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Though I’ll have to post the promised Fun Friday entry on Sense & Sensibility this evening (I thought I was going to get today off work, but found out late yesterday afternoon I was going to have to come in, which threw my whole evening off kilter), I did want to pop in first thing this morning to congratulate Leslie S., who won the Amazon gift certificate! Leslie is a newcomer to the blog (and a new ACFW member as well!), so I’m tickled that her name came out of the hat last night.

In Monday’s post, we explored the idea of creating sequels—i.e., what happens next—through the disasters or hooks at the end of each scene. In addition to Bickham’s methods listed there, he also introduces the technique of the scene interruption. To keep the reader hooked, he suggests creating a diversion that stops the hero’s ability to complete the task or work through the conflict of that scene. The character wants to move on, but is thrwarted becaues his scene is postponed, left hanging. This creates a delay, a setback, a “mini-disaster.” In cinematography, they call this the “cut-away.”

In a single-POV story, this is going to be extremely hard to do, unless your cutaway involves a timelapse. In that case, the sequel scene may actually be more of the character interalizing the disaster that just happened—a chance for a character-growth/development scene. But, as anyone can tell you, don’t let the interrupting scene pull the reader away from the previous disaster too long, or else you’ll lose the tension because the reader will forget the peril the character was facing.

Regardless of how long or short your chapters are, always end your chapters at a place where the reader has to know what happens next. If you don’t end at the disaster moment, the next best place to end is in the middle of the conflict, especially if the next chapter opens with the continuation of the conflict. Another way to end is at a place when the character is stuck, thinking there’s no way out or that things can’t possibly get worse (which of course, is a method of foreshadowing and immediately implanting the idea in the reader’s mind that things are definitely about to get much, much worse). Or you can end the chapter when the character is on the brink of making an important decision or taking a new action that has potential to change the story outcome.

As in life, in writing “what happens next” is all about consequences. We’ve already seen how our job as authors is to make sure that our characters fail to reach their goals often enough to generate more conflict for the story. Failure brings consequences that generate conflicts that necessitate setting new goals—in addition to the main story goal that must still be met. These then become your scene goals. For each conflict, there are multiple outcomes dependent upon which decision is made or action taken, and this is the driving force behind the plot of your novel. For example, in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Frodo and Sam’s main story goal is to take the One Ring to Mordor to destroy it. Yet all along the way, they encounter roadblocks, interruptions, setbacks, and other characters with different goals that keep setting them along paths they don’t necessarily want to be on. They must work their way through each of those conflicts—they must resolve those consequences—before they can resolve their story goal.

Along with consequences come rewards. Stein, in How to Grow a Novel, states that in a discussion with playwrights once, he jotted down the phrase, “You must reward your audience” (18). As we discussed in the Plot or Plod series, you cannot just pile up the conflicts one on top of another in an ever increasing intensity, or else the reader is going to be overwhelmed. Once you’ve finished your first draft and are ready to start revisions, take the time to write out a scene-by-scene outline (or use scene cards) and pinpoint scenes where you’re rewarding the reader for sticking with you by revealing something important, resolving a conflict, or allowing a breather-scene where your reader can fall in love with your characters a little bit more. This will also help you in tracing the conflicts and consequences and making sure that each scene ties in with the scenes that follow in some way, and that each ends with some kind of a hook.

And just because I took the time to pull them and I kept forgetting to use them, here are the rest of the chapter-ender hooks that I pulled as examples for this series:

Dean Koontz, The Mask, end of Part 1:

“Gracie . . . it can’t go on forever. You’ve got . . . to put an end to it. Protect her, Gracie. Protect her . . .”

The voice faded away.

There was only silence. But not the silence of an open phone line. There was no hissing. No electronic beeping in the background. This was perfect silence, utterly unmarred by even the slightest click or whistle of electronic circuitry. Vast silence. Endless.

She put the phone down.

She started to shake.

She went to the cupboard and got down the bottle of Scotch she kept for visitors. She poured herself a double shot and sat down at the kitchen table.

The liquor didn’t warm her. Chills still shook her.

The voice on the phone had belonged to Leonard. Her husband. He had been dead for eighteen years.

Carolyn Keene, The Moonstone Castle Mystery, end of Chapter 13:

Bess and George and the boys hurried toward Ned. “Where’s Nancy?” they asked in one breath.

“I don’t know,” Ned said fearfully, then told them where he had left her.

“How long ago was that?” Bess asked quickly.

“Why, just a few minutes.”

“Then she didn’t come up the stairway, nor was she anywhere near it,” said Bess. “Otherwise, we would have seen her.”

The five young people looked at one another. Panic seized them. What had happened to Nancy?

Dick Francis, Dead Heat, end of Chapter 13:

I dreamed that I could smell toast. But someone had left it in my broken toaster for too long, and it was beginning to burn. Burned toast. My father had always liked his toast burned black. He had joked that it wasn’t burned, it was just well-done.

I was awake, and I could still smell the burned toast.

I got up and opened my bedroom door.

My cottage was on fire, with giant flames roaring up the stairway, and great billowing black smoke filling the air.

Michael Crichton, Timeline, end of 30:21:02:

Sir Guy stared for a moment, and then he began to shout, “The prisoners! All escaped! Prisoners!”

This cry was taken up by the Lady Claire, who called out in the hallway.

