Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [52]
“Switch your first two chapters around,” he said.
“Huh?” I said.
“Put your second chapter first,” he said patiently. “And put your first chapter second. You’ll have to run them through the typewriter so the transitions work smoothly but the rewriting should be minimal. The idea is to start in the middle of the action, with London carting the corpse around, and then go back and explain what he’s doing and just what he’s got in mind.”
“Oh,” I said. And glanced up quickly to see if a lightbulb had taken form above my head. I guess it only happens that way in comic strips.
Now this change, which was a cinch to make, didn’t turn Death Pulls a Doublecross into an Edgar candidate. All the perfumes of Arabia wouldn’t have turned the trick. But it did improve the book immeasurably. By beginning with Chapter Two, I opened the book with the action in progress. There was movement. Something was happening. The reader had no idea who Ed London was or why this young lady was wrapped in her Bokhara like cheese in a blintz, but he had plenty of time later to dope out the whys and wherefores. After he’d been hooked by the action.
(The reader may have further wondered where Ed London got the muscles to manhandle a rug with a corpse rolled in it; oriental rugs are pretty heavy, even without bodies in them. This whole question never occurred to me until years later.)
Ever since Death pulled that doublecross, I’ve used this opening gambit more often than not. All seven Tanner books employed this device. In some of them I wrote a single chapter before doubling back to explain the book’s premise, while in others I let the story line run on for two or three chapters before flashing back and explaining who these people were and what they were doing and why. In the Tanner books, a secondary purpose was served by this technique. The opening chapter or chapters generally left Tanner up against the wall—suspended in a bamboo cage in northern Thailand in Two For Tanner, and informed that he’s to be executed at sunrise; on a train in Czechoslovakia in The Canceled Czech, with a cop asking him for his papers; and literally buried alive in Modonoland in Me Tanner, You Jane. This tension was maintained and even heightened by forcing the reader to pause for a flashback; the effect was that of a cliffhanger in an old-fashioned serial.
This business of beginning after the beginning is a natural for novels of suspense and adventure and action. But it works as well in the sort of novel in which characters do not get tossed off Czech trains or buried alive or shot at sunrise. If your story is one of a young man’s loss of innocence in the big city, you don’t have to begin with him arriving in town. You can choose instead to open with a scene involving him and a girl he’s taken up with some weeks after his arrival. They’re at a party, or in bed, or having a fight, or whatever—you’re writing this, not me. Then in the next chapter you can fill in whatever background has to be filled in. The point, remember, is to involve the reader, to make him care what happens next. You do this by showing your characters in action, in conflict, in motion, not sitting on a park bench musing about the meaning of life.
Innumerable examples of mainstream fiction of the highest order are structured along these lines. They open with a scene designed to get things off to a good start. Indeed, I’ve read a slew of novels in which the first chapter poses a crisis, the ensuing thirty chapters recount the hero’s entire life up to the moment of that crisis, and the final chapter resolves it. Jerome Weidman’s The Enemy Camp is a vivid example of this approach. By and large this strikes me as too much of a good thing; if the problem is such that it can be stated and resolved in two chapters, why must we wade through a hundred thousand words of background between the statement and the resolution?
Is it always a mistake to begin at the beginning?
Of course not. Always