Go Too Far!

and other answers to your questions about openings

This fall, I posted a couple of things (here and here) about story/novel openings. Readers asked questions (about cheesiness, and perfect starting points, and multiple timelines, and Big Reveals!) and now, 89 years later, I have some answers.

The Fear Factor:

My biggest writing fear is cheesiness! You touch on that but I'm not quite clear on what NOT to do when adding tension. I think your point was that the narrative should be robust enough to drive the tension much of the time, rather than jazzing up an inherently saggy story with ambiance or unanswered questions. Are there things you see writers consistently getting wrong with this? Thanks so much for the deep dive into tension!

Okay so first of all, let’s talk about the cheese factor.

Because writers have overactive imaginations, we’re always going to imagine what will happen if we go too far, regarding any advice we get or any move we might make. Someone tells you to use strong verbs, for instance, and you instantly fear that if you start doing this, you’ll take leave of your senses and write something like “Glowering eastward, Howard perambulated toward the exit, which he then oped, subsequently penetrating the doorway.” You’re probably not going to do that! So don’t let your fears stop you from moving a reasonable amount in that direction.

Or, let’s say you do go too far… Either you’ll recognize it, or one of your early readers will tell you so. That’s great! Now you know where the edge of the cliff is. Before, you didn’t know. Now that you know, you know how far you can go without fear.

I think he’s actually going to be just fine as long as he doesn’t look down.

There’s also the fact that it’s all in the execution. If I just describe the plot of Hamlet to you, it’s going to sound like horrible slapstick comedy. “…and then he tries to stab his uncle through the curtain, but it turns out it’s his girlfriend’s father!” Seriously, try it. Or try The Great Gatsby or Beloved or Frankenstein, but try worrying about the cheese factor as if it were your own work. “Really, self? You think people are going to believe that he just stitches this giant guy together from dead bodies and then it comes to life, and then it all ends with a chase scene in the arctic tundra? What is wrong with you?” These books all work because the author worked diligently to pull it off (and, okay, was also a genius—but so are you, probably). In other hands, it might have been a mess. But you can’t judge whether something will work just from the synopsis.

(This is, incidentally, the reason I can never answer the questions “Do you think it will work if I ______” or “Do you think it’s a good idea to write a novel about _______?” I don’t know, man. Would you have told a friend it was a good idea to write a rap musical about the founder of the US Treasury? Probably not. But it turns out, no one can know ahead of time.)

“Is it a good idea?” I mean, like… no?

But you’re asking about this regarding tension. In terms of how much is too much, see above—risk going too far so you can find the cliff edge. But equally important is the quality of the tension. And you partly answer this question yourself. Tension that just comes from the environment (Ooh, there’s a thunderstorm!) or that’s just dangling cryptic questions in front of the reader, when the character already knows the answer (What is in the box that our narrator is guarding?) can fall flat or seem desperate. You want your tensions either to come organically from your characters, or—if external—to change your characters. Or both.

Tension coming from the characters might look like a story opening with one person trying to convince the another to lend him ten thousand dollars.

External tension might look like the city going into lockdown for Covid, and this forces one character to quit his job as a Chippendales dancer and another to propose to his girlfriend.

Using both might look something like two adult brothers, stuck at their parents’ house for the Covid lockdown, arguing over whether one will spend all his money on an engagement ring or loan his brother 10k to get by without his Chippendales income.

Notice that I didn’t mention tension between the reader and the story—the “Wait, what’s going on?” kind of tension. You can of course use that in small doses, but it’s not load-bearing; it can’t hold up a story.

The Perfectionist:

I’ve rewritten the opening of my WIP 17,000 times, trying to find that perfect starting point. What trips me up is striking the right balance between establishing the main character’s life before the big change with enough to get the reader invested, but not so much that they get bored before stuff really happens.

If you haven’t written the entire draft yet, my advice to you is pretty simple: Forget about it. Leave the opening behind in the dust and get to the end of this thing. Then, once you have a full draft you can actually meet your story for the first time, you can do a retroactive outline, and you can start to figure out what it’s all about.

If you have a full draft, or once you have a full draft: Look back at what you have and ask yourself what is the latest point where you could reasonably start the story.

Since we were talking about Hamlet above, let’s stick with it. Shakespeare had infinite options here. He could have started when Hamlet’s father was alive and well, then shown the murder, then the wedding, and then had the ghost show up and so on. It’s actually a bold choice, when you think about it, to start the story after the murder. But doing this lets it be a play about revenge, not about murder—and keeps it down to a nice, crisp <checks notes> three hours and fifteen minutes.

It would be hard to start the story any later than he does. If we started with Hamlet playing mad, and then we had to learn that he’s only doing this because his father’s ghost showed up and told him to avenge his death, we’re going to get lost in backstory. He starts us at the last reasonable moment to start us—with the ghost showing up—and it’s not coincidental that this is just moments before Hamlet, our protagonist, experiences a seismic shift in his life, one that will set all the other events in motion. Of course his father’s death was also a change; but it didn’t change what Hamlet does, or who he is. This visitation, on the other hand, redefines him.

