by Sacha Black
Granted, this opening scene is a little on the preachy ‘telling’ side. However, it’s all in context. The protagonist is considering her future and her big birthday. As a result, she’s explaining what procedure she has to undergo. From her sister’s experiences, and her talk of love being a disease, we infer that scientists found a cure for love and that’s what the procedure is. It also tells us that procedure is ‘normal’ for her world.
Example 2: Divergent by Veronica Roth
“There is one mirror in my house. It is behind a sliding panel in the hallway upstairs. Our faction allows me to stand in front of it on the second day of every third month, the day my mother cuts my hair.” Divergent by Veronica Roth, pg.1.
This example is far less telling and much more showing. A simple scene – that simplicity is a clue to the world. Tris tells us that her house only has one mirror (again, another clue to her world) and that her ‘faction’ has rules that she must abide by. We know her world is dystopian because the rules are so different to ours. I mean, who only has one mirror in their house AND ONLY LOOKS AT IT ONCE EVERY OTHER MONTH. Think of the bed hair, people. The way the protagonist describes the length of time over which the habitual haircut happens tells us that this is a ‘normal’ ritual for their world.
Who is the hero anyway?
And so to the second part of establishing normal. Let’s be efficient and kill two birds with one stone.
At the start of this chapter I noted the three key things you need to do in your opening:
Establish the normal world
Tell the reader what the hero wants
Lay down the stakes
We’ve done the first. But the second, I’ve always thought, is terribly phrased for writing advice because we don’t really mean tell the reader what the hero wants. After all, we’re not supposed to tell the reader anything. The first lesson we learn as we crawl into the light from our word-mother’s loins is ‘show don’t tell’. What we actually mean is imply. You need to imply the hero’s goal.
Imagine a protagonist (a stable boy) talking to another stable boy about the Grand National while picking out a horse hoof and wistfully watching the champion jockeys train.
Bet you can guess his goal. I didn’t tell you his dream, but the reader can be pretty certain, even in that short image, that the protagonist’s goal is to someday be on one of those horses, racing with the best. You don’t need to tell because creating an image with description and action implicitly shows the reader the hero’s goal.
The last two key points, identifying desire and the stakes, are intricately linked. And the efficiency bird they kill? If you know what a person desires, and the stakes they’re up against, I’d say you’re fairly well acquainted with the ‘normal’ hero too.
Goal specificity
Vague goals won’t cut it. In fact, vague anything isn’t going to cut it in your novel. Your protagonist’s goal should be specific enough the reader can easily identify it. Michael Hauge in Screenplays That Sell argues that there are five types of specific goal:
Win - For example, winning that horse race I mentioned earlier, or winning the heart of a lover, or winning a battle against the lord of darkness, or Rocky winning the fight against Apollo.
Stop - Well, stop the bad guy! But it could be stopping a bomb from going off as in the Speed movies, or stopping the Terminator from killing John’s mother, Sarah Connor. Or every James Bond film ever.
Escape - Of course, it doesn’t have to be a prison as in the case of Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption. It could be escaping a husband, or a job, or a room like Jack and M, in Room by Emma Donoghue, or some big-brother-style reality like Truman in The Truman Show.
Deliver - This could be all manner of things from money in a gangster film to the Bible in The Book of Eli, where Eli must traverse an apocalyptical world and deliver the only copy of the Bible left in existence.
Get - In the movie The Italian Job, Charlie Croker wants to get gold bullion. Lara Croft wants to find Pandora’s box in Tomb Raider. ‘Get’ is often found in adventure stories, as they are usually quests to find something.
Often, stories combine goals, like The Matrix, which combines escape (as in escaping the Matrix itself), and stop (as in stopping Agent Smith from getting to Zion and wiping out what’s left of humanity.
Lay the stakes like it’s a vampire fest and you’re the only human at the party
It’s vital you lay down the gauntlet for the reader in chapter one because the reader needs to know what it will cost the hero to reach his goal. And sure, your stakes will rise and fall and maybe even change as your story progresses, but for the love of all things literary, make sure you whip out some kind of a stake in the early chapters.
Continuing with our earlier examples, Roth establishes the initial stake on page 2.
“Tomorrow at the Choosing Ceremony, I will decide on a faction; I will decide the rest of my life; I will decide to stay with my family or abandon them.” Divergent, Veronica Roth, p.2.
Note how Roth doesn’t bash the reader round the chops with the stake. She lets the hero infer the stakes through actions: Tris making a life-changing decision. Pretty substantial stakes, if you ask me.
Maybe you write crime, and a dead body or four show up – stakes laid: solve the crime before the killer strikes again. Or maybe you’re a romance novelist, and the heroine’s husband abandons her on the day she gets made redundant – stakes identified: find a way to support herself before her life totally falls apart.
