas (conceits) are wonderful, but unless sufficiently embodied in characters and actions they remain ideas. And ideas aren't what fiction is made of. Fiction is made of actions performed and experienced by characters.

Here, nothing happens. While the author takes pains to lay out his clever conceits, he neglects to provide us with any grounding in time, place, or event. Instead we're treated to rhetorical demands, explanations, and contradictions (inexplicably the narrator assumes we've heard of Necronomicons but never of Tomes). Nor is there any suggestion of a specific scene in the offing. As they say down in Texas, it's all hat and no cattle: all bluff and bluster but no bite—all set-up with no pay-off. In this opening the author does everything but tell a story. I'm reminded of the Great and Powerful Oz, of his thunderous voice and great balls of fire—all most impressive until Toto draws back the curtain.

Which isn't to say that this author is out to deceive us, or that he doesn't have a wonderful story to tell. But he'd better stop telling us how he's going to go tell it, and start telling it, soon, before all of his wizardry is exposed as humbug.

Beth's Wish

2010-07-17T11:16:00.000-07:00

Like most creative people I have a healthy distrust of rules. But when it comes to writing fiction there's one rule I feel comfortable about giving to my students and applying myself: "Never state what's implied." The inverse ("Never imply what's stated") is as sound. But since a fiction writer's purpose is to show and not to tell, the first version applies more. In this scene much that's stated is implied.

A widower and his daughter, Beth, are bound for a holiday gathering—the first since Beth's mother, Judith, died in a car crash. Something is bothering Beth. This is made evident to her father through Beth's sighs and swallows, and by how she worries a necklace her mother and father gave her as a high school graduation gift five years before. At last her father asks, "What's the matter, Princess?" To which after more sighing and shifting Beth replies, "Dad, what do you miss the most about Mom since she died?"

The central conflict here is so thoroughly embodied in that question that much of what comes with it feels redundant, an effort to dramatize what's implicitly dramatic. The question isn't merely the crux of the scene; it is the scene, and all the sighing and squirming and shifting is gilding the lily.

The passing scenery adds something; the snow and the Christmas lights give us the season and ground the situation in a solid setting. On the other hand, Beth's description feels forced. From the narrator father's point-of-view in the shifting darkness of his truck, he might note the play of lights on her hair, and see the neckless digging into her neck. But "Beth was a beautiful woman, no longer the skinny teenaged waif who held her own at barrel racing" is intrusive, more the words of Beth's anxious author than of her concerned, driving father.

That description, like much of the content in this opening, teases suspense where none has been established; heightens conflict where there is no conflict. If, on the other hand, Beth's query were to preceded such descriptions, they would then color and evoke Dad's interior world as he drives and ponders.

"Dad, what do you miss most about Mom?"

We were on our way to the Schmucker's Christmas party in my pickup truck when my daughter put the question to me . . .

Here, through squirms and sighs, the author has tried gamely to dramatize the daughter's plight, when the drama expressed by her question belongs to the father who must answer it—and who awakens every morning to the answer.

Darkness & Light

2010-07-12T11:00:00.000-07:00

A woman watches—or dreams—herself walking in the woods under a canopy of trees. She walks with "scarcely" a sound, her skirt hem teasing the leaves in her path, leaves whose crunching sounds are themselves "almost inaudible."

Indeed, there is something altogether ghostly about this woman and the scene she inhabits—or haunts. Everything about the scene is tentative; nothing, with the possible exception of the forest itself, is real. But is the dreaming narrator really in a forest, or is that, too, only a dream? In the second sentence a canopy is mentioned; I assume it's the canopy of the forest, but it might also be the canopy of the dreaming woman's bed. Maybe it's both.

The bulk of this first section is taken up with a description of this dream-woman whose face "looks serene" and whose body "appears relaxed." Notice how even these descriptions are vague and abstract, with adjectives doing most of the heavy lifting. But adjectives aren't descriptions; they're opinions. They state the net effect, but not the causes. Meanwhile the evidence on which the opinions are based is nowhere to be seen, heard, smelled, or touched.

This lack of concreteness, conjoined with the author's tendency to hedge, subdue, or negate the few concrete details provided ("faint rustle," "no more than a whisper," "absence of wind") add up to a scene that self-destructs on reading, wavering and dissolving like smoke rings into thin air.

What do you expect from a dream? This is a dream, after all—the first section, anyway. And about dreams in literature I have very mixed feelings. Though they can successfully convey a character's psyche while—as real dreams do—offering symbols and other fodder for amateur Freudians—they can also be as boring as the dreams our lovers button-hole us with in real life. Our own dreams are of interest to us because we've lived through them; for us they're real experiences. But to others they're just dreams, and not worth investing much in.

That's usually how I feel about dreams in fiction. However supremely rendered, still, I rarely invest much in them, since I know they're just dreams. This is even more so when a story opens with a dream, in which case I'm not even invested enough in the dreamer to care what the dream might portend. And so, though poetically written, for me anyway this opening scene goes up in dreamsmoke.

As for the second "chapter" (the units are too short to pass for chapters; at any rate I wouldn't label them such), there at last we get something concrete. Since this second scene works only in contrast with the first, juxtaposing poetic dream with "hard" reality (pun intended), the two scenes should probably be merged. And the proportions should probably be reversed, with the sylvan dream image of the walking woman reduced to a sentence or two—three at the most—and the lion's share of this opening given to vulgar reality: a ratio far more in keeping with what most of us, for better or worse, experience as life.

Dying Star

2010-07-12T10:55:00.000-07:00

To modify a famous opening sentence, "All good writing is good in pretty much the same ways." Whatever the genre--when it comes to telling stories--certain ideals, conventions, and principles apply. The law of economy and efficiency; concreteness over abstraction. Show, don't tell.

Then there's the convention know as in medias res. The Latin phrase, which translates to "in the middle of things," describes a narrative technique whereby, instead of telling stories from the very beginning, authors plunge their readers into conflicts already underway. Especially with respect to the first pages and scenes of our stories, ideally we want to invite readers into worlds populated by characters whose lives are already complicated by situations which, if they haven't set a plot in motion quiet yet, will do so very soon. In medias res.

The genre here is science fiction. The story opens with Zech, the hero, twenty-minutes from a confrontation with some rivals to whom he is about to make an offer they can't refuse: at least he hopes they won't refuse it. In the bedroom (or the equivalent) of his starship, he picks out a suit custom-tailored back in Astria (his home planet) from the fleece of a "very rare animal." He shaves his stubble and—later, in the kitchen adjacent to his starship laboratory—takes his daily vitamins (likewise a product of Astria). And though he wishes to swallow them with something presumably stronger than water, he finds the bottle empty. But then it doesn't matter: whatever was in the bottle, he doesn't need it anymore.

Take away the sci-fi trappings: the starship, the "omni-com," the mention of other planets and rare creatures thereof turned into suits—and what's left? A man getting up in the morning, doing his toiletries, getting dressed. In a word: banality. Why do so many stories in writers workshops start with characters waking up, stretching, brushing their teeth? Maybe because their authors haven't located the true beginnings of their stories, or they're too timid to plunge straight into situation and conflict. Or maybe they feel they want to "milk" things a bit more before getting into the action.

But where no suspense has been created, there's nothing to "milk." A character getting out of bed is a character getting out of bed—whether the bed is in a suburban tract house in Pine Hill, New Jersey, or on a space station orbiting between Saturns rings, makes little (if any) difference. Just as looking at the readout on his omni-com makes Zach want to yawn, so readers are likely to find themselves yawning through this opening scene, despite it's author's game effort to front-load it with suspense by telegraphing a future dramatic event in the opening paragraph. But that event won't occur for another twenty-minutes. Meanwhile we're stuck with a character contemplating his razor stubble while we're treated to a nickel-tour of his spacecraft.

My suggestion: open in medias res, with the promised dramatic deal scene. We can learn about Zechs suits and his razor stubble later.

Without a Dragon's Protection

2010-07-12T10:02:00.001-07:00

Up to its second to last line, this opening page might have been torn out of James Hilton's 1934 bestseller, Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Set a generation earlier than the given work, Hilton's unabashedly sentimental novella portrayed the life of its eponymous self-effacing hero, Arthur Chipping, a career schoolmaster in an English public school.

In Hilton's story, having retired after decades of teaching Roman History and Latin at Brookfield School, Mr. Chips is called back to service during World War I, which has sent younger teachers off to the trenches. For Hilton, the period between World Wars represented an oasis in civilization—or the mirage of an oasis, soon be obliterated by Hitler and the smashing of the Versailles Treaty. In another novel written just before Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Hilton celebrated this oasis metaphorically, through a fictional utopia set high in the mountains of Tibet. That novel was called Lost Horizon, and the utopia was Shangri-La—a term that's since become synonymous with the notion of an earthly paradise, often with a pejorative intent.

I mention all this because, up to the last paragraph, there's something dreamily quaint about this opening passage. Here is Master Jack, the schoolmaster in his tweed waistcoat, comforting and admonishing his eleven-year-old charge, Nick Parker, in his oak-lined study bristling with anthropological artifacts. Through the study's window "shouts and screams" drift in from the rugby fields where Nick has gotten into a scrap with one or several of his schoolmates. It's not the first time; indeed, three days into his first term and Nick has already earned a reputation for fighting. Nick's teacher—no stranger to combat himself (he lost an arm in the Great War), lends Nick a "fresh white handkerchief" to blow his bloody nose into.

All of this is conveyed very deftly in an opening passage that's alive to all the senses: sight (the pink color of Nick's blood mixed with his saliva), sounds (the shouts and screams from the rugby field), textures ("knicknacks of wicker and weave"—note how alliteration and meter create their own texture). A good ear for dialogue ("To you, Nick, they happen a lot") together with a sharp eye for telling details (the objects cluttering the master's walls) make this a winning opening. In a few paragraphs I feel I know Master Jacks and his pupil. And though—excepting the last lines—there are no throat-grabbers here, still, there is conflict, and I for one would read on to discover why Nick is having such a hard time fitting in with his fellow students.

Then comes the dragon in the last paragraph. Suddenly I've traded the gentile Shangri-La of Mr. Chips and Dead Poets Society for Tolkien's Middle Earth. True, the title should have warned me, and did, though as soon as I started reading I forgot the warning.

These days, dragons are as ubiquitous in works of literature as angels, witches and vampires—a truth that I confess to lamenting. The moment we introduce supernatural phenomenon into fiction we undermine the human element, with curses, spells, and potions augmenting (if not replacing entirely) psychological cause and effect. The fantasy genre to which such phenomenon belong doesn't just allow for impossible events, it insists upon them. Though traditionally—as with Tolkien—fantasy novels are grounded in medieval settings, thanks to Ann Rice and Harry Potter we may now expect witches, vampires, and dragons to pop up anywhere, including a boarding school between the World Wars.

