I've been asked to use this blog to give advice on writing and it seemed like a pretty good idea. As anyone who's spoken to me for any length of time can attest to, I can get pretty long-winded. Especially on the subject of writing. So if you have any topics on writing you'd like me to talk about, please feel free to drop me a line and I'll be happy to do it.
Now that we've gone over my basic rules for writing, it's time to get to what I was asked to write about—and that's how to start a story. There are a number of schools of thought on this and as the first rule states, it's up to you to find your own path. In Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing (first published in the New York Times and available on any number of sites on the Internet—just Google it), his first two rules deal with what NOT to do:
Now that we've gone over my basic rules for writing, it's time to get to what I was asked to write about—and that's how to start a story. There are a number of schools of thought on this and as the first rule states, it's up to you to find your own path. In Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing (first published in the New York Times and available on any number of sites on the Internet—just Google it), his first two rules deal with what NOT to do:
Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
Avoid prologues. They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's “Sweet Thursday,” but it's okay because a cahracter in the book makes the point of what my rules are about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks....figure out what the guy's thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that...Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle...Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That's nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don't have to read it. I don't want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”
Leonard is one of my favorite writers, so it's no surprise that I'll side with him on almost any piece of writing advice he can offer. In my world, if you're lucky enough to be half as successful or as talented as Leonard, then you're lucky enough.
But this is ultimately about how Percival Constantine writes, not Elmore Leonard, so I'll get started with how I write my books. And first thing's first, you've gotta start with some sort of plot. In his book On Writing, Stephen King talks about how he doesn't do a lot of advance plotting and I'm of a similar school of thought (On Writing is a book I strongly recommend, particularly the audio version as King reads it himself and it feels like you're having a conversation with the man).
There are a number of ways to plot. Some people jot down random notes and just write as they go along. Other people write out long, detailed descriptions of their characters. Others can spend weeks, months, even years just on laying out the details of the world and the story. J.R.R. Tolkien reportedly had more backstory written about the world of Middle Earth than ever made it into The Lord of the Rings.
A method I've found particularly useful is Lester Dent's Pulp Paper Fiction Master Plot. You can find it on the Internet on a number of sites. Lester Dent was one of the most renowned of the Doc Savage writers and he remarked that no story he ever wrote conforming to the Master Plot ever failed to sell. The plot lays out a simple formula for a pulp story and how to fit it all together by dividing each story into four sections (this was for a 6,000 word story, but I've applied it to 30,000 word novels and it's worked just as well). It's very useful, especially if you're doing pulp stories.
I have a collection of random notes cobbled together and descriptions of the characters and I go from there. Like King, I let the story evolve as I write it. I've found if I do too much plotting, my tastes eventually change through the course of the story and I end up getting frustrated and abandoning it. I know what the major conflict or reason for the story is and I have a rough idea of how to get from Point A to B, but I don't follow a roadmap.
When it comes to beginnings, well, beginnings are truthfully the easiest thing in the world for me to write. Lately in my writing (and you can see one example of this in the recently-published Love & Bullets), I've taken a cue from the James Bond films and I start with a literary equivalent of a cold open. A cold open is a technique in film and television of jumping directly into the story at the beginning or opening. No real set-up, just jump right in.
This is particularly effective in action stories. Instead of introducing the hero slowly and the story, I jump right in and show the hero on a mission. In Love & Bullets, the book opens with the main character, Angela Lockhart, assassinating a target named Jack Travis and then getting ambushed by his bodyguards. All we need to know about Angela is given to us in this first scene—she's an assassin, she's been sent to kill this guy by someone named Dante, and she's damn good at her job. It's not until the later chapters that we find out Angela is a former operative of an intelligence organization or that her husband was killed through unknown means and she went rogue to locate his killer. If we throw all that exposition into the first few pages, the reader may not find it as exciting. But with a cold open, you grab their attention in the first few pages and you get them intrigued—who is this woman? Why is she doing this job? How did she get so good at it? Why was this man a target?
I'm very critical of Dan Brown's writing, but I have to give the man credit—he knows how to keep people reading. And he does it by putting in just enough mystery so the reader is compelled to keep going, but not too much so the reader is confused and gives up. That's a very fine line to walk and you have to be careful with it. You should give the reader just enough information so they can understand what's going on, but enough mystery so they want to keep reading.
So basically, what my first chapter generally is? A teaser or a short story featuring the main character. I introduce them, show them in action, and then end on a cliffhanger that causes the reader to go on to Chapter Two. In Love & Bullets, the first chapter really has very little bearing on the rest of the book, but it serves to introduce the characters. However in my upcoming book, The Myth Hunter, the first chapter leads directly into the main story and sets off a chain of events.
How this works is, again, up to you.
The important thing to remember in the beginning of any story is to just get something down. Don't dwell on the details or the set-up, just hit the ground running and learn the details of the story as you go. You're not going to have everything perfect on your first run-through and trying to make it perfect will just cause you undue stress and fatigue.
So screw it. Just start writing the damn thing. When you're finished, revision is the time to go back and tighten it up, add the little details or cross out the stuff that just makes no sense. But when you're starting out, you can't be concerned with sweating over that small stuff.
When I worked on my college newspaper, we were taught to write in the style of an inverted pyramid. And what that means is you start off with very broad strokes, summarizing the entire story. Then as the article goes on, you narrow your focus and get more detailed. The actual process of writing a novel or a story is the same—you start off writing very broadly, without letting yourself become too concerned with the details. Then with your next revision, you narrow it down, tighten things up and worry more about how it all fits together. Then another revision and so on and so forth.
But just write something. And remember that you don't have to necessarily write in chronological order. If the entire reason you're writing this book is because you have a great idea for a climatic fight scene at the end, then start off by writing that fight scene and work your way through the story from there. Or write the scenes completely out of order. Write the last scene then the first. Then another one that goes in the middle. Then a flashback and at the end figure out how you fit them all together.
There is no right way to write! You write in the style that you're most comfortable in. And anyone who tells you “I have all the secrets to writing a best-selling novel in thirty days, all you have to do is buy my product” is a scam artist. There is no shortcut, no magic formula that makes everything easy for you, so don't waste your time looking for one.
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