The Un-Set Scene

Awhile back I wrote a post on how to decide when you’ve over-described something. Today, I’d like to discuss the opposite problem, specifically as it relates to scenes.

As they read, most people will picture the events of the story in their minds, almost like scenes from a movie. An author’s task is to find a balance between too much description and too little description. They must describe a scene vividly enough for the majority of readers to picture it clearly, but not with such long-winded detail that a large number of readers might get bored. But often, authors fail to set a scene almost entirely.

I’m not talking about neglecting to mention the color of the carpet or the type of trees in the forest; I’m talking about forgetting to mention that the action is taking place inside a room of some sort or that your characters are in the forest. It’s surprising how many new writers don’t think to mention where a conversation is taking place. They might, for instance, mention that three characters are sitting at a table eating nachos while they argue, but they won’t tell us where the table is. It could be in a kitchen, a dining room, a bar, a restaurant, a cafeteria, or a break room, but the audience doesn’t know for sure until halfway through the conversation when a waiter comes in to ask them if they want dessert.

This is often called “White Room Syndrome,” because for all the audience can tell, the action is taking place in a blank white room. Great for the Matrix, but not so much for most other stories.

So, how little is too little when it comes to description? Here’s a few basic bits of information about setting that you should generally try to get across to your readers within the first few paragraphs of a scene:

Where is the immediate action taking place? Are your characters indoors or outdoors? If they’re indoors, what sort of room are they in—a kitchen, a bedroom, an office, a parking garage, a space station control center? If they are outdoors, what sort of terrain is around them—forest, plains, a lake, a river, red-rock desert, the void of space? What is the weather like? Give your readers a few words to set the backdrop to the action.

Where are your characters at in that space? Are they clustered around a table in the corner? Is one of them sitting on the ground against a rock while the other two climb a tree at the edge of a clearing? Are they strapped into seats at their stations on the bridge of the space ship? Give some basic information about where your characters are in relation to the setting and to one another.

Whose setting is this? Does the room, house, car, spaceship, or even the field or the planet, belong to one of the characters? Are they trespassing? Are they simply out in the unclaimed wild? This can be cleared up with a simple adjective—they sat in Calvin’s kitchen or he ran through the king’s forest. Are your characters masters, owners, regulars, visitors, strangers, or interlopers in this place?

What time of day is it? I don’t mean the exact hour and minute, but rather a general sense of time as it relates to the scene. Is it day, night, dawn, or dusk? Is it dark out or light out? A daytime conversation in the park will have a completely different feel than the same conversation in the same park in the middle of the night. If it is pertinent, you might want to give readers a sense of the season as well.

If this is the first scene of the story, then what time period is it in? Ever read a story that you thought was taking place in a medieval setting, only to have someone drive up in a car? Or a story that seemed modern until someone mentioned the warpgate to Jupiter? It’s pretty disconcerting. Try to give your readers a clear sense of the era (and by extension, the genre) right from the get-go.

If this is not the first scene of the story, then where is this setting in relation to previous settings? The importance of this information varies from story to story. You could write an entire story that takes place in an unnamed city without it ever being a problem—the character could move from their apartment to work to a bar to a seedy nightclub without you needing to explicitly state where are those places are in relation to one another. However, if you jump locations and characters from scene to scene this may become important—if the last scene was the King of Rohan at Helm’s Deep, and then you jump to the hobbits sneaking into Mordor, it could be helpful to let your readers know that they’ve moved several hundred leagues away.

And that’s really it. You can add more detail to the setting than what I’ve listed above, but you probably shouldn’t have less. Imagine that you’re sketching the scene out with a pencil—these are the most basic lines that you’ll need for it to be clear that you’re drawing a scene and not just a person, a place, or a thing. For more tips on writing description, check out some of the posts listed here and here.

The Inactive Beginning

If you’ve read my post on the purpose of the Story Polisher, then you know that I like to divide writing into three categories: Prose, Plotting, and Creativity. My posts here generally focus on Prose; this is in part because your prose will be the first thing an editor notices about your work (poor prose is the number one reason most stories get rejected, in my experience) and in part because it is difficult to teach people to write clear prose in any setting other than a classroom or one-on-one instruction. There are an abundance of resources out there to help new writers improve their Plotting and Creativity, but not many focused on Prose.