Notes on Herosplaining and Exposition
Let’s delve into the detail of why herosplaining is hideous and should be outlawed. Herosplaining and information dumping are siblings. Here’s an example. Jeremy and Cal are long-term BFFs (Best Friends for Life for the acronym haters).
Let’s look at a little scene between Jeremy and Cal. What we (the readers) don’t need, is the author telling us that Jeremy is Cal’s best friend. Show the reader through their interactions.
Information dump example:
Fourteen-year-old Jeremy sauntered into the canteen and sat next to Cal who was also fourteen. Jeremy was Cal’s best friend, they’d been friends since kindergarten. They met on their very first lunch break. Jeremy sat next to Cal just as the rather skinny lunch lady slopped a dollop of spagbol over their plates. Both of them pushed their plates away at the exact same time, after that, they were inseparable.
“Afternoon, Squire,” Jeremy says.
Non-information dump example:
Jeremy sauntered into the canteen, his lips pressed into a thin grin. His eyebrows dipped over his glinting eyes as he caught sight of Cal. It was an expression Cal had come to love and loathe in equal measure.
“Afternoon, Squire,” Jeremy said fist bumping Cal and plonking himself on the bench next to him.
“What are you planning Jeremy?” Cal asked.
“How’d you know?”
Cal rolled his eyes, “Same way I know you’re hiding our pirate radio mic in your bag.”
“I take 'Squire' back. Hello, Sherlock.”
Information dumps are easily identifiable because the information they give the reader isn’t about action in the present story, but something from the past.
Typically, info dumps are about historical events, magical or societal constructs or anything that’s remotely complicated in your protagonist’s life (or your world’s history). The dumps ‘explain’ behavior, action or relationships between characters. But ‘explaining’ is tantamount to telling, and every author in the history of written words knows the ‘show don’t tell rule’. If you don’t, Google it.
Reasons info dumps need to go to the sin bin
Reason 1: Information dumps take the reader out of the protagonist’s mind and out of the present action. I’ve established that readers experience the story through the feelings and perceptions of the hero. When we tell stories in real life, we don’t naturally dump twenty years of personal history and life achievements to explain
how your child achieved ten out of ten in their latest spelling test. Natural conversation is full of interruptions and tangents, so stories get told in snatches and glimpses.
Reason 2: They remind the reader they’re reading. No one wants to be reminded of the calories they’re consuming when shoveling secret eclairs into their mouth. You want the sickly-sweet pastry to coat your tonsils, and you want to be left in peace. Readers are the same. They want to escape into your novel, be fully immersed. If you dump info, you’ll take that away. Don’t take your reader’s eclair away. It’s mean.
Reason 3: It creates a fact-giving listicle utterly devoid of emotion instead of a gripping emotional rollercoaster of a plot. It also slows the pace. I mean, who wants to read a War and Peace-sized encyclopedia on the ins and outs of brick construction in the Far East quarter of quadrant seven? I was bored even writing that sentence, let alone the poor sod that needs to read it in a novel. If it’s not relevant, KILL THAT DARLING. Sever it like a carotid artery in the muscled fingertips of James Bond’s hands.
Who’s in the driving seat?
Even though the hero is flawed at the start of the novel, and even though they are not ‘actively engaged’ in the story until they’ve picked up the mantle and accepted the call to action, the hero should still drive the plot. After all, if the hero refuses the call to action, it would make the mentor or ally wander in and encourage the hero to accept it.
The protagonist should be the most active character in your story and that should be the case right through to the finale. If you find your protagonist isn’t the one driving your story through to the conclusion/climax, then they aren’t your protagonist.
Your hero's worked through the obstacles in the story, so don’t let someone else make the final blow on the villain. Imagine you’re at work and you’ve worked for months or years on a project, and then someone else comes in at the eleventh hour to close it and inevitably take the credit. Nobody likes that person. That person’s an asshole. Your hero needs to make the final blow because it should be the action in your story that requires the most risk or responsibility.
Example: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling. During the final climax of the story Harry, Ron and Hermione face a series of increasingly challenging spells woven by the school’s professors to prevent people from entering the stone’s secret chamber. Each spell got harder, but it wasn’t until the final challenge that Harry had to face the biggest challenge of them all: Lord Voldemort.
Opening gambit clichés to avoid
Although we’ve covered clichés more generally in STEP 8, there’s a couple more things to cover on clichéd beginnings.
I’m not here to tell you what you must and must not do, but even Edward Bulwer-Lytton is sick of hearing “it was a dark and stormy night.” I’ve included a list of tired story starts below. That’s not to say you can’t use them, but I hope you’re feeling super innovative when you do because the list is full of clichés for a reason. Your first line is your first impression, if you want my advice — which I’m assuming you do given you’re reading this book. Mix it up. Avoid starting with these eye rolls:
Dreams or waking up. (Just don’t. I will lynch you.)