Starting with the dragon that guards the golden fleece at Rhodes, on through the unnamed dragon in Beowulf and Tolkien's Glaurung and Smaug, with each decade the number of dragons in books has multiplied, with the past decade furnishing us with no less than a hundred novels featuring the mythological serpents, making me wonder why Saint George ever bothered. Why in 2010 so many readers and writers still share this obsession with our medieval forebears may be explained partly by a dissatisfaction with the fruits of Christianity and science, and the wish to return to more innocent and colorful myths.

Though I share those dissatisfactions, I can live without dragons. But that's the personal bias of someone who prefers to stare down the real monsters rather than embrace mythological beasts. That said, injected into this otherwise quaint scene the allusion to dragons in the final paragraph is jarring, and the author might better prepare us for it by dropping a hint of some kind earlier—a set of dragon's on the walls of the teacher's study?

Blood & Water

2010-07-10T08:06:00.001-07:00

Good writers are determined to get things exactly right, and so they work and work and keep working, fine-turning their sentences and paragraphs to within a tolerance that would make a Swiss watchmaker proud. Here, the author seems more intent on showy syntax than on clear, precise, concise expression.

The story opens with a man—Pete Carter—driving at breakneck speeds down the blighted streets of "Canary Wharf" (now a high-rent financial and shopping neighborhood in east London, but still derelict at the time when the story takes place). My first assumption is that this is going to be a high-impact thriller, with Pete a fugitive on the lam. In fact Pete is a thirty-year old career criminal, and the car he's putting the hammer down on is a brand new Ford Sierra pinched from a dealer showroom on Pete's behalf by a contracted car thief. It's all pretty OTT—Over the Top. Still, I might go along for the ride were there fewer infelicities of language and detail.

The third paragraph offers some examples. It begins: "Tyres [Brit. spelling] squealed loudly in protest, struggling to maintain traction on the ancient potholed hardtop, and the rear of the car jolted violently threatening to spin out of control." For all its kinetic energy the sentence feels passive, with the car doing the struggling and the protagonist nowhere to be seen. And do we really need to know that the tires squeal "in protest" and furthermore that they do so in "struggling to maintain traction" i.e., grip? A sentence less intent on flexing its author's linguistic muscles might read, "The car's tires squealed and its rear-end jolted over potholes as Pete tried to keep it on the road."

Next sentence: "Deft work with the clutch and brake corrected the over-steer before he again trod heavily on the accelerator." Alternative version: "He downshifted out of the corner and floored it again." The first sentence draws attention to itself; the second puts the character in the driver's seat.

Last sentence: "With a roar of the engine, the car shot through the apex of the corner and raced away, down the deserted streets of the industrial estate." I'm not sure what the "apex" of a corner is, since apex usually refers to the top of something. But apart from that, if Pete has "shot through" the corner, then by my lights he has just driven off the road, and so it's a mystery to me how the end of the very same sentence has him back "on the deserted streets of the industrial estate." The image I'm left with is of a car shooting through a high guardrail and vaulting through space toward a perfect two-point landing on another street— the sort of thing you see in movie chase scenes all the time, but which, on paper, at least for me, is more annoying than exciting.

In the next paragraph proud Pete (and he has every right to be, having executed that last Hollywood stunt) grins "broadly" and "a childlike giggle escape[s] his lips." I want to know why the giggle has to "escape," since nothing else about Pete is inhibited. A paragraph later, when we're told that Pete's a "supposedly responsible thirty-year-old," I can't help wondering who does the supposing, and whether he (or she), too, should be locked up before being loosed on the back streets of London?

We read further to learn that rendering the stolen vehicle "untraceable" took nothing more than "a bit of fancy work with the engine number and registration plate." And what about those "gleaming alloy wheels" and that "gorgeous bright red" paint? As targets of theft go Pete's dream car is about as discreet as a fire engine. Within an hour he'd be in jail.

As for Pete's having done all this to please Susie—his wife and the mother of their two children—wouldn't she have been happier with an SUV? Apparently, since when Pete gets home (in the last paragraph) Susie goes "ape shit"—an abrupt diction drop, and hard to reconcile with phrases like "he again trod heavily on the accelerator."

The author might consider entering the action as Pete pull's into his driveway, and have readers discover what he's done through the dialogue with his wife, who, knowing him, smells something fishy. He might even consider narrating the scene from Susie's POV, leaving the joyride--and all that burning rubber--to the reader's imagination, which is better equipped to compete with movies.

The Grace of the World

2010-07-10T07:52:00.000-07:00

Near the end of North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock's careening suspense comedy starring Cary Grant as a divorced advertising executive mistaken for a CIA counterespionage agent, Cary Grant grips Eva Marie Saint (a genuine CIA plant) by the hand as she dangles off one of the faces of Mount Rushmore. The movie literally ends on a cliffhanger (Spoiler Alert: he not only rescues her, but vaults her straight into the arms of marital bliss in a train couchette).

Instead of ending with a cliffhanger, this novel opens with one. Unlike Cary and Eva Marie (who've been pushed to the brink of Mt. Rushmore by James Mason and his band of spy-thugs), Ruby and Sal are voluntary cliff-danglers, though on this cliff they've apparently met their match. As Ruby's "fingertips bleed" while she "strain[s] to keep hold of the narrow ledge," she looks up at her partner Cal, who adjusts the belaying rope and eggs her on, saying, "You've climbed taller men than this."

The mixture of comedy and suspense is something else this piece shares in common with Hitchcock's masterpiece. As they both dangle from Thomas Jefferson's nose, Eva Marie Saint asks Cary Grant why his previous wives divorced him, to which he replies, "They said I led too dull a life." A similar repartee binds these two more surely than that belaying line.

In North by Northwest, by the time we arrive at this blend of nail-biting and quip-tossing we know the protagonists well enough to invest equally in both suspense and humor, to laugh out loud as we bite our nails. But Sal and Ruby are strangers to me. Their dangling from a cliff means no more or less than would the peril of any two strangers. Ditto their sarcastic banter.

I'm reminded of another movie, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, in which the two outlaws sling affectionate barbs at each other ("You just keep thinking, Butch. That's what you're good at."). In terms of their banter, thanks to the above mentioned movies (and also to shows like the X-files, where male/female teams share a similar sarcastic repartee), the dynamic feels too familiar. On the one hand I don't know these people, really; on the other I've seen and heard them a dozen times before. I know them as cardboard cutouts.

Affectionate sarcastic repartee is what this opening has to offer substantially, by way of character development. The rest is a competent and detailed evocation of rock climbing and the question: "Will Ruby fall?" I care, but much less than I might had this relationship not already obtained the summit of glibness.

Clashes by Night

2010-07-10T07:49:00.000-07:00

At the onset of war a pastor prepares to address his congregation. Though many novels end with the outbreak of war (War and Peace, From Here to Eternity), and many more deal with the time leading up to war (and then go on to treat the effects of that war on the characters), I can think of no novels that actually begin on the very first day of war.

Two reasons why this may be so occur to me. The first is that, since wars are cataclysmic, climactic events, it makes more sense for a novel to end with the outbreak of war than to start with it. The second is that, while the ends of wars tend to be clearly demarcated by treaty signings, unless prompted by singular events like the attacks on Pearl Harbor or the World Trade Center, their precise starting points can be harder to pinpoint and are often only made clear to the general public historically, in retrospect.

Still, it's an intriguing conceit, and well-handled here, with the description of the priest/narrator putting on his vestments closely observed ("I run my finger between [my collar] and my neck to relieve the chafing") and well-integrated with his internal ruminations ("What are [the members of my congregation] thinking? That soon we will greet Spring as though nothing has changed?").

Some of these musings are too obvious ("If only that were true. I wish. I wish."), while others seem out of place—specifically his dwelling on the taunts he endured as a shy child, and his concern that his priestly garments make him feel feminine. That a man of the cloth would routinely harbor such thoughts is unlikely; that he would do so on this of all mornings is bizarre. At the very least such reflections should be provoked by specific stimuli and not come unbidden.

That said, owing mostly to the attention given to his clerical garments, the portrait of a priest that emerges here is more convincing than not. But that portrait is marred by less-than-perfect handling of time and tense. The first sentence is problematic. If the war started "today," when when—relative to that starting point—does the present-tense monologue occur? If "dawn is clouding," then the day itself has just started, in which case when did the priest and his congregants get the news? Were they up at two a.m. watching the news of TV? If so, something might be said to that effect. Anyway the war started before dawn, so it would be more accurate to say, "The war started early this morning." It's not as brisk a sentence, true. But it's less confusing.

In the same first paragraph, a few sentences later, the author shifts accidentally from present to past tense ("I had always imagined . . .").

Still, despite these technical errors, I'm curious to hear what this preacher will say to his flock, and more than that to learn if and how his faith will hold up under the assaults and insults of war. One thing's for sure: in a story that starts with the first bombs of war, two outcomes exist: either things will get worse, or they'll get much, much worse.

In the Dark

2010-07-06T10:41:00.000-07:00

The challenge of fiction writing boils down to this: what information to supply to readers, and when to supply it, by what means. How much does the reader need to know, versus how much he or she should be kept in the dark? Give the reader too much information, or give it too soon, and you kill any sense of suspense. Give too little, and you'll generate not suspense, but confusion. And though inexperienced authors routinely conflate the two, they aren't the same thing.

To describe what writers do, Frank Conroy—who, before his death in 2005 directed the famous Iowa Writer's Workshop for over 30 years—used the metaphor of a mountain. In writing fiction, we equip readers for a journey up a mountain. When they get to the top—assuming that they get there—they'll be rewarded with an expanded view of life (and even, if the book is really good, of the universe). But in order to get there they'll need certain things. The trick, Conroy explained, is to give readers everything they need to make the journey—compass, map, hardtack, water—but nothing unnecessary (yo-yo, kazoo, kaleidoscope), and nothing sooner than it's needed (telescope, champagne).

This opening generates a lot of what I call false suspense—the kind of suspense that has readers asking not what's going to happen next? but what the heck am I reading, and why? From the profusion of blood-drenched visions that the heroine suffers to the mystifying "U'Gen"—a term without meaning in my world and without explanation in the author's—it offers almost nothing but confusion.

Who is Rachael? Where is she? What is she doing there? When did those intruding thoughts of hers—the ones she is "grateful to be away from" in the first paragraph—intrude? During the long bus trip? And if indeed she has gotten away from them, then why, two paragraphs later, is she seized with a vision? Is this the same vision she's on her way to report? Do these visions pop "into the forefront of her thoughts with little prodding" or against her will? What, if any, is the relation between Rachael's visions and her mind's autonomous habit of drifting into other "open minds"? Those other minds—are they where Rachael's visions come from? We don't know. Nor can we be sure if Randall is the dying soldier in the vision, and if the "coveted item" he embraced with his dead arms is the family photograph mentioned later. As to the nature of the relation between Randall and Rachael, regarding that, too, we are left clueless.