Hamlet, I am your fahthahhhhh.

So what I’m saying is: Write the whole thing. Realize that what you have on your hands is really a play about revenge (or a novel about grief, or a short story about lost love). Then try to find the latest starting point that will keep that theme and arc intact, or (ideally) help emphasize it.

The Back-and-Forth:

In a dual POV (alternating chapters but in the same time frame), how do you handle the inciting incident? Can one occur early on and the other perhaps not occur until the end of Act I?

So let’s imagine that we’re bouncing between two timelines, looking like this:

Timeline A: Fifteen people have gone missing from the convention center. Chaos ensues!

Timeline B: Marjorie goes for a walk.

Timeline A: The national news gets involved, and the detectives lock everyone in the exhibition hall.

Timeline B: Marjorie picks up her mail.

Timeline A: The Prime Minister of Canada arrives, and everyone learns that his mistress is among the missing!

Timeline B: Marjorie feeds the dog.

How are readers going to feel every time they leave Timeline A and start reading about Marjorie’s amazing day? Probably not thrilled.

Of course this is an exaggeration, but milder forms of this risk failing to engage readers, too.

When I’m alternating timelines (or, okay, the one time I alternated timelines) it’s important to me to read and edit each timeline through many times independent of the other text. So when I was editing The Great Believers, I needed to make sure Fiona’s story (my secondary one) had its own arc, its own momentum, its own changes. (If you go looking for it, I’d say the big change for her happens slightly before her story starts—she learns her missing daughter might be in Paris—and yes, it’s okay for that change to be before page 1.) By design, her story is not as dramatic as Yale’s (my main storyline), and so I gave her much shorter chapters as well. I was terrified of her story just being “and then she wandered Paris some more” in each chapter, and had to fight hard against that pull.

And now… The Big Reveal!

Do you think a *reveal* can work in a short story, instead of a reversal / change / upheaval, either in a beginning or an ending?

I assume you mean a “reveal” in which we, the audience, learn things that everyone in the world of the story already knew. So rather than there being a change for the characters, there is only a change for the reader. (If there’s a reveal for the reader and a change for the characters—a la the ending of The Sixth Sense—that tends to work much better.)

Of course anything can work, but some things are a lot lot lot more difficult to pull off, and this is one of those things. Here are the reasons:

1. Assuming we’re supposed to have access to at least one character’s mind, why has that character not shared it with us and/or thought about it? It tends to push us out of the story, to break our implied contract with the narrative. This is true at the beginning but especially at the end, when we’ve been along for the whole ride already.

2. Since it’s not really a change within the world of the story, the characters aren’t going to act differently than they normally would. We’re just seeing a random day in the life, and we’re left wondering what the point is.

3. It can seem desperate and cheap. Since the reveal has no effect within storyland, the author must be aiming the reveal at us, the readers… and now we’re thinking about the relationship between author and reader, and how the author is trying to impress or manipulate us—rather than about the story itself. And unless you’re aiming for something super high-concept and Nabokovian, that’s not great.

For what it’s worth, I do think this kind of move works better (but not great) on film, a medium in which we’re fundamentally outsiders observing and trying to guess what’s going on, and we don’t have the expectation of knowing everything a character knows.

If you’re asking specifically about short stories, as opposed to novels, etc.—yes, you do have a bit more of a chance of this working, especially if you’re going for a non-narrative story (that is, one without a plot involving different moments in time, cause and effect, etc.). Here’s an example: Ramona Ausubel’s strange and hilarious story “You Can Find Love Now,” which is structured not as a linear series of events, but as an online dating profile. The reveal at the beginning of the story (this would be a spoiler if it weren’t SO close to the opening) is that the guy filling out the profile is a cyclops. And that’s really the only big hook at the beginning.

On the other hand, what IS a reversal from everything in the cyclops’s previous life is that today is the day he’s sitting down to fill out the dating form. Soooo, maybe I take it all back and there’s a reversal (not JUST a reveal) after all.

Which leads me to my challenge for this writer and/or anyone tempted to use a Big Reveal as a load-bearing wall: Can you think of a (narrative) story or novel you love in which the opening or closing rests entirely on a reveal and not on any kind of change for the characters? If you can’t, there’s your answer. If you can: Are you absolutely sure there’s no change within the world of the story? You’re positive that this day is like all other days, and only the reader is altered? Cool. Cool cool cool. Knock yourself out then. And please post below with the name of the story, because those ones are hard to come by.

And Happy New Year, Here’s a List of Stories!

There’s got to be some culture out there where it’s traditional for people to exchange lists of short stories for New Years, right??

For a class, I recently put together a list of some of my favorite short stories (or at least favorite stories to teach), so I’m sharing it below as a thank-you to paid subscribers (who help keep most of this content free for everyone and who are also good-looking!)…