Start with the Heart : guest blog

How can we strip a romance (no pun intended) down to the bare bones of its central dilemna? That's the topic as I guest blog at The Write Type, where Cheryl Kaye Tardif is generously hosting me. I discuss how to start with the heart of the story, the core conflict between the two main characters.

“She’s the owner of a fancy restaurant. He eats there all the time” probably won’t work, but “She’s the owner of a fancy restaurant. He’s the fancier competition” has inherent tension. And ideally, readers should be able to see both sides. “She’s in love with him. But he stole all her savings and burned down her home” raises the question of what exactly she’s in love with.

Read more here!

Conflict at the start

One of the first how-to books for writers that I read, which was Dean Koontz’s How to Write Best-Selling Fiction, offered some simple advice. Start with a character in trouble or conflict.

I took this to heart, and starting with conflict is good advice – as long as the conflict is convincing and well-presented. Here are a few examples of what doesn’t work for me in this regard.

1. The Grey Room

This is where the character wakes up in a locked room and has to escape from it. It’s not a bad opening per se - there can be plenty of conflict in such a situation – but one drawback is that there’s no sense of what the character’s life was like before the imprisonment. And one grey room looks very much like another (we won’t get into whether or not it’s a good idea to start with the character waking up).

I ran into this problem when I started The Mark of Vurth with the protagonist waking up in a mud-walled jail cell. The mud walls were the only clue to the fact that this was set in an Africa-esque land. After a discussion, I realized that starting the story with the protagonist’s kidnapping would give readers a chance to connect with him as a character, see that Africa-esque land for themselves and still have conflict.

(Named after the room in which half of Cage a Man by F. M. Busby is set.)

2. The Family Argument

Or anything which starts with spouses separating, children coming out of the closet, children being locked in the closet, etc. Without knowing any of these people as characters, it’s difficult for readers to be fully involved with their struggles and setbacks – and if the story immediately leaps to people shouting or weeping, this can come off as melodramatic.

It might be better to start with a small, simple problem and then realistically escalate this to a major one. For instance, in the one where the spouses separate, perhaps they start with a minor quarrel over a missing handbag. Wanting to patch things up, the husband searches the house again once his wife leaves for work, and finds the bag… except there’s a letter from another man in it.

3. The Amnesiac

IMO, this is one of the most difficult openings to pull off (and one reason I needed to rewrite Redemption). With partial amnesia, the writer might be able to tell us the character’s name; with total amnesia, either someone else will have to do it or the character will be “he” and “him” for a while, which doesn’t really aid reader identification. There’s conflict inherent in such a situation, but the very premise can get in the way of it.

Even someone with partial amnesia can be difficult to relate to, since if they don’t remember their past, they can be too much of a tabula rasa.

4. Jack London Inspired

I love The Call of the Wild, but it’s not easy to start a story with a character against the environment or a sociopolitical situation. The antagonists in London’s novel are all secondary to the protagonist’s struggle to survive and then dominate the new world in which he finds himself. Half of the time, he’s fighting himself – or his past – as much as he is them.

The London novel works because he was writing about something intrinsically interesting – the Gold Rush, from the point of view of one of the dogs used in it - and his omniscient POV works well in this context. I’m not sure that would work as well today as it did in 1903, and a writer would have to be pretty good to pull off something similar.

I’ve found that all of my manuscripts start with the protagonist quickly plunging into a tense or dangerous situation. This always involves a hostile character to whom the protagonist will be attracted eventually, providing sexual tension as well. So far this has worked, but I’ll vary this pattern in the future. There are other ways to start out with conflict, and I’d like to try more of them.

Action vs. conflict, the sequel

Another reason not to start with a tense scene where the characters are fighting for their lives is because the action will have to stop sooner or later for the story to explain who the characters are and to expand on the plot. Unless the author can weave information seamlessly into the narrative and make it interesting, this can be a letdown compared to the action. It’s not easy to stop the fight, deccelerate the story and still expect to hold the reader’s attention.