What we do know is that for reasons unclear Rachael is able to see into the future, and that that future is apocalyptic, with blood "leeching from . . . dead bodies" and "streets littered with glass and rubble." Then again, the story itself would seem to be set in a none-too-charming future in which U'gen cadets and "Visionary students" (author's capitalization) rehearse military strategy as they gear up for the coming apocalypse.

What partly does in this opening is a lack of contrast. Were they cast against a less dismal present Rachael's "horrifying" visions might indeed horrify; instead, they spill blood and darkness into a vision that is already dark, or at any rate murky. Just as, in her vision, "light filter[s] through the haze of dusk," in this opening as a whole very little light seeps through. All is hazy, dim, and obscure. Between Rachael's vision-addled mind and the author's own lack of clarity and precision (Is the school in Paragraph #1 a "looming remnant of an ancient society" or active and in session?), we are left completely in the dark.

Out of the Wreckage

2010-07-06T10:28:00.000-07:00

A woman rushes to the aid of her father-in-law, who's had a car accident ("again"). Though "Pop," as he's called, made it home on his own, the next morning his son and the narrator insist that he go to the emergency room for X-rays, where he is pronounced sound and discharged.

Though that pointed "again" in the first sentence more than suggests that Pop’s wrecking of cars is routine, no elaboration is offered here, and so the event feels novel and therefore anecdotal. For the same reason that anecdotes make for great entertainment among friends, they tend not to work very well as fiction (or—in this case—as memoir), since they present people in such strained and extraordinary circumstances that they fail to illuminate their personalities. In other words what Tolstoy said about happy families ("All happy families are happy in the same way") applies equally to men who've just missed breaking their necks in car accidents.

What would make this scene less anecdotal is more background surrounding the father’s habit of wrecking cars, so that this scene is experienced in its proper context: as one (perhaps the worst) in a series of similar incidents. Instead of concentrating on the aftermath, as here, the author would do better to describe Pop’s routine actions which have occasioned this particular event. Otherwise what do I learn about Pop? Merely that like the rest of us he is flesh and blood and hence mortal, and that for a self-destructive man he is also very, very lucky. But his luck is more a factor of fate than of character: it, too, tells us little about who he is.

Bottom line: the author misses the point of her own opening scene. The point isn’t that her father survives this event, or how; the point is that he has survived dozens (or however many) like it—that he's a reckless man whose recklessness causes more pain and suffering to his kin than to himself.

As written this isn't emphasized; in fact it’s brushed aside in favor of the details surrounding this particular episode, the trip to the emergency room, and so on, all of which is if not entirely predictable pro forma. It is the footnote or epilogue to a tale as yet unwritten of a man with a death wish, or something approaching one. Perhaps the scene more-or-less as written might serve as a framing device, a way to get into the story of this father and his reckless behavior. In that case, the story might be framed at one end with the trip to the emergency room, and then—after Pop’s history of car wrecks has been recounted and its implications explored—with Pop's having survived, for better or worse, yet again.

Some technical issues: as written the opening suffers from temporal dislocation. When has the incident occurred? The exclamatory first sentence suggests that it has just happened, while the past tense second paragraph suggests otherwise, that the episode is being recalled not hours later, but across a much greater distance of time. Better to write: "At six o'clock this morning Pop wrecked his car. Again." Else why would the narrator exclaim over it now?

The last sentence of the third paragraph tells us that Nancy Lee's house treated Pop's sounds.

In the fifth paragraph the phrase "down for the count"—an idiom imported from the boxing ring, when a boxer has been knocked out and won't recover—implies that Pop will die of his hidden wounds, but everything that follows suggests that he will live to wreck more cars.

Playing for Keeps

2010-07-05T18:45:00.000-07:00

A man (or boy) of indeterminate age wakens to find his mother dead in the other room. This monumental occasion in his life has not come unexpected; we are told (improbably) that it is something "he had always feared." Having given his mother's cat a bowl of milk and fed her chickens, the protagonist assumes a catatonic state in his mother's armchair "staring ahead, his mind vacant of thought." When the cat makes its next appearance he emerges from his stupor just long enough to strangle the creature to death with his bare hands, after which he curls up in bed with Mom's corpse. The passage ends with his realization that "for the first time in his life" he is "utterly alone in the world."

If in reading this passage you sense a Norman Bates in the making, you're not alone. Bates, for those who've never seen the movie (I almost said "or who've forgotten it" except it's unforgettable), is the title character of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (played to a fare-the-well by Anthony Perkins). He operates a motel at the bottom of the hill where he and his mother share a forbidding Victorian house—his dead mother, that is. Mrs. Bates has been dead for six years; Norman has kept her mummified body and propped it in her rocking chair.

I imagine a similar future in store for this protagonist—minus the motel. One needn't travel that far a psychic distance to get from strangling cats with his bare hands to stabbing anonymous fugitive women to death in a shower. Whatever his fate, there's little doubt in my mine that what we've got here at best is a creep, at worst the humble beginnings of a serial killer.

Which makes this an effective opening, provided that the story that follows lives up to its creepy nature, as I suspect it will. After all, a story whose first page treats us to two deaths and one murder isn't likely to turn into a comedy of manners or a romance—or, for that matter, a nuanced work of psychological or social realism. Not with passages like this

"It was then that he came to from his reverie, then that he put his hands around its scrawny neck and squeezed until it slumped limply, dead."

that call to mind Vincent Price's "Thriller" voiceover sessions. Here and at other points the writing feels downright Gothic, as if the author has dipped his quill into Edgar Allen Poe's inkwell. Nothing wrong with that, except that it plants us firmly in Gothic thriller or horror territory. If the story that follows doesn't measure up disappointment is sure to result.

I can quibble with grammar and style. To say the least the handling of tense here is problematic, especially with the penultimate paragraph, where after his mother's death the protagonist "knew that it would come some day" (should be "had known"). In the same paragraph we get "But he did not know that today she would die." In a past-tense narrative, unless it refers to the present from which the narrator is looking back, the word "today" has no place or meaning. The sentence should read, "But he hadn't known that she would die this day."

I'm also troubled by the last line, in which we're told that what the protagonist "[feels] most" is the "sense of being" utterly alone—packing psychic bubble wrap between the character and his experience, since he is most emphatically and in fact "utterly alone."

Here, in This Sun

2010-07-05T08:27:00.000-07:00

A woman waits in an auto repair shop while her car is serviced. While waiting she is distracted by the glare of sunlight through the shop's windows, to the point where she envies the blind man waiting across from her, with his "deep black sunglass lenses." She goes on to ruminate about the lack of blind women in the town, at least in public places, and concludes that "even with a German Shepherd's protection" such women would be vulnerable to muggers and rapists. Odd thoughts for a woman to be harboring on an otherwise ordinary day at the auto shop. But then Anna—that's her name—is hot and tired ("She had often felt tired lately"), and even a little dizzy, and these oddly cynical thoughts might be ascribed at least in part to her exhaustion.

Then the litany of odd thoughts resumes with Anna concluding that "everyone in the [auto repair shop] waiting room" is vulnerable, at the mercy of mechanics "with their greasy fingers and wrenches clinking under their car hoods." She's convinced that the mechanics are out to rip her off, and furthermore that she deserves it for "sitting helplessly [at home] in her vinyl seat, watching Jeopardy" instead of teaching herself mechanics (one wonders if at the dentist's office she berates herself for not having gone to dental school). One begins to suspect that these aren't merely the ruminations of an exhausted and wary woman, but the warped notions of a paranoid. At the very least Anna is deeply depressed.

The world as interpreted by a mind slightly off its tether is the subject of this opening, one that makes for a good if disturbing read. I for one want to know more about this character who feels so undone by the rays of sunlight through a window that she wishes herself blind, and compares spare car parts to human organs "in nests of shredded packing paper."

In first-person fiction we call such a character "unreliable." What makes a narrative unreliable isn't usually that we're given the wrong facts, but that the world is presented through the distorting filter or tinted lens of a psyche that has lost its grasp on the objective world: i.e., that may see things very clearly, but doesn't see them as you and I would see them. Unreliable narratives are either void of perspective, or offer us perspectives that are warped.

A good example of this is the narrator of John Cheever's masterpiece "Goodbye, My Brother," who tells us up front that his family "has always been very close in spirit," then goes on to eviscerate said family and especially his brother, who by the story's end has been attacked not only verbally but physically, laid flat on his back with a saltwater-logged root. From the narrator's perspective this may pass for filial devotion, but Cheever's readers are bound to see things differently, as he meant us to.

Another prime example of an unreliable protagonist is the butler in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, a man rendered so emotionally comatose by his inured sense of propriety that when given his once real chance at love he botches it. It's a terribly sad story, rendered sadder for being told by its victim who doesn't even see how sad it is, or even that he's the victim.

But the woman in the work presented here has more in common with Chief Broom, the narrator of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a native American inmate at a mental hospital in the Pacific Northwest, for whom events unfold through a thick, hallucinatory fog as he pushes his broom back and forth down the hospital's corridors. Though his view of things is distorted, still, for Kesey's novel about a belligerent individualist who fakes his way into the looney bin to avoid prison time Chief Broom is the perfect narrator, since he's been faking his own mental illness. Only after Kesey concocted Chief Broom (which event, we're told, occurred during one of the fledgling author's many drugged interludes), was he able to successfully write his novel.

Don't get out the peyote just yet. Unreliable narratives are rare and tricky birds, and should only be ventured into with the sure understanding that an unreliable narrative is intended, since the ultimate subject of an unreliable narrative is always the protagonist's unreliability. Otherwise, you run the risk of presenting readers not with an unreliable character, but with an unreliable author, for which there can be no excuse. If there's nothing wrong with Anna; if her bizarre, unbridled perceptions turn out to be nothing more than the writer flexing his or her descriptive muscles, being clever or cute for cuteness or cleverness sake, then this opening fails for making promises it has no intention to deliver on.

I suspect this author won't let us down; that these perceptions of Anna's are there for a good reason, to introduce us to the psyche of a woman on the verge of mental breakdown. I suspect, too, that as the story progresses her problems—along with her perceptions—will only get worse.

Hit and Run

2010-07-04T11:56:00.000-07:00

A private investigator arrives at a murder scene. The weapon: not a bullet or the gun that fired it, but "the blunt square shape of the front of a car" traveling fast enough to have "become airborne . . . before slamming into its victim."

Though not stated as such, these observations clearly belong to Matt Selden, private-eye, as he takes in the scene, "pull[ing] his coat closer around him." We don't have to wonder what sort of coat he wears. As befitting the grand tradition of hardboiled crime fiction into which this snugly falls, it has to be a trench coat, one with the lapels flipped raffishly up and that has no doubt seen better days, as has its haggard, cynical owner.