However, today I’m going to set Prose aside for a moment to focus on an element of Plotting. I do this in the interest of highlighting a common error that gets stories rejected by editors on a frequent basis. And that error is the inactive story beginning.

This error is easy to describe: a story begins, and nothing happens. More specifically, the protagonist and other characters aren’t doing anything, or the amount of activity on their part is miniscule compared to the number of pages it takes to describe it all.

This is almost always the consequence of heavy worldbuilding, backstory-telling, and other forms of info-dumping. Most stories have a fair amount of background information that the audience will need to know in order for the story to make sense, and it is tempting to try to get all of that pesky background information out of the way right at the start.

But here’s the thing: background information tends to be boring if your audience isn’t already emotionally or intellectually invested in your world and your characters. The most effective way to engage readers at the beginning of the story is to have something interesting happening at an efficient pace.

Here’s an example of how I’ve seen this done poorly (or rather, a summation of an example, since an actual example lifted from an actual manuscript would be far too long):

     The book begins with the protagonist in the back seat of an SUV, sandwiched between a pair of burly guards. He is being escorted into the dangerous jungles of Juduun, home of the dangerous and violent ape-snakes that guard the ancient ruins of a lost civilization. The various horrors that the ape-snakes have perpetrated upon humans are described. The ruins are described, along with the few little facts that are known about the ancient civilization and what happened to cause its downfall.

     Our protagonist is nervous and tries not to tremble, not wanting to show weakness in front of his captors. He reflects upon the unfortunate series of events that brought him here, how he was orphaned at a young age and stole to help feed his sister. He managed to find her good work and a place to live, but then everything went wrong when she caught the eye of a lecherous nobleman. Various things happened, our protagonist was charged with a crime that he either didn’t commit or was forced to commit even though he’s really a good guy.

     The jungles come into sight up ahead, covered in early-morning mist. The protagonist is being sent into the jungles to retrieve an artifact of the lost civilization as punishment for his crime. He will have no supplies or help; even worse, no one is even sure whether or not the artifact that he’s supposed to find is even real. He believes it’s just a myth and that he’s simply being sent to his death.

     They arrive at the jungles, and the guards throw him to the ground beside the trees. He pleads with them to give him some equipment, anything that might help him. The dangers of the jungle are described. He’s afraid of them.

Now, my summation of this example was four paragraphs long. The actual examples that the summation is based on, however, tend to be anywhere from ten to fifteen or even twenty pages long. That’s ten to twenty pages where our protagonist:

     1. Sits in a car

     2. Sits in a car and tries not to tremble

     3. Sits in a car and sees the jungle up ahead

     4. Is tossed from the car and pleads for help

See the problem? That’s nothing. Nothing happened in over a dozen pages of story. It was all just backstory and worldbuilding—one long infodump. It doesn’t matter how you frame all the backstory; if your protagonist is reminiscing about it, describing it to someone, or having it described to him or her, it’s all the same. Which is to say, it’s boring. It doesn’t matter how action-packed or interesting the backstory is—it will still be boring if it’s a flashback given while your protagonist does nothing. If all of that backstory is so interesting and eventful, then just go back and start the story there!

The pure-backstory prologue gets criticized often (with good reason), but even that would be better than watering down the action of the beginning of your story with infodumps.

Picture what the introduction to a movie would be like if it were done in this manner. Try the original Star Wars movie: after the opening crawl (which is itself a backstory infodump, but it’s traditional and deliberately evoking old pulp action films and comics—not to mention short—and is therefore somewhat justified), we see a star destroyer capturing Leia’s ship. C-3PO and R2 discuss how serious this is and the things the empire is likely to do to all of them. The imperials board the ship, and C-3PO reflects on how brutal the empire has gotten over the years and how hopeless the situation of the rebels seems. Vader comes on board, all menacing, and we’re shown a long introductory flashback depicting some of his history of brutality and his position relative to the Emperor. Jump back to the present, where Princess Leia records a long message explaining her position in the rebellion, what her goals were for her present mission, how she obtained the stolen plans for the Death Star, and then paused to reflect upon what type of droid R2 was and what his normal functions were.

"Ah, we've captured you, senator. Now I will explain the lengthy process by which we uncovered the fact that you are part of the Rebel Alliance and a traitor!"

