A Rude Awakening

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vividly, with loving detail lavished on both the condition of Charley’s bedroom (“among piles of smoky clothes, outdated magazines, and empty bottles”) and of her drunk (“The room spun and dipped around her”), disorderly, and disoriented body to which a cigarette butt clings.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

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

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

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

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

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

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?