Without even having read beyond the second paragraph already I feel I know Matt, or know his type. I've met him many times before in books and movies. He is Sam Spade in Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Marlowe in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. No stranger to violent crime or danger, he's been known to engage in a little of both himself now and then—for the sake of his clients. He's cocky, tough, a bit on the flip side—but not without principles, or a heart. He may not always get his man (or woman: the hardboiled school doesn't discriminate on the basis of sex); but his batting average is better than that of the cops with whom he shares a common goal, but with whom he nonetheless always finds himself working at cross purposes.

Pioneered in the 1920s by Carroll John Day and popularized in the '30s and '40s by Chandler and Hammett, the hardboiled genre—referred to less than generously by some as "pulp fiction"—remains hugely popular to this day. Part of that ongoing success may be owed to the genre's timelessness and versatility. After all, as long as there are criminals and crimes, someone will need to solve them—or try. That may explain why the genre has attracted writers as otherwise unlike each other as John D. MacDonald, Robert B. Parker, Sue Grafton, Walter Mosley—and others whose titles dominate bestseller lists, each of them giving the hardboiled theme a different twist.

Here, the "twist" seems to be that Matt Selden, private eye, is also a man of the cloth. "No," Matt replies when a burly police sergeant also at the scene sneers "Ah, Jesus" at him, "just one of his faithful ministers[italics mine]." It's not the first time that a fictional man of the cloth has slummed as a detective. In the early part of the last century English novelist G.K. Chesterton published 52 short stories starring Father Brown, a priest who moonlights as a Sherlock Holmes-like detective. Unlike his hardboiled successors, Father Brown exemplified the quiet humility of his other calling, and seldom spoke except to utter something profound. More recently Fr. Brad Reynolds and Andrew Greeley (himself a priest) have given us mystery-solving clergymen.

Though Hammett was an exquisite stylist (whose dialogue was so strong to arrive at a screenplay for The Maltese Falcon director John Huston supposedly had his secretary strip everything else out of the book), and beautifully-crafted hardboiled novels exist, to succeed at the genre gorgeous prose is by no means a prerequisite. "Adequate" sums up the style of most such novels.

Here, the prose is better than adequate. "Death had come airborne and metallic" draws me right in; there's a wisecracking, poetic edge to it that, I soon learn, is a product of the protagonist's steely cynicism. However hardboiled, the prose still makes room for atmosphere ("The first rays of the sun sparkled on the spire of the stately old church") and convincing detail ("His eyes narrowed as he saw a change in the color of the bitumen"). The trails of blood drifting away from the corpse are likened to the tendrils of a jellyfish. Though I regret the lack of faith in the reader that has the author assuring us us that the tendrils are of blood, still, the description works. With similar efficiency via a brief exchange of dialogue the author effectively renders the strained relationship between protagonist and beat sergeant.

Mean, lean, and clean—almost (but not quite) slick: befitting of a genre of which we've come to expect no more or less.

Road Train

2010-07-03T13:47:00.001-07:00

Though the term is more familiar in Australia, a road train (or roadtrain) is a truck pulling two or more trailers in tandem. Here, in this effective opening, the road train becomes a source of anxiety and terror looming on the wavering horizon, "floating toward us above a hot blue lake across the road"—like one of those B-movie monsters from the 1950s, The Blob or Empire of the Ants. No longer simply a conveyance transporting innocent merchandise from point A to point B, here the road train becomes Yeats' "vast image " arising out of the desert sand . . . moving its slow thighs. . .slouch[ing] toward Bethlehem to be born." The narrator finds it scary, and so do we.

In fact the truck is only a truck—but still a source of fear and anxiety as it bears down on the protagonist in her car "like a boat with a cresting bow wave ahead of it." We are in Australia, somewhere in the outback, presumably. As one of the road train's trailers swings over the double white line the narrator braces herself for the collision, for "the smashing, shrieking, grinding impact of a side-swipe"—which, of course, doesn't come.

Instead of being smashed to death, the narrator is jolted into the past, into a memory of another violent disaster. Evocations of fire, screaming, of hot metal ticking, "blood oozing," of sirens wailing and emergency lights flashing off of buildings. The memory is vague but vivid. We learn that someone very close to the narrator—Simon, possibly the narrator's husband—died in "the crash."

Then the flashback ends and we return to that wavering stretch of highway—the same road, apparently, where Simon met his fate a year earlier. She is traveling from Perth to Sydney, a distance of over 4,000 kilometers, over forty hours, traveling "with Alice [her daughter?], [her] bags, and the last bits [of her life] in her car." The rest of her belongings are in the hands of "the removalist"—the Australian term for a moving contractor.

Though little is spelled out, much is conveyed in this efficient opening page: a mother whose life has been shattered by tragedy, hoping to leave that tragedy behind her and begin a new life. Will she make it? The road itself becomes a hazard, a portent—a symbol for the journey that has just begun, and which with its mirages and hazards is bound to be treacherous.

Clinic Caper

2010-07-02T06:35:00.000-07:00

This scene of marital bliss set in the confines of a dermatologist's examination room feels more like something complete in and of itself than the opening of a longer work. If there's any doubt, the title of the piece seals it.

Not that there's anything wrong with telling a story in a page or two. In fact, anyone who can do so has my unqualified admiration. The trick, though, is to tell a story and not just relay an amusing anecdote.

An anecdote is a short narrative constructed around a unique, curious, and often provocative incident, one that typically reveals character through extreme circumstances and almost always with humor as its end. The term comes from the Greek word anekdota, meaning "unpublished"—an indeed, most anecdotes are relayed orally and not intended for nor worthy of the printed page except as illustrations serving some larger purpose—evoking, for instance, some facet of a character or characters. Served a la carte, anecdotes tend to be as ephemeral as they are amusing. They are garnishes or appetizers, not the main course.

Though quite nicely written, the opening scene here feels more anecdotal than it might were the emphasis less on the singular, curious, and provocative event in the clinic, and more on the two principle characters, Jim and his narrating wife. As it stands, I can imagine such a tale being told at a dinner party (a popular venue for anecdotes). The guests, who know this couple well—and who've also had their share of cocktails—are extremely amused, weeping with laughter. Their host is on a roll. When she gets to the part about the dermatologist's fiendish chair launching her husband through the stucco wall, I see them all doing spit takes with their wine into their Roquefort pear salads.

But literature isn't a dinner party, and the "guests" (unfamiliar readers) need something more than cocktails to wet their appetite for anecdotes. They need context. They need some sense of who these two are when not goofing around at the dermatological clinic. That sense—the very little of it that we get—is tucked into one sentence in the opening paragraph ("at the age of sixty-six and forty-one years of marital bliss, we saw no reason to occupy separate rooms"). We're told that they are an older, happily married couple, a statement the anecdote goes on to confirm. It does so charmingly and (except for the mishandling of internal quotation marks) with skill. It meets our expectations; nothing more. It neither suggests nor reveals anything more or less about the characters, who they are, or why we should care about them enough to want to keep reading.

And since the scene merely confirms what we've already been told—without a hint of irony or paradox or a shadow of doubt, I'm left unsatisfied. Again, at a dinner party I would be content to know that my hostess and her husband are lovely, happily married people: sure, it's probably not the whole story; in fact it may well be a total illusion. And yet what are dinner parties for if not to parade ourselves in front of our guests in our favorite masks?

If literature serves a purpose it's to tear those masks off--or at least let us peek through them and see the real lives underneath. Here, with this opening, I'm shown only the mask: a bright, smiling, charming one.

Supposing the shenanigans in the examination room were underscored by something grave? Supposing this routine visit to the dermatologist turned out to be anything but routine, that "everything" was not "all right"? The small blotchy growth on his shoulder? A stage-3 melanoma. Then this would be no mere anecdote, but revelatory of a devoted wife's courageous humor in the face of terror and tragedy.

The underscoring item needn't be something as grave as cancer, but it should carry us beyond anecdote.

The Valyserian Festival

2010-06-23T06:49:00.001-07:00

Writing a good novel doesn't require genius. You don't even have to be all that smart. But you do have to work hard, and to care. If you don't care, readers won't, which may translate into them tossing your book into the fire grate.

If great care goes into writing a novel generally, greater care should go into its opening. Within the first few paragraphs or pages you'll either gain the reader's confidence or lose it. Gain it, and you can get away with a lot. Lose it, and you won't get away with anything.

With this opening I lost confidence after the first paragraph.

The prologue sets us in a kingdom on another planet on the festival day of the Valyseriat—a species about which we learn little beyond that they're not human (one thinks immediately of Vulcans and Spock). We are firmly in the world of fantasy and science fiction.

Some writers suffer from the mistaken notion that—because they're writing fantasy or science fiction—they don't have to sweat the details. The opposite is closer to the truth. It's easy enough for me to believe in the world I walk and breathe in daily; to believe in another world I need to be convinced. And the way to convince me is through precise, telling details.

In the first paragraph we get no such authenticating details: just a man named Alec sitting by "a large window" concealed by "scarlet curtains" as he watches the festival unfold. All of the sights, sounds, and other sensuous details of the festival are left off the page. We don't know who Alec is hiding from, or why. Though the first line suggests a plurality of festivals, later there seems to be only one. We are told that—while so concealed—Alec thinks, "The Valyseriat"—and that he does so "curiously," meaning either he's curious about the festival, or that the thought in itself is odd. But then we learn that Alec isn't curious at all; in fact he finds the whole spectacle ludicrous. As for the thought being curious, it's not; it's lame, like a man staring at a hamburger thinking, "A hamburger."

A sentence later we're told that Alex studied "about [the Valyserians] alongside Aaron." We aren't told who Aaron is, only that he is "in Earth" (on the Earth? Buried on Earth? Digging a tunnel into the Earth?). Though he studied these beings, they "left no . . . history," however it is known that "they were the leaders of the Valyses" (whoever they were, their history being no less obscure). I wonder what Alec took away from his studies, since he knows nothing.

There are other problems with this opening. Since the scene that follows (in which Prince Alec is summoned by the king to discuss his coronation) has little bearing on the Valyseriat or their festival, why choose this crucial moment to dip us into their nebulous history? Might there not be a better time to fill us in on that background? Alec himself can't "care less" about them; why should we? Furthermore, these are supposedly Alec's thoughts as he peers out from behind the scarlet curtain: but why would he be thinking of things that don't matter to him? Why should he be watching the festival at all, or even present, if not out of diplomatic responsibility in his capacity as Prince, in which case his purpose is defeated by hiding behind that curtain?

