The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes - Jack M. Bickham [6]
How do you do that? By recognizing three facts:
1. Any time you stop to describe something, you have stopped. Asking a reader to jump eagerly into a story that starts without motion is like asking a cyclist to ride a bike with no wheels—he pedals and pedals but doesn't get anywhere. Description is vital in fiction, but at the outset of the story it's deadly.
2. Fiction looks forward, not backward. When you start a story with background information, you point the reader in the wrong direction, and put her off. If she had wanted old news, she would have read yesterday's newspaper.
3. Good fiction starts with—and deals with—someone's response to threat.
Let's look a bit further at this No. 3, because it tells us how our stories should start.
As human beings, it's in our nature to be fascinated by threat. Start your story with a mountain climber hanging from a cliff by his fingernails, and I guarantee that the reader will read a bit further to see what happens next. Start your story with a child frightened because she has to perform a piano solo before a large recital audience—and feeling threatened, of course—and your reader will immediately become interested in her plight.
It stands to reason, then, that you should not warm up your engines at the outset. You should start the action. What kind of action? Threat—and a response to it.
Every good story starts at a moment of threat.
Does this mean you are doomed to spend your writing career looking for new and dire physical threats? I don't think so, although some fine writers have thrived by writing fiction dealing with literal, physical threat and danger. But you don't have to write about physical catastrophe to have fascinating threat in your stories.
Think back a moment over your own life. What were some of the times when you felt most scared, most threatened? Perhaps it was your first day of school. Or at a time when there was a death in the family, or a divorce. Perhaps the first time you had to speak a line in a school play. Or when you tried out for a sports team. Maybe your first date? When you changed schools? When the family moved? When some new people moved in next door to you, and you didn't know if you would like them? When you were engaged or married, or when you started your first real job? When you were fired from a job? Or promoted to a better one?
All stressful events. All threatening, even though many of them were happy occasions. Now, why should that be so? Isn't it strange that happy events would be threatening?
Not at all. Better minds than I have pointed out that we human beings like to feel in harmony with our environment and our situation in life. Each of us carries inside a view of ourselves, our life, and the kind of person we are. When things are going well, we feel in harmony with everything and everyone around us, and we aren't threatened. But enter change—almost any change—and our world has been shaken up. We feel uneasy.
Threatened.
Nothing is more threatening than change.
From this, it stands to reason that you will know when and where to start your story—page one, line one—when you identify the moment of change. Because change is where the story starts.
A bus comes to town, and a stranger gets off.
The boss calls an employee: "Please come in here. I have something important to tell you."
A new family moves into the house down the block.
A telegram is delivered to your door.
The seasons change, and you grow restless... uneasy.
It is at this moment of crucial change, whatever it may be, that your story starts. Identify the moment of change, and you know when your story must open. To begin in any other way is to invite disaster:
• Open earlier, with background, and it's dull.
• Open by looking somewhere else in the story, and it's irrelevant.
• Open long after the change, and it's confusing.
Begin your story now. Move it forward now. All that background is an author concern. Readers don't care. They don't want it. The reader's concern is with change... threat...