Weather (it’s boring)
Expository dialogue like ‘As you heard, Joe…” Herosplaining is not cool
Summaries (they’re tantamount to info dumping)
STEP 9 - Start with bang, bang, kapow
Starting with action doesn’t mean blowing shit up and launching into epic battle scenes with no explanation.
If we boil down the start of a novel to the simplest parts, then you need to do three key things:
Establish your protagonist’s ‘normal world’
Tell the reader what the hero wants
Show (or imply) what the stakes are to the reader (which is, of course, predicated on what the hero wants)
Establishing the normal world has two aspects to it:
Establishing what the ‘world’ itself is like
Establishing what the hero is like in it
Change is predicated on stability. You can’t have a change if you don’t know what you’re changing from and to.
Let your hero experience your world through the natural course of your story and interactions with other characters. Doing that allows your reader to immerse themselves fully in your world.
Only give world building information when it’s relevant to the story.
Don’t herosplain or information dump. They’re easily identifiable because they don’t give the reader information about the present action in the story.
Information dumps are bad because:
They take the reader out of the protagonist’s mind and out of the present action.
They remind the reader they’re reading
It strips your plot of emotion
We don’t really mean tell the reader what the hero wants. After all, we’re not supposed to tell the reader anything. You need to imply the hero’s goal.
Types of goal: Stop, Get, Deliver, Win, Escape.
The hero should be driving the plot, even when they’re not actively engaged in the story.
Questions to think about
What type of goal does your hero have?
How is your hero different from his or her normal self?
11
STEP 10 – Sprinkling the Unicorn Dust - AKA the Hero Lens
And so, we reach the final and most delicately nuanced chapter. The best bit about a cake is the icing (don’t you dare say the sponge). It’s so sweet it’s like shooting up hallucinogenic sugar. In this book, we’ve thrown in our character ingredients: theme, arcs, traits, avoided the gone-off clichés and for flavor we’ve shaken and stirred motives and soul scars into the mix. What we’ve done is build a solid protagonist. Her motives stand up. The pace, conflict and arc she experiences evoke reader sympathy and bridge the connection from inky words to the reader’s heart. And yet, there’s still a little more…
There’s still that little ‘je ne sais quoi’ missing. That something extra that makes your protagonist pop and sparkle enough she stands out of the slush pile. The something that makes your character the 1% – the Madonna of pop, the Elon Musk of Engineering, the Michael Phelps of… okay, you get it.
And here’s where I whip out a cliché that makes my eyebrows twitch harder than a gorilla in a rave: the devil is in the detail. Eww, I feel dirty. But it’s kinda true. The things that make us likable are the tiny nuanced variations. In some ways, this chapter is the pièce de résistance because it’s where we look at how to go from the foundations of finger painting and Lego blocks to the masterpiece of a Michelangelo.
You need to build your hero lens.
What in the fudgebanging collywomble is a hero lens?
I’m so glad you asked.
Your hero is a bookish telescope, a strangely muscular funnel, a dashing mirror, a pair of protagonist-shaped glasses, a cape swishing magnifying glass… I’ll stop now.
All those things are lenses in one form or another (and before you argue that a mirror isn’t a lens, zip it Einstein, don’t ruin the analogy). Your hero is the lens through which your reader experiences your novel. The mirror part? Well, that works too because we’ve already talked about how protagonists are a reflection of us, we see parts of ourselves in stories… You know, like a mirror. Just saying.
Everything the hero does, sees, feels and thinks, encloses your reader into a tiny literary lens. Nothing happens in your book unless your protagonist experiences it. Everything is channeled through her. She is the lens your reader looks through when reading your story. Readers want this lens. They covet it.
But that means your lens needs to be tinted in a slightly different color to everyone else’s. It’s time to ice that character cake and sprinkle on a bit of magical unicorn dust.
The implicit hero — the hero’s voice
In researching this novel, I surveyed readers to find out what they found hardes
t when creating their heroes. The thing that came up the most often was how to get your reader to know your hero implicitly, without using expository dialogue or description. Another reader described it as wanting their audience to hear the hero’s voice rather than their author voice. And yet another writer described the same problem as wanting to know how to express the hero as the hero wants. When there are too many traits and motivations to choose from, all the heroes sound the same.
I couldn’t agree more. But motivations and traits are foundations. And the foundations of anything, whether it’s a house or language or dancing, are the same. They’re huge blocks on top of which you layer and build skills or bricks.
It’s not the traits and motivations that make a hero unique; it’s the way she embodies them. The expression of traits will impact how she experiences the world. For example, why can roast chicken smell thick and creamy to one identical twin and like sour flesh to the other?
The implicit hero shows the reader your story world through the five senses: how does the world look, sound, feel and taste to her? It’s the expression of these senses that create the subtle nuances between one hero’s lens and another’s.