Added to these larger questions and concerns are small errors like tense shifts ("now that it has resurfaced Alec was worried") and inconsistent handling of viewpoint (is it "[his] father" or "the King"? From Alec's point of view it should be one or the other). Taken all together, the problems have me wondering two things: 1) how familiar is the author with her own material, and 2) how much does she care? Throughout this opening, I'm dogged by the suspicion that the author is either inexperienced in the art of writing fiction, or winging it, or both. I don't sense that great effort went into these paragraphs.

In any case, more effort needs to go into them, since as they stand the author's imagination and ambitions aren't matched by her skills. More care must be taken to satisfy a close, careful reader, the sort of reader who demands integrity and precision—a category into which most agents and editors fall.

The Common Era

2010-06-20T09:45:00.000-07:00

There are two principle ways in which characters are evoked in fiction: descriptively, through summary or exposition, or dramatically, through scene.

In this opening page of a novel about a popular young high school teacher with an unhealthy (or anyway dangerous) infatuation with one of his students, the summary method is employed with much skill and success. "Show, don't tell," goes the old writing workshop chestnut. But there's nothing wrong with telling: it just has to be done well.

Here, it's done well. The long second paragraph is packed with information about Stephan, the protagonist—information that serves not only to orient us about his status as a school teacher, but to authenticate that status through telling details (he founded the school's cycling club; his male colleagues wear plaid shirts). By the time I get to the bottom of the page, there's no doubt at least in my mind as to the authenticity of this earnest, long-haired, tieless, earringed high school teacher "seasoned by age yet unspoiled by its coming strain." I feel that I know him, and more than that: that I know something of what it's like to be him.

The advantage of summary description is that through it authors can convey lots of information in little space, as here. Summary description is expedient: it does the job quickly and efficiently. The disadvantage is that, unlike drama, which evokes character through action and dialogue, exposition renders it exclusively through language: i.e., we're forced to accept the author's word[s] for who this person is. As evidence goes—assuming that the narrator is reliable (as most narrators are)—it's solid evidence, but it falls short of being damning evidence. For damning evidence, nothing works as well as actions.

And in this opening the only action given to us is the negative one of Stephan "avoid[ing] the eyes of Mona McCullough." Through his not looking at Mona we learn something about him: namely that he has a thing for her, and also that he is afraid—with good reason—of that thing. The only other hint of "action" here takes the form of sweat breaking under Stephan's armpits — an action which, however involuntary, likewise speaks volumes.

From there we launch into the long expository passage. But wouldn't it be nice if the ratio of action to description in this opening were more balanced—if, for instance, the author were to lavish as much time and detail on the first paragraph as on the second; if we were told not just that he avoids looking at Mona McCullough, but what, precisely, he is avoiding. For instance, those eyes: were he to look at them, what would he see? What does she wear? How does she sit at her desk? Does she wear a skirt? What color? How short? Are her legs crossed? Does she pry off the heel of one saddle shoe with the toe of another (while gently licking the freshly sharpened tip of her #2 pencil)? While avoiding Mona McCullough's eyes, what does Stephan imagine? What inappropriate images does his lustful imagination cast before him as he pretends to examine the syllabus on his desk?

These and other specific details form—or might form—part of the present action of the opening scene, rendering Stephen—as well as the object of his downfall—vivid and unforgettable before we are dipped into summary background.

Mommy Get Your Gun

2010-06-19T18:22:00.000-07:00

Behind trash bins in a garbage-strewn alley a woman seeks cover from a gun-toting assailant. Of the assailant's identity—or the cause underlying his or her murderous pursuit of the protagonist—we know nothing, not on this first page. We know only that the protagonist is the single mother of a boy named Jamie, who, in the midst of his mother's back-alley struggle for survival, has taken an accidental fall at school and bloodied his nose.

The juxtaposition of two utterly incongruous fictional worlds, of noir detective and struggling single mom —Raymond Chandler meets Murphy Brown—is as tantalizing as it is perplexing. Assuming this woman is ducking real bullets, how on earth did she get herself into such a jam? Equally impressive—and no less perplexing—is the nonchalance ("I rolled my eyes") with which she proceeds to shrug off what a few moments before had been a serious threat to her life and limb to rush to the aid of her slightly injured child.

Or had the threat been serious? Are we being played with? What, exactly, are we to believe?

Whatever is going on here, one thing is clear enough: that somewhere a tongue has been lodged firmly in a cheek. The world of this novel isn't my world, and (hopefully) isn't yours, but a world existing in a parallel universe, one where gun-toting mothers interrupt back alley shoot-outs to kiss their offspring's skinned knees: The world of satire, or, more precisely, of spoof.

The word "spoof" derives from a hoaxing game invented in around the turn of the 19th century by British comedian Arthur Roberts. Since the game involved trickery and nonsense, it wasn't long before the word itself came to stand for tomfoolery. As applied to literature, it denotes a light, playful parody, which, presumably, is what we have here: a parody of a detective novel wherein the detective is an otherwise typical, struggling single mother.

On this first page, that satirical world is created with considerable authority, an authority earned in part by the author's unwillingness to explain, apologize, or make allowances for her premise. As soon as we read, "I crouched, unmoving and stifled; the garbage bins masking my position," we are already ensconced in that ironic world. By plunging us directly into action, the author avoids exposition, and, with it, explanation. In much the same way Kafka convinces us via a single sentence that overnight a man has been transformed into a giant beetle. How this transformation occurred, why it has occurred, Kafka wisely abandons to the reader's imagination. Otherwise it is a fait accompli.

But there are other, smaller ways in which the author undermines that same authority, including poor punctuation (that imprudent semi-colon in the first sentence), subject-verb disagreements (see sentence #3), tense shifts (sentence #4), and a tyro's embrace of adverbs ("desperately," "suddenly," "directly," "slightly"). Given her far-fetched premise that asks so much of readers by way of suspending disbelief, the author has no wiggle-room for such confidence-shaking errors: she'd better get everything just right; for sure she can't get away with telling readers that her heroine's eyes "[follow] the top of [her] head."

Even in a world where single moms shoot it out in blind alleys, we still expect eyes to tag along with the skulls that hold them.

The Other Sister

2010-06-19T06:48:00.000-07:00

Though women stopped wearing bodices by the end of the eighteenth century, the term "bodice-ripper" is actually of recent coinage. The phrase debuted in print in a December, 1980 issue of the New York Times, to wit: "Women too have their pornography: Harlequin romances, novels of sweet savagery, bodice-rippers." A second article published in The Village Voice during that same decade characterized bodice-rippers as a strain of romance novels featuring scantily clad women being manhandled by alpha males on their paper covers, and went on to call them "juicy, cheap, predictable, and devoured in stupefying quantities by legions of loyal fans." No wonder, then, that authors of romance fiction haven't embraced the expression. In fact they consider it an insult.

If there's a line between bodice-rippers and "serious" romantic fiction it's a porous one—but then so too is the line between romantic fiction and such darlings of the literary canon as Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Pride & Prejudice, which has been called "the best romance novel ever written" (despite having been published in 1813, when, per se, the genre didn't exist). In fact, if we define romance novels as novels of courtship told from the perspective of the heroine that end happily, then the original may be Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. Published in 1740, Richardson's novel was one of the few of its time to offer a happy ending. It was also one of the first blockbusters.

However much (or little) prestige we assign to the romance genre, with its shuddering shoulders and lingering caresses the given sample clearly fits the bill. Even the main character's Christian name, by design or not, blows a kiss to Richardson's 1740 prototype. And whatever else may be said of the genre in general, its entertainment value is hard to deny. Fast-paced, suspenseful (in so far as any tale whose conclusion is foregone can hold suspense), studded with sex scenes, hospitable to clichés, stereotypes, black-and-white morality, with little tolerance for subtleties and ambiguities . . . in other words, the literary equivalent of a soap opera.

Which isn't to suggest that the genre lacks sophistication. In its own way it's very sophisticated. There are first of all many more rules to be negotiated than with mainstream or literary fiction, many more restrictions. The protagonists must meet early; adultery must be avoided; ultimately, emotional commitment must be rewarded. Of course, many romance novels have been written that deviate considerably from these "rules" (the present example, with its male protagonist and Botox-enhanced antagonist certainly promises to do so). But even when deviating from them, still, it takes skill to negotiate such restrictions and still evoke breathing characters seemingly capable of exercising their own will.

And this author exercises considerable skill. From Lady Pamela's first drawled words ("Really, darling— I can't believe you're marrying a girl you haven't even met") I get a strong sense of her less-than exemplary character: a spoiled rich woman with (perhaps) her own designs on Alfie, a man committed to marriage not out of convenience or greed, but out of, if not love, duty.

However entertaining, I suggest that what's presented here isn't the opening of this novel, but a scene from deeper into it, after the relationship between Alfie and his Colombian bride-to-be has been established, along with Lady Pamela's stake in all of this, such that when we arrive at this scene we'll appreciate the dynamics that underlie it. Though I've painted Pamela as antagonist, for all we know this could be her novel, and we're meant to cheer her on in her mission to rescue Alfie from a doomed, loveless marriage. As things stand we don't know who to care for, or why.

A Trinity of Miracles

2010-06-15T14:04:00.000-07:00

Wordsworth defined poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility [italics mine]."

If we broaden the definition of poetry to include poetic prose, and then broaden it further still to include writing that successfully evokes subjective experience, then—if Wordsworth is right—the best condition for good writing isn't one of feverish frenzy, but one of calm equilibrium. This of course flies in the face of the popular cliché: the masterpiece produced in a "white heat," with author foaming at the mouth while spilling his blood and guts on the page (the visual artist equivalent: Van Gogh as played by Kirk Douglas, gripping his straw hat and licking this brushes in the midst of the mistral).

Assuming such masterpieces exist (facts speak against it: if van Gogh succeeded as a painter he did so despite his frenzied circumstances, not thanks to them), for every work achieved under such conditions there must a hundred times as many abortions and failures. The unromantic truth being that successful art is produced by sane people under calm—or relatively calm—circumstances.

On the first page in question a woman gives birth during a storm. The opening itself is a tempest of frenzied and feverish language. Among adjectives alone we get swollen, dilated, labored, grunting, uncontrollable, torrential, desperate, exhausted, agonizing, gutteral. Verb choices are no less turbulent: cracked, pushed, ripped, moaned, cried, clung, fired, pleaded, begged. Whether this opening was produced in a state of fervor or one of serenity I have no way of knowing, but here we have emotions presented not in calm or even remotely objective terms, but in a verbal squall.

That's not to say that the writing here isn't effective; it is. But then so is a kick in the stomach. In fact the prose here is so intent on visceral jolts that reading it feels something like sticking your fingers into an electrical socket. Ever sentence packs a punch. And just as by the third paragraph this pummeled reader found himself gasping for breath, so did the writer, his sentences spluttering and coughing with ellipses.

This sort of breathless, over-the-top prose stuffs the pages of bestselling novels, especially horror novels (I'm thinking of The da Vince Code and Stephen King at his italicized worst). It sells lots of novels. But is it good writing?