Slow, ponderous, and boring, right? And that’s with actual action going on in the background—the imperials capturing and boarding Leia’s ship, fighting in the corridors, ominous villains arriving, and our heroine hurrying to get the plans off the ship. If that’s not enough to counter the effect of excessive infodumping, then nothing will be.

Don’t let this problem happen to your story! The inactive story beginning is the most common reason—after poor prose—that I’ve seen stories rejected. So remember: reflecting, reminiscing, explaining, and flashbacking are not action. There’s nothing wrong with introspection in reasonable doses, but introspection does not an interesting story introduction make. Get your characters out there and get them doing things right from the start.

Calm Down About the First Line of Your Story

You only get one chance to make a first impression. This is true in nearly every situation, from work to parties to first dates. It is also true of stories.

I’ve heard a lot of talk about the first lines of stories—how important they are, how they need to hook the reader, how they should effectively introduce the story, establish a unique voice, be surprising, etcetera, etcetera. And all of that is true. But I’ve also met so very many new writers who’ve gotten a little too consternated trying to write the “perfect” first line. I find that, more and more often, the only advice regarding first lines that I want to give to people is this: calm down.

First lines are like titles: if done well, they can hook the reader’s interest from the get go. Sometimes they just pop immediately to mind, and other times the writer really has to dig and work to find a good one. Sometimes writers knock it out of the park; more often, they simply manage something adequate. But even if first lines and titles are only average, most readers and editors will continue to give you their attention for at least a little while longer.

So yes, first lines are important; but they’re not worth the headache that many writers devote to them. There are only a few basic rules that I would suggest that you follow when writing the first lines of your stories:

Make sure that they are free of errors. Almost no editor or reader will set down your story simply because the first line didn’t “grab” them. But if you have grammar or punctuation errors in the very first sentence of your story, that will make them wary.

Don’t let them run on. As I’ve mentioned before, long sentences are both more difficult to properly construct and more difficult for your readers to follow. Asking your readers to swallow a massive amount of information at the very, very beginning of your story is a bit of a tall order. Try to give them the new information and introductions a little bit at a time.

Make sure they are on topic. Sometimes, in their quests to create engaging first lines, writers wander a little too far from their story. They begin on a largely unrelated topic and then wander from there to the story. The problem is, if that first line is so very engaging, your readers will only feel cheated when they find out that it has nothing to do with the actual story. Not a good way to gain fans.

That’s it.

I’m not saying that you should ignore all the other “first lines” advice out there. If you can craft a pertinent first line that is funny, intriguing, or fascinating, that’s great! That’s desirable and impressive; good for you. But here’s the thing: what is funny, intriguing, or fascinating to one person won’t be that impressive to many others. I can’t tell you how often I’ve had other people show me “amazing” first lines that I just wasn’t that impressed with. I’ve been completely floored by amazing first lines that other people just shrugged at with a “meh.” Almost no first lines will be amazing to everyone or even most everyone, so don’t break your brain trying too hard to amaze and wow. As long as you follow the tips above and don’t write anything that will actively repulse readers, you’ll be fine.

Now, this may or may not be a helpful illustration, but I found it fun. I’ve spent quite a bit of time browsing through the first lines of books and short stories, especially ones from very successful books. I’d like to share a few here. I think that, like me, you’ll see that many first lines are impressive, while others are simply quietly competent. Some hit you with a plot hook, while others simply begin a slow process of easing you into a long story.

In making this list, I have avoided all of the “classic” first lines that these lists usually cover. I love the first line of Pride and Prejudice and am less-than-wowed by the famous first line of Moby Dick. But this list is more focused on the first lines of modern stories that have come out in the last few decades. How are today’s writers—your contemporaries—beginning their books?

     Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling)

     Robert Langdon awoke slowly. (The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown)

     When he woke in the woods in the dark and cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. (The Road by Cormac McCarthy)

     “We should start back,” Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them. (A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin)

     The trial was irretrievably over; everything that could be said had been said, but he had never doubted that he would lose. (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson)

     When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. (The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins)

     My suffering left me sad and gloomy. (Life of Pi by Yann Martel)

     I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. (The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini)

     CLARE: It's hard being left behind. (The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger)

     My mother drove me to the airport with the windows rolled down. (Twilight by Stephenie Meyer)

     Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death. (The Fault in Our Stars by John Green)

     The palace still shook occasionally as the earth rumbled in memory, groaned as if it would deny what had happened. (The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan)

     Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood. (The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan)

     When I think of my wife I always think of her head. (Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn)

     At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin. (The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd)

     It was night again. (The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss)

     There is one mirror in my house. (Divergent by Veronica Roth)

     I have never been what you’d call a crying man. (11/22/63 by Stephen King)

     Mariam was five years old the first time she heard the word harami. (A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini)

     Kalak rounded a rocky stone ridge and stumbled to a stop before the body of a dying thunderclast. (The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson)

     Wind howled through the night, carrying a scent that would change the world. (Eragon by Christopher Paolini)

     There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. (Holes by Louis Sachar)     

See what I mean? I’m sure some of those really grabbed you; others not so much. And I’ll bet the ones that impressed you aren’t all the same as the ones that impressed me. But all of those books were widely-read to an extreme degree. So don’t fret too much about your first lines; they won’t usually make or break your story.

What Editors Are Looking For

As I briefly mentioned in my last post, I spent several days last week at the 2015 Superstars Writing Seminar:

Pictured: Famous authors and editors. Not pictured: me (off-panel to the left). Photo by the awesome Lauren Lang.

It was an excellent experience which I highly recommend to any writer with a desire to learn about the business of publishing and how to make a career out of writing. Even if you’ve already got a lot of knowledge in the area, this seminar gives you a nigh-unparalleled opportunity to meet authors and editors and pick their brains for information.

I took some notes at one particular panel that I would like to share with you. The panel was titled What Are Editors After and the presenters were all full-time editors or authors who have regularly edited anthologies or the like: Toni Weisskopf, Lisa Mangum, Eric Flint, Kevin J. Anderson, and David Farland. They mentioned several things that can crop up on the first page of a story that cause them to quickly set the submission aside. Here they are in the order of how frequently they were mentioned:

Repeated grammar and spelling errors

Now, all of these editors understand that typos happen; no one can edit a story to absolute perfection. But they unanimously agreed that a story with several typos or grammatical mistakes on the very first page wouldn’t be worth their time. Learn the grammar, edit carefully, and ask for help. Find yourself a freelance editor to go over your work if you feel you need it. Make sure that your story is as clear of error as it can be. Remember the Editor's Lake.

Poor formatting

For most of these editors, this wasn’t as big a deal as it was before the age of electronic submissions. Nowadays, if you used a font that they don’t like, they can simply hit “select all” and change it. But if you have a lot of formatting mistakes (strange margins, strange fonts, fonts that are too small or too large, etc.), they won’t bother making the changes; they’ll just set the story aside. If you’re not sure what a properly-formatted manuscript looks like, don’t worry—we’ll be going over that next time.

Remember: most of these editors don’t have very strict formatting requirements. Some other editors do. Always check a publication or editor’s submission guidelines to see if they have specific formatting requirements and then follow those directions exactly. No editor wants to work with someone who can’t follow simple directions.

The same topic that everyone else is writing about

Editors receive dozens to hundreds of submissions on a regular basis, and stories tend to come in waves—after Twilight became popular, there were a lot of vampire stories getting submitted all over, either from people who were inspired by the books or who felt that the world needed to see vampires done “properly.”  When scientists successfully cloned Dolly the sheep, a whole slew of cloning stories poured into submission piles around the nation. Tomorrow there will probably be another major news story that will inspire dozens or hundreds of similar stories. Since most editors have a very limited amount of time to go through the mountains of submissions they receive, these waves of similar stories all tend to blend together into one uniform, uninteresting blob.

This is a tricky problem to avoid. After all, how are you supposed to know what everyone else is writing about? The answer is really that you simply have to make your best educated guess. Don’t try to “write to the market” (meaning don’t deliberately write what “seems popular” right now). If you see an interesting news story or new scientific discovery and it spawns an idea for a story, then go ahead and start writing that story—but do your best to take that story several steps away from where it started. Throw away the first few characters and setting that come to mind and reach for something more unusual. Do the same with plot twists and endings. If you can, take your story so far afield that no one would ever be able to identify where it actually began. And don’t wait until halfway through the story to make your story different—if you don’t do it right from the start, the editor probably won’t get that far.