Starting with action can also backfire because it’s melodramatic to watch two strangers interact in too intimate a way, whether that way is fighting to the death or making love. Rather than being pulled into the story, the readers feel left out, because they haven’t been given time to get into the characters’ minds. Rebecca Brandewyne’s Desire in Disguise begins with a long, explicit scene where the hero and heroine have sex. Now this would have been wonderful if I’d read it at the climax of the novel, after I’d become interested in their relationship and wanted them to get together. To read it at the start… well, that’s the closest I’ll ever come to voyeurism. Since I didn’t know who these people were, I couldn’t be involved on an emotional level.

Starting with action can work - as long as it’s wedded to conflict or has a lot of suspense. One of the most startling openings I’ve ever read was in J. V. Jones’s The Baker’s Boy, where the wizard Baralis murders someone in the first paragraph and rapes a queen before the end of the first chapter. I was hooked, because the start made it very clear that Baralis was a thoroughly vile, creepy and manipulative person who wasn’t going to get what he deserved. You probably didn’t get the same impression from the John scene. In fact, it may have been all too clear that since John was the hero, of course he wasn’t going to be killed by two nobodies. A character getting what he or she deserves, at the start, doesn’t exactly make the reader’s pulse beat faster. It kills the suspense instead, and the reader has no reason to continue.

When authors receive critiques on these scenes, they often focus on honing the action, making it as explosive and realistic and exciting as possible. But it may also be necessary to look at the bigger picture and to see if there’s any other opening which could accomplish more.

Action vs. conflict

I’ve read a certain opening in some works-in-progress posted for critique. It’s written along these lines.

John wheeled, just in time to parry a slash from the taller of the two attackers. The force of the block knocked the man’s blade aside for a moment. Ignoring the pain that sang along his arms, John stabbed forward at the man’s belly, fast and hard. From the corner of his eye, he saw the shorter man dart at him and he pivoted, lashing out with one heel.

Is it gripping? To some extent, yes. It’s certainly better than, say, John watching butterflies in a sunny meadow. But it’s got certain problems, and if an author doesn’t take these into consideration, the opening of the story will look as though action has been mistaken for conflict.

Conflict occurs when a character is prevented from having something he or she wants very much. It’s the backbone of fiction; there aren’t many stories without conflict, except perhaps in ultra-literary works where the style and characterization take center stage instead. It can do very well without action, but the reverse rarely applies. If action is the sizzle, conflict is the steak.

Is there conflict in the paragraph I wrote? Well, I’m guessing that John wants to protect himself from the two attackers, who want to kill him. But I have no idea who he is, why he’s fighting these men, who they are, and what’s at stake if he loses (the only clue I have that John is the protagonist is that he’s named and the story is from his point of view). The potential for conflict is lost, because the story opts for action instead. This can be very vivid in a movie, but it leaves something to be desired in a novel.

Another reason I wouldn’t start with a scene like this in a short story is because the reader will never be in any doubt that the viewpoint character will survive the fight. Towards the end, the reader might be more concerned; after all, some authors do kill off their main characters or have otherwise bad things happen to them. Towards the end, especially when you’ve shown the forces confronting the protagonist, the reader will have a you-never-can-tell feeling that allows him to be genuinely afraid for the main character.

But at the start? Unless this is the prologue to a fantasy, where viewpoint characters often do get killed off, the reader isn’t going to worry.

Sometimes the story or novel begins with a practise fight or training sequence, but this has the same problem. There may be plenty of action, but unless there’s real tension, it won’t be fun to read. That’s one reason the Pai Mei scene in Kill Bill was delightful – Pai Mei hated women, Americans and Japanese, but he had to train an American woman who spoke Japanese and who thought she was good enough to defeat him. Most training-the-protagonist scenes don’t go this far. Instead, the protagonist gets a mentor who likes him and doesn’t really want to hurt him, so there goes any fear the reader might have felt on his behalf.

To be continued…