For me, the marriage of frantic subject with frantic prose is an unhappy one. Instead of complementing what's going on in the story, the style works against it. It's overkill—like putting butter on gravy. The sensational experience isn't allowed to speak for itself (compare with, "I was born in the belly of a white elephant during a 30-day dry Northeaster"—the opening of Christopher Cook Gilmore's Atlantic City Proof); instead, we listen through the author's screams.

Another risk of heaping breathless prose on furious events is that of unintended comedy. Benjamin Cheever once explained comedy to me this way: "You take a very tragic event, make it more tragic, then make it even more tragic. Then it's funny." He gave an example of a woman in labor driving herself to the hospital at two in the morning. On the way she gets a flat tire. It's raining. She jacks up the car only to find her spare tire missing. As she stands there weeping a trailer truck passes through a mud puddle, spattering her in her pajamas.

When I relate this scenario to my writing students before I even get to the trailer truck they are laughing. Reading The Da Vinci Code, I had a similar experience. By the end of the prologue when the museum director writes an encrypted code on his chest with his own blood, I found myself laughing—not, I gather, what the author intended (though for all we know Dan Brown may have laughed, too: all the way to the bank).

Personally, I'd rather have dramatic actions speak for themselves than have an author shouting them in my face.

An Overabundance of Beginnings

2010-06-10T12:09:00.000-07:00

As writers we face a barrage of choices, one of the thorniest being where to begin our stories? At the beginning, in the middle, or near the end? If at the beginning, where at the beginning? How close to the inciting incident—the singular event that will wrest the protagonist out of her routine existence? If the inciting incident is, say, the protagonist's decision to go to Timbuktu, should we begin at the moment when this idea first occurs to her, or with her packing her bags for the journey, or with her already aboard a plane bound for whatever airport one flies into en route to Timbuktu? Or do we start with her already there, in Timbuktu, with her adventure well underway?

Here, the author makes an end-run, or tries to, around that thorny choice by offering us not one, but two beginnings, the first dipping us into the middle of the story (paragraph 1), the second taking us back to what appears to be the story's beginning (paragraph 2). If in opening a novel a writer puts his best foot forward, here the writer has put his two best feet forward. The result, needless to say, trips over itself.

By telegraphing the major conflict ("I was too gay, and knew it, to arbitrate between a lesbian couple and their dysfunctional single nemesis”), the first opening points us, abstractly, into the psychological heart of the story. It tells us what the story is about, while drawing a kind of diagnostic conclusion about the characters and their situation. This has its advantages. It presents us with the main theme of the novel, so we know, more or less, what we're getting into. The disadvantage is that like all summaries it's abstract, vague, general. It doesn't ground us in experiences, it only captions them. It is anti-dramatic.

However bland, the second opening ("Five years ago I took up tennis") takes the more dramatic approach, enticing us into the story by means of a simple declaration of fact— audacious in its blandness—signaling not a set of abstract psychological circumstances but an event, one that presumably will either embody or pave the way to the inciting incident. As a direct or indirect result of having taken up tennis something will to happen to the protagonist. It's no throat-grabber; it packs not the punch of "Call me Ishmael" nor the paradoxical poetry of "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Still, as opening sentences go, "Five years ago I took up tennis" isn't bad; in fact it's rather good.

For one thing, "Five years ago I took up tennis" is good because it doesn't grab us by the throat, or try to, as so many first sentences do. Too often writers employ shock tactics to gain their readers' attentions; it takes a brave, confident author to appeal to us not with shock, but through humble simplicity.

"Except for the Marabar Caves—and they are twenty miles off—the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary." There's nothing shocking or impressive about this first sentence, either. It opens E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, one of the greatest novels of the 19th century.

Think of the opening sentences of your novel as arrows thrust toward the heart of your story. It's not necessary for the arrows to strike a direct hit on their target; they don't even have to deliver a glancing blow. All that matters is that the arrow is hurled in the right direction, that it carries the reader toward and not away from the target. If you have a good story to tell and your words point toward that story, that's enough, or should be.

Have I Got Your Attention Now?

2010-06-10T03:57:00.001-07:00

"Defamiliarization" is a technique whereby artists force their audiences to look at familiar things and ideas in new, unfamiliar ways. The term was coined by Russian author and critic Victor Shklovsky in his 1917 essay "Art as Technique," in which he distinguished between poetic and practical language: language used to describe or explain, as opposed to language used to impart perceptions or heighten existing ones.

Poets and poetic artists typically use defamiliartzation to breathe fresh life into thinks ordinary and banal. Similes and metaphors work this way. When Lorrie Moore compares a mother's face to "a big white dumpling of worry" or Richard Brautigan compares a dish of ice cream to "Kafka's hat," they force us to look at something familiar in an unfamiliar way. We're momentarily disoriented—shocked, even—but then we say to ourselves, "Yes, yes: I see it now."

Here, defamiliarization is used exclusively for shock value: not to impart a fresh way of looking at things, but to catch the reader off-guard and keep him that way. It's not the first time that literature has furnished us with examples of men and lions confronting each other at close quarters (the most notorious being Yan Martel's The Life of Pie, where they do so across an ocean in a lifeboat). But the man sitting across the table from the narrator is not a lion; he is Big Sid, a hospital orderly with a taste for lager who stands (but presumably doesn't sit) a foot taller than his companion. Otherwise, unless we count bunched shoulder muscles and blazing eyes, there's nothing especially lion-like about him.

Which is all right, assuming that the comparison isn't meant to be symbolic or even poetic, but is a literal description of a hallucination—a possibility that the narrator himself raises in the fourth paragraph. In which case it won't be the first time that literature has given us an hallucinating mental hospital orderly, either: the most famous of those being Chief Bromden, the narrator of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, who witnesses events through an hallucinatory, psychotropic-drug induced fog. But the hallucinatory explanation here is quickly cast aside; indeed, in the rest of the passage the narrator pretty much shrugs off the whole lion analogy, which near the bottom of the page gives a little roar with the words "Bloody predator," but otherwise makes itself scarce.

The solution, I think, is either to jettison the analogy completely, or weave it more thoroughly in to the description of Sid, to emphasize his leonine features so that we readers, too, will see him as his narrator does, rather than have the comparison imposed on us.

As it stands what brings Big Sid to life in this opening isn't the narrator's shock-tactic metaphor, but Sid's strong dialogue ("I'm in charge of the loony bin, Pete. My cabbage patch.") in conjunction with his actions ("He chugged beer, burped, and carried on."). As a character Big Sid speaks well for himself; he doesn't need a lion to roar for him.

Prologue: The Cage's Mentor:

2010-06-08T08:07:00.001-07:00

Where to begin? That has to be one of the hardest choices a novelist faces. What makes the choice hard isn't a lack of possible starting points, but a surfeit of them. Hence the beauty of the prologue: it lets us have two beginnings instead of just one. Prologues may let us dip into our stories before they start, giving readers a kind of prequel to what follows. Or they can dip into some dramatic moment in the future—the heroine being escorted to the gallows—with the tale we read starting in Chapter 1 telling us how she got there.

The prologue above presents us with the spectacle of gladiatorial combat or something like it: a sport wherein people (in this case women) entertain audiences through deadly, hand-to-hand combat. Historically, gladiatorial games took place during the Roman Empire. Many gladiators were soldier-prisoners who volunteered for gladiatorial combat training as a way to regain the honor lost through their having surrendered or been captured. It's a colorful if gruesome sidebar in history, one exploited many times by novelists and filmmakers and therefor rife with cliché.

Whether the author of the given prologue is treating Roman or some other form of gladiatorial combat isn't clear. No dates or place names are given; the one specific concrete detail provided in the prologue is the professional combatant's name: Celestial Monte—an odd choice, Monte being short for either Montague (French in origin; not commonly used until the 19th century) or Montgomery, which dates back to the Gauls (N.B. the Romans began overtaking Celtic Gaul in 121 B.C.); while "Celestial," on the other hand, is strictly New Age, the name of a Tom Robbins character, or an herbal tea infusion.

Perhaps the prologue is set in some distant future in which gladiatorial combat has been revived; for all we know it may be set on another planet, in another universe (as suggested by the main character's cosmic name). In any case, this material demands much suspension of disbelief on the part of readers, meaning great confidence in the author—a confidence unfortunately not earned here.

One reason: the author's clumsy handling of grammar and syntax ("It was only then, at her last battle, did I never clap again"), due either to carelessness or to the fact that English may not be the author's first language—in which case I have to admire his or her bravery and audaciousness. Editors, publishers, and agents are likely to take a much dimmer view.

Apart from being grammatically challenged, however, there are problems with this prologue. For one thing it fails to do what prologues do best: claim the reader's attention by way of a dramatic scene that provides a context for the main story to follow.

Though the raw materials are dramatic and even sensational, what's on the page here isn't dramatic. A fiction writer's main job is to create experience; here, no experience is directly offered. Instead of "seeing" Celestia Monte in action (through the eyes of the narrator, an eyewitness), we are told things about her. "She was the strongest, most vigilant fighter." So says the narrator, who piles on more adjectives ("she was strong", "she showed no mercy" "she was neither tired nor injured"). But adjectives are opinions, not facts; and we treat them as we treat all opinions, with at least a measure of skepticism. The great advantage of showing versus telling is that it lets readers form their own opinions based on concrete evidence. Here, rather than reaping the benefits of the narrator's eyes, ears, and other sensory perceptions, we get only his editorial verdicts.

Since nothing is shown and everything is told, nothing is convincing. And considering the sensational nature of the material, unless the author manages to suspend disbelief through convincing detail, the slightest skepticism on the reader's part will likely result in his closing the book, or worse, flinging it across the room.

There is a place for exposition—for "telling" rather than "showing." There are times when our narrators need to summarize events, and even editorialize on them. But the time to do those things probably isn't in the midst of a spectacle. And certainly in a story about gladiators (or the equivalent) readers can't be blamed for wanting spectacle.

In the sample given the crowd grows aggravated; they want blood. I suspect that readers of this prologue will be similarly frustrated. And the blood they demand may be that of the author who has failed to provide the visceral spectacle promised by his subject matter.

An Untitled Memoir

2010-06-05T10:35:00.000-07:00

On learning that her sister is pregnant, a woman is overcome with envy. That's the gist of this opening scene, and it raises a question: in telling a story, when should we dramatize things, and when is it better to simply summarize or state them?

Here, all the effort that's gone into dramatizing this moment in the narrator's life feels misguided, since a simple, direct statement ("When I learned that my sister was pregnant, at first I was happy for her. It took about ten minutes for my happiness to turn to envy.") could do the trick much more efficiently.