For a few more great tips on what not to do at the beginning of your submission, check out Ten Easy Ways To Get Rejected by David Farland (and don’t forget to avoid metaphors).

Metaphor and the Beginnings of Stories

Beginning a story can be a tricky thing. There’s a lot of information that you need to get across to your readers right away if they’re going to understand what’s going on: who the main character is, what their personality is like, where they are, what they’re doing, etc. And if you’re writing speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction, horror, etc.) it gets even worse—you’ll probably have to introduce an entirely new world to your readers, complete with fantastic magic or technology, strange aliens or monstrous creatures, and imagined cultures with centuries or more of history.

That is a lot to get across to a reader, and deciding where to begin can be daunting. What can you show the readers that will be interesting and engaging without being so foreign as to be completely beyond understanding? What major elements of character and setting need to be given right away, and which need to be introduced slowly and subtly over time?

Sadly, I’m not here to answer all those questions for you. Maybe someday we’ll dive further into those topics, but this blog is for discussing errors that crop up in prose, not in plotting or content. So today I’d like to highlight a common prose mistake that many writers make in the beginning of their stories: the overuse of metaphors.

Most of you probably remember the simple definitions of simile and metaphor that you’ve been told since elementary school: a simile is describing one thing as being like something else, while a metaphor is describing a thing by saying it is something else even though you don’t literally mean it.

     Simile: The castle loomed over the town like an overprotective mother watching to make sure her children were playing safely.

     Metaphor: The train was a powerful, serpentine dragon winding through the hills, belching smoke from its great mouth.

Simple enough, right? Now I myself am not much of a metaphor man. I’ve heard a lot of talk about the poetic capabilities of metaphor and all that, but at the end of the day I tend to rely much more heavily on similes. If you’re a metaphor fan, then hey—more power to you. Just watch out to make sure you don’t pile up a lot of metaphors at the beginning of your story.

Why? Well, because at the beginning of your story, you haven’t been able to give all of that background we discussed earlier—all of the character, plot, personality, history, culture, setting, or explanation of various fantastical elements that your story might hold. And without all of that background, your readers won’t have any frame of reference to determine whether you are being metaphorical or literal.

For example, here’s the beginning of a story:

     Kalateia stood on the ridge surveying the dusty, bloody remnants of the battlefield. Corpses were strewn throughout the valley below, from mountain slope to mountain slope—her soldiers, the enemy’s soldiers, and hundreds of innocent civilians who’d had the misfortune to live in the valley where the two armies had met. Spider-like gravewagons crawled over the field, harvesting up bodies for use in future battles. The heavy corpses were difficult to gather, zombies clinging to the soil and to one another in a futile attempt to avoid the claws of the gravewagons.

So here’s the five-hundred-and-twenty-three-dollar question: are the corpses literal zombies or not? Are these “gravewagons” gathering up dead bodies that are simply trampled down into the blood-muddied soil and therefore seem to cling to the ground like strange zombies, or are those corpses literally undead and holding on to the ground and each other in an attempt to avoid being harvested? Without additional context, you can’t be absolutely certain, can you?

Even if you’re not writing speculative fiction, metaphors can be confusing at the beginning of a story. They can give your readers a moment where they’re knocked out of the story, where they stop to wonder, “wait, did I pick up a fantasy novel by mistake? What is this?” Sometimes it’s only a moment of confusion, sometimes it can be a few paragraphs or even several pages before they can be sure that you were being metaphorical. Either way, the last thing that you want to do during the first few pages of your story is introduce bumps into an already-steep learning curve. Beginnings are confusing enough—don’t add even more confusion!

You might think that your metaphor is clearly not meant to be taken literally, that there is no way someone could think you actually meant what you said. Something like:

     The bus moved through the field with surprising grace, a bulky cat carrying passengers to destinations unknown.

No one could take that literally, right?

Wrong.

There is almost no metaphor so outlandish that it will be clear to everyone that it’s not literal. So ease up on your metaphor usage until you’ve given your readers time to get some context.



P.S.
There won't be any new posts for Wednesday and Friday this week, as I'll be busy at the Superstars Writing Seminar! Regular updates will resume on the 9th.