Aside from achieving little beyond what's accomplished by the bald statement, this opening is cluttered and confusing. We slog through a procession of names and relationships, father, siblings, in-laws—a grand total of seven characters (including the narrator) to process within half a page: a headcount sufficient to make readers of Tolstoy dizzy. Indeed, most of the characters mentioned have little if any bearing on the main subject of the scene; nor does it matter, really, whether the news has been posted on Facebook, since the narrator learns it by phone from her father.

Other irrelevancies abound. That the narrator's mother is a schoolteacher is beside the point; and even if it weren't, do we really need to be told, here, that finding substitutes is "a necessary part of [her] job"?

"Show, don't tell," goes the old writing workshop chestnut. But there are times when telling is better and this is one of them.

Prelude to a Prelude

2010-06-05T08:02:00.000-07:00

An unnamed woman of indeterminate age—having either survived a broken love affair or poised to embark on one—settles into her shabby beachfront apartment. Based on the title, we may reasonably assume the latter.

The title raises other issues. Though not protected by copyright, and though there’s no law requiring them to be original, you want to take into consideration whether a title has too much wear on it. A quick search at Amazon reveals no fewer than 49 products with this title, best known as that of Craig Luca’s 1988 drama, irrespective of which the phrase itself is common enough so that—unless used ironically—it may strike some readers as trite.

Like the title, the direct, inviting first line promises a love story. By making the sentence its own paragraph, the author increases its portentousness, suggesting that this meeting will be fateful and may result not only in one or more broken hearts, but in tragedy.

The implied point of view in the second paragraph is that of the protagonist about to park her car in front of the cigar shop housed in the building where she lives. But the sensory details provided here are not, or would not seem to be, part of her experience of the present moment: i.e. can she be parking her car and hearing the “clacking of the wind” simultaneously? Does she see “neat white boats bobbing” as she maneuvers her Ford? If the purpose of fiction is to create experience for the reader, it's important for the author to know whose experience is being reported. Is is that of an omniscient, objective narrator, or that of a specific woman parking her car? It can’t be both.

In the next or third paragraph, with the point of view settled into that of the main character, we are able to enjoy the wealth of sensory details—the clicking of sandals against pavement, the color of the evening sky, the calm “rushing” of the bay. Sounds, sighs, smells— all generously and judiciously evoked. The writing is richly atmospheric. At the end of the same paragraph, however, the POV slips again, with the reader being told about the quality of the apartment beyond the “cheap and thin door,” though the protagonist has yet to open the door and enter that experience. Why not describe the interior of the apartment from her POV once she has entered it, and not before?

The third and fourth paragraphs build on the sense of mood and atmosphere established in the second, with details of setting grounded in the character’s sensual experience: she sees the sun setting, she smells the salty air, she hears the lapping of waves. So far, beyond the vague and rather coy reference to “all her worries,” nothing in the way of a conflict or plot has been suggested. Which is all right, provided that the writer does indeed have a story to tell us about this woman, and provided that the status quo of her daily existence, so lovingly established here, is disrupted within the next few pages as readers will have every right to expect.

Which raises several questions. Is this where the story begins, or where it ends? Has the fateful meeting already occurred, or does it lie in store? The implication of the opening sentence is that we will soon bear witness to the fateful encounter by way of a dramatic scene. What has just been stated or summarized will now be shown or dramatized.

If that's the case, unless the front doorbell is about to ring (with our protagonist sipping Chablis on her balcony), perhaps it would be wiser for the author to state more specifically in that first sentence the circumstances the fateful meeting ("They met in a bar in Atlantic City,"), and start her tale accordingly: not with protagonist wallowing in her apartment, but at a bar the evening in question. What's being dramatized here? A fateful first encounter, or a woman's routine existence in her shabby Atlantic City digs?

Or has that fateful meeting already occurred, along with the attended love affair, in some past to which this scene is about to flash us back? If so, then what we are being presented with here is the frame of a story, and not the story itself. And that flashback will have to be motivated.

In any event, based on the quality of what I’ve read so far, I would keep reading.

Lucia

2010-05-09T14:15:00.001-07:00

The well-written first page of this work-in-progress presents us with a female protagonist—a woman of extraordinary virtues and eccentricities. Or so at least we are told by the first person narrator.

According to the narrator, Lucia:

—is "a true individual"
—is "an independent thinker"
—has "an incredible imagination"

We learn, furthermore, that she is a woman of many names—including the saintly names given to her at birth by her parents, and nicknames assigned to her later by herself and others, Lucia being just one of many (presumably the one by which the narrator knows her).

But Lucia's abundance of names accounts for only one of many eccentricities, which include being an only child, left-handed, and a Capricorn. All this we are told by the narrator, who also tells us that these and other characteristics "made [Lucia] different from others."

Certainly one method of evoking characters is by way of other characters—in this case, by way of a first person narrator who, at least for the time being, remains unnamed and otherwise, for the most part, completely anonymous. With respect to the narrator we can with certainty say only that she is a woman, that she came of age in the 1960s (and is probably a woman in her sixties). We might also assume that she admires Lucia. At any rate she couches her opinions in terms of admiration. Then again, so does Marc Antony when speaking of Caesar to the mob.

The problem with this method of character evocation is that it tends to leave room for doubt. Since first person narrators are human, and since humans tend to look at the world through subjective eyes, no human narrator is completely objective; which is to say that no human narrator is entirely reliable. What we get from human narrators is, to a greater or lesser extent, an opinion. It is up to readers to decide how much to invest in those opinions, what degree of credibility to assign to them. The degree of credibility assigned to a narrator is based largely on the extent to which the narrator's opinions are supported by concrete evidence. When, for instance, the butler narrator of Ishiguro's Remains of the Day tells us that, in forsaking his love for Miss Kenton he was acting appropriately given his vocation, we see right through this rationalization into his broken heart.

Here, since we are presented only with abstractions with no concrete scenes or evidence with which to compare them, we are left at the end of this first page with only a very fuzzy sense of both narrator and subject: neither jumps off the page; both remain abstractions.

"Show—don't tell," says the English teacher. But there is nothing wrong, really, with telling, just as there is nothing wrong with abstractions, per se. But unless they're accompanied by illustrations—by solid evidence—abstractions alone aren't very satisfying. Here, to the extent that the title character is evoked at all, she is evoked by means of a series of adjectives. And adjectives are opinions: on the continuum of evidence they rank very low, down there with hearsay. We take them in only to see them upheld or refuted, until which time we reserve judgment.

As for Lucia, until I have more concrete evidence, I will do likewise. But I do wish that within this first page I had more to cling to than a narrator's words, however well-written.

Girona

2010-05-03T16:40:00.000-07:00

At the outdoor table of his Spanish villa overlooking a Mediterranean bay a sculptor in glass wraps his works for an important exhibition. Normally, he would perform such chores in his studio, but for reasons unstated he's chosen to work outdoors, on a blustery day, and against the wishes of friends who have enjoined him not to use the table as a workspace.

There are some lovely qualities to this opening scene. As a lover of anything to do with the Mediterranean, I can't help being drawn into the setting. I'm also drawn to this artist by his Romanian background (one that begs explaining, since his surname, Macek, is most common among Latin Americans) and by the distinct nature of his work. Though I've run into hundreds of fictional artists working in oils on canvas, and chiseling marble, so far I've met no glass sculptors. (One thinks of Chihuly, but he's no Romanian.)

The setting and the artist are engaging; the scene less so. For action, we have a man wrapping things, rather absentmindedly, while surveying the "visitors" (tourists?) as they struggle to preserve their hairdos while walking a windy promenade, and to dwell on critical receptions of his work. The protagonist is more wrapped up in his thoughts than in his wrapping.

Which brings me to one problem with this otherwise well-written opening scene: Mr. Macek's ruminations—assuming they're his ruminations and not the interjections of an intrusive author—feel unmotivated or irrelevant.

The second paragraph offers the first rumination, about Mr. Macek's daughter, who, we learn, like the visitors promenading below, has had her own struggles with her hair, black and kinky "when the style was for long and straight." While there's no question that these are Mr. Macek's thoughts, why would he think them? A short mental leap might get him from the people below and their hair issues to his own "wiry strands," but to get from there to women in general, and from women in general to his daughter and to her hair struggles takes many leaps, all by a man wrapping sculptures on a windy Spanish balcony for a major exhibition.

These kinds of seemingly arbitrary musings are the stuff of stream-of-consciousness. But since the technique touches only this one paragraph, its use here likewise feels arbitrary or accidental. It's one thing to plunge readers into a character's stream-of-consciousness; it's another to soak them for one paragraph then leave them high and dry.

In the third paragraph as the artist wraps "another piece for the show at the Museo d'Arte in Barcelona" (we're told—rather intrusively), we're treated to a Wikipedia entry summarizing past critical responses to his art, including a snippet review. The contrast between this and the earlier passage where the protagonist dwells on his daughter's kinks couldn't be greater. The first takes us into the character's psyche, the second is dryly objective.

If compelling reasons exist for Mr. Macek's choosing to work outdoors in blustery weather rather than in his studio, those reasons might form the spine of his interior monologue here. We know the protagonist is wrapping sculptures; we know he's on a balcony overlooking the sea; (we don't need to know, by the way, that the Mediterranean's waters are "turquoise," or that waves unfurl or undulate "as they reach the shore"); we do want to know about protagonist, about whom the most telling thing so far is his refusal to work indoors. Were the scene written from deeper in Macek's viewpoint, his resistance to his own studio might form the substance of a scene which, as written, though as carefully set as a jewel, lacks a thematic center or focus.

Alternatively, a second character might be introduced, a friend who arrives on the balcony and sees the artist wrapping his sculptures at the forbidden table, and reminds him of the injunction against his doing so. This would be the dramatic solution.

Home From Fairview

2010-05-01T06:10:00.000-07:00

A woman home from a stay in a mental hospital: that is the subject of this first page. It might be the subject of the chapter as a whole--or, for that matter, of the entire novel. We don't know. We are merely told that Ana Gates is "home after nearly a month in Fairview Clinic." The prose is very strong; the handling of syntax, punctuation, and grammar unimpeachable. As written, this certainly works. Yet it could be less static and abstract. Let's examine it.

With its first sentence, the author dives into figurative language, serving up not one, but two similes in tandem ("like trailer trucks," I was tempted to add), with the heroine "scrubbed clean" like "a sky after a storm" and/or like "a tub after a good grouting." Though made of concrete things like storms and tubs, since they are figurative and not literal similes and metaphors aren't terribly solid: they're symbols for things, not things themselves. And so this opening sentence puts us firmly in abstract territory.

Each of the two similes presents problems, with the problems compounded by their union. First, what is "scoured clean"—the woman's body, or her mind? Presumably her mind, since we're told nothing about her body in the ensuing paragraphs. And since readers yearn for concrete things, whoever reads these words will likely picture a woman whose flesh has been"scoured clean."

If, on the other hand, her mind has been scoured "like the sky after a storm," does it help, then, to compare it to "a tub after a good grouting." Does grouting a bathtub scour it? Similes and metaphors are like those little step stools people keep to reach high shelves in kitchens, to be used when needed to help readers reach a solid impression or image. Here the grouted tub clashes with the storm-scoured sky and isn't likely to help anyone.

The next line gives the first hint of action. "Ana gates was home," but as verbs go none is less active or concrete than the verb "to be." No other action is indicated by the opening paragraph.

The last lines of the opening paragraph give us the condition of Ana Gates' mind, with her unable to decide how she feels about being back home. On the one hand "she should feel good about being back"; on the other Fairview Clinic was "a haven for sanity." But then it's "hard to know what feeling good means," though "she's alive and that might eventually count for something."

"Scoured clean as the sky after a storm" is one way to describe the mental state evoked by these thoughts. "Foggy headed" is another. For sure Ana Gates is confused, and it might be best to let her confusion speak for itself through solid actions and descriptions.

Unlike the first, the second paragraph presents a concrete and vivid picture of Ana in her present circumstances, bundled up in her afghan and looking out the window of her lakeside home while eating breakfast, pulling her breakfast toast apart. But here, too, the author feels compelled to resort to bald abstractions ("Mornings were still rocky") instead of relying on the moment at hand to speak not only for itself but for the character's general state. If Ana feels "jittery," her coffee cup might tremble as she brings it to her lips. If she dreads mornings, her dread might be evoked through a description of her breakfast from deep in her point of view ("the bread crusts looked as appetizing as strips of cardboard."). Only when she swallows the toast and the "warmth spread[s] across her belly," do I at last enter into Ana's body—and, through her body, her psyche. But the effect is undermined by the paragraph's concluding clause which generalizes about Ana's cramping and her miscarriage from beyond her present state, and not from her viewpoint, but from that of an intrusive author.

Here, then, is what a more grounded version of the same opening might look like:

Three days after arriving home from Fairview Clinic, Ana Gates sat at the kitchen table of her summer cottage, pulling her toast apart and sipping black coffee while watching a squadron of Canada geese skid and flap across the surface of Lake Waramug. As she brought it to her lips the coffee cup trembled. With each sip she braced herself, expecting a jolt of pain when the warmth reached her belly. But the moment passed, and she sighed with relief and gratitude. Ever since she'd arrived home from Fairview, the cramps had been coming less frequently.

The crusts of toast on her plate tasted and looked like cardboard. She shoved the plate aside, took up the notebook that Dr. Beckman had presented her with on her last day at the clinic, slid the slim fountain pen (also Felix's gift) from its spiral binding, and pressed its nib to the blank first page. "Write about what you feel now," Felix had suggested. So—what did she feel now? Emptiness. Cold. She drew the crocheted afghan more tightly around her shoulders. Even this late in May the winds off the lake turned the cottage into a refrigerator...

There's no set rule against abstract openings. In beginning Great Expectations with, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," Dickens no doubt had good reasons for favoring broad abstraction over concrete events. Through a series of parallel constructions Dickens settles his readers into an epic whose events span generations and confront life's paradoxes across a broad spectrum. Without narrowing his focus, he could hardly have opened with a singular event.

But a novelist of humbler ambitions does well to consider whether static abstractions are truly the best foot forward into his or her story.

The Paths of Eden

2009-09-16T03:57:00.000-07:00

Rather than start with a geography lessons ("The Suwannee River begins in a Georgia swamp . . . " ) why not start with real estate agent Dan Horne in action, driving up a logging road? Stories have one subject, people, not rivers or geography.

Also, rather than have Mr. Horne escorted up a non-specific logging road to a non-specific cabin, why not give readers what they need to form a more clear, less generic image of the road, and to particularize the cabin—but not before we get there. Create the moment with more vivid and immediate sensory detail, an--having created the moment--stay in in it. Also, when does the agent ask "Is this far enough out of the way for you" ? A mile from the cabin? A hundred feet from the door? On the front steps of the cabin? The idea is clear; the action isn’t. The author has not immersed him/herself sufficiently in the event. As readers we are not quite there.

"There was [a kitchen]": the weakest word pairing in the language. Ditto “It was” ["a dark and stormy night."—Edward Bulwer-Lytton]. Since we are sharing Dan's experience here, render the description active through his senses? "He entered a small kitchen . . ."

A kitchen, a room, some furniture. Nothing specified; everything generic. There are no generic kitchens: even in their genericism (beige Formica) kitchens are identified by their particulars. This same tendency to generalize continued with the “sturdy pier” “small boat.” Adjectives give us opinions, but nothing solid, nothing sensual. Rather than give opinions about these objects, provide the sensual details on which the opinions are based. It takes more work, but it's worth it.

By the end of the third paragraph readers may want a visual of at least one of these characters. I don’t "see" them. They are disembodied names and voices.

Last paragraph: They've left the cabin? Unclear. A transition is needed. A white space might help. "Honor the white space."—Mary Gordon.

Right now, this opening is all purely objective, as if a camera were watching these two men. No subjective content; we are not in either of their heads. And yet even the objective camera’s point of view isn’t clear. In film this is never a problem, obviously, since the camera can only be in one place at a time, and we as viewers never question its position. But in fiction, the “camera angle” must be solidly established through language. There is a big difference between a purposefully objective point of view (as Hemingway gives us in his story “The Killers”) and no POV, or one that's accidental or arbitrary. In Hemingway's story, the stark, cold, objective treatment of the material suits the subject: a story about two hired killers arriving in a midwestern town to fulfil a contract. Here, there does not appear to be any such clear intention; the lack of any subjective content or clear point of view filter seems more like an omission than a decision, and makes for a muted, insipid reading experience. We are denied the subjective content of prose/fiction, but are given nothing to take its place. The subjective filter has been removed; but there is no "stark" or "cinemagraphic" filter here to take its place. The result is bland.

Either give us a sense of whose experience we are reading, or provide us with a camera eye's vivid objectivity.

Letter from Tehran

2009-09-14T05:39:00.000-07:00

I like the active solidity of this opening passage—though I wonder if the author may have an even better card to play. “The letter came on a Friday.” But by stating emotions outright before readers have any reason to feel them, the last sentence undermines the effect, and that “fearful submission imprisoning my brain” feels forced, awkward, and sentimental; the emotional content feels unearned. To simply say, “I feel as if I never left Iran” is probably ominous enough without forcing more sentiment that the situation—so far—can support.

With no indication of setting in the first paragraph, the second paragraph comes as a disorienting surprise. We are standing in the middle of a road—and have been, presumably, from the novel’s first sentence. And since we are outdoors, there must be weather. It is a certain time of day. Morning? Foggy? Dark? Cold? A blistering sunny summer day? Not a clue. Yet the weather is there; it exists. How can it not be a part of this character’s experience?

With the sentence, “How dare they write to me after all these years when nothing in that world can matter to me again, when I have found peace far away from them?” emotions race ahead of action/experience. Let actions speak; rather than state broad emotional responses, provide context. Who is “they”? Writing after how much time? Provide context, and we will fill in the emotional response. Part of that same context is expressed by: “my weekly drive down to Wintun Hills to cash my pension check, to buy groceries and flowers for the cemetery. “Establish this as context, the routine shattered by the event of receiving this letter. Here, no routine is established. I said elsewhere that most attempts to dramatize routine in fiction are doomed. But you can write a dramatic scene where an event takes place that undermines routine. In fact that is the essence of drama: shattered status-quo.

Here, in the paragraph following the letter, I begin to suspect that the letter reading scene is a framing device for what has led up to this moment, that the real story will take us back to those events that precipitated this scene. Given that suspicion, it occurs to me that the letter here serves perfectly in and by itself as prologue: the important thing here is what the letters says, its contents, and not the sentimentally stated or even the implied response or the scene that goes with it. Instead, why not just give us the letter—we can imagine that it has been received, opened, and read. Then, next chapter: “I once read that a person can escape reality but not memory. And it is true....”

Then go on to tell of those events precipitated by the letter.

The letter is not only the heart of this scene; it is the scene. The rest can be cut.

Detective Novel

2009-09-09T10:34:00.000-07:00

First sentences are so important. They tell us what the writer thinks of as his "best foot forward." If that "best foot" is lame, it doesn't set up great expectations for what follows.

Here, the first sentences raises doubts. First, there is the tentativeness of that "maybe." As the first word of what is presumably to be a novel of two to three hundred pages, and a detective novel no less, the writer may want to ask herself, "Do I really want to start off on such a tentative note?" A wishy-washy opener can serve a purpose. The best example I can think of is the opening to John Barth's early novel, The End of the Road. The novel is essentially about a man who cannot make up his mind about anything. It begins, "In a sense, I am Jacob Horner." Compare that with the iron-fisted firmness of "Call me Ishmael."

I'm not sure, though, that wishy-washiness is intended here. My confidence is further undermined by the questionable authenticity of a department store named Drakes located in "upper" Manhattan. Having lived in Manhattan, I know that there isn't and has never been a department store named Drakes; in fact there are no department stores anywhere above 59th Street, where Bloomingdale's is still located. Why not choose a real department store at a real Manhattan location, and not a generic--and not very credible--substitute?

The third sentence, too, can be strengthened. Rather than details already mentioned (and that, as discussed, are less than convincing), the writer might present us with the evidence of solid, specific, and authentic observations, making the narrator's point ("I pay attention") explicit and vivid, rather than a matter of faith. In the next paragraph, instead of stating that the salespeople are "elegantly dressed," why not tell us what they wear, providing us with specifics--down to brand names, if appropriate. Mere epithets won't do.

Lack of authenticity with respect to specific details can cost you readers. But there are other kinds of inauthenticity to guard against. Look at the first sentence of the second paragraph, in which the detective describes what's on the second floor before taking us up the escalator. We might assume he’s been in the store before, but he must have been there quite recently to know the sweaters are still there, and nothing suggests he's done so, so the clever remark about the sweaters feels like an authorial intrusion.

On the other hand once the narrator does go up that escalator (and not before), he might describe the department store's glass-floored mezzanine, or the candy store where the counter clerk where's a conical paper hat, or the men's dressing room with its varnished wooden stalls smelling faintly of vinegar.

Lastly, I think this opening would be strengthened by starting out with a dramatic scene in progress, with the detective already in the store watching the young woman get a facial. Through this carefully described scene we can experience his eye for details—which, after all, is what the scene is really about. The scene might also establish the narrators remoteness and detachment: he sees the pretty young woman, but responds to her clinically, rather than sympathetically, passionately, or poetically.

Whenever a first person narrator describes things, he is also describing his or her psyche to the reader. Opportunities to do so are missed here; the “girl getting facial” scene is brushed aside as are those "swarming" salespeople.