In the passage, the professor turned to them. “If we’re separated, you go to the monastery. Find Brother Marcel. He has the key to the passage. Okay?”

Before any of them could answer, the soldiers came running into the passageway. Chris felt hands grab his arms, pull him roughly.

They were caught.

JK Rowling, HP & The Deathly Hallows, End of Chapter 34:

Voldemort had raised his wand. His head was still tilted to one side, like a curious child, wondering what would happen if he proceeded. Harry looked back into the red eyes, and wanted it to happen now, quickly, while he could still stand, before he lost control, before he betrayed fear—

He saw the mouth move and a flash of green light, and everything was gone.

Now we must face the consequences: that’s the end of this series! And the reward: on Friday, April 4, in my Fun Friday post, I’ll announce the winner of the $15 Amazon Gift Certificate. So you have until the end of the day Thursday to make sure you’ve participated in the discussion as much as you can—each comment you’ve left on this series earns you another entry in the drawing!

Picture this scenario: You’re watching your absolutely favorite show. Things are getting dicy for the heroes. All of a sudden, there’s an explosion! Your heroes’ lives are in danger! What’s going to happen to them? Are they okay? Will they survive? Then, the screen goes black. And then you see: TO BE CONTINUED. “NOOOOOOOOOOO!” you scream. “I have to know what happens next!”

And what does happen next? Well, you tune in when the next episode airs or the new season starts. Why? Because you’re HOOKED. Because you need to know the sequel: what happens next.

Though I wouldn’t recommend reading it straight through, just like with Stein’s books, I recommend everyone should at least check Scene and Structure out from your local library and read the sections on Sequels. It’s not about subsequent books, but the pattern of how scenes follow-up the disaster that happened in the previous scene.

The way you structure the flow of your scenes is one of the primary ways, after dropping disasters on your characters, to keep the reader hooked. Remember, the purpose of each scene is to move the character further from quick fixes and shortcuts. Once you’ve written to the hook, the disaster, you can keep the reader frustrated and wanting to find out what happens next by breaking away from one character’s disaster to a subplot or other POV character’s scene. But change POV only when it creates more tension and suspense, not just to be in the other character’s head.

Bickham gives a few ways to amp up the conflict for each character within the scene that then ties that scene to either the next one or what happens later in the book (setting up sequels to keep the reader turning pages):

• Drop hints that the antagonist knows something which the hero/POV character doesn’t—something that is advantageous to the antagonist and/or disastrous for the hero. This is Malfoy taunting Harry Potter with stuff he knows that Harry obviously doesn’t. This is the serial killer taunting the detective. This is someone (either an antagonist or someone well-meaning but ill-informed) telling the heroine that the hero is cheating on her.
• The antagonist could actually reveal something the hero didn’t know yet—a bit of bad news that alters the hero’s assumptions or decisions or even make him deviate from his scene goal (or at least make the reader believe he will).
• Show that the hero has faulty information—and that he doesn’t realize it—to lead the reader to believe he’ll make the wrong decision.
• Have the antagonist (or an outside source) set a ticking clock on the duration of the scene (Can Jack Bauer stop the terrorists in twenty-four hours? Can Rose get Jack unshackled before the room fills with water as Titanic sinks?)

Once you’ve upped the tension in a scene, then ended it with a disaster, there are six ways to keep the conflict going in the sequel that will give the reader some closure on the previous conflict and yet still keep the tension level rising:

• As already mentioned, set a timer on your character’s actions, a time-limit in which to make a decision. You end a scene with the hero receiving a ransom note from the kidnapper who has his child: You have three hours to deliver $5 million or I kill the kid. What happens in the sequel scenes is shaped by that disaster, by that time-limit.
• Have the POV character come to understand—on his own or with help—an entirely different aspect of the previous disaster he hadn’t thought of before. How can that disaster actually be used to his advantage?
• On the flip-side, instead of realizing how the disaster can be advantageous, the character is now overwhelmed by the disaster (and the emotions resulting from it) and plunges back into the conflict with insufficient understanding of what’s going on, leading to more disasters.
• Introduce roadblocks (have you ever seen Amazing Race?) that create a “sidebar” conflict the character must get through to get to the next scene—conflicts which the character (and thus the reader) sees as relating directly to his stated goal for that scene, but which, in reality, only serve to throw him further off course.
• Have the character hint that he has more of an agenda than he’s revealed to the reader. Something along the lines of, “He knew what he had to do.” [End of scene].
• Stage an interruption—an outside stimulus—which forces the character to stop “sequelizing” and meet the new threat/conflict. This is very similar to the roadblock idea. Something interrupts the very straight-forward direction of the plot and either waylays the character for a little while or throws him completely onto a different trajectory for the remainder of the story.

Now that you’ve read the “how to,” let’s look at some examples of how published authors have put these techniques to work. I probably should have put these on the “disasters” page, but I think from these, you’ll also be able to see how the disaster sets up the sequels to come:

Janet Evanovich, Eleven on Top, end of Chapter 5:

“How could you be the big bounty hunter without knowing how to pick a lock? How’d you ever get in anywhere?” Lula stood back and looked at the store. “Ordinarily I’d just break a window, but they got one big window here. It’s just about the whole front of the place. It might look suspicious if I broke the window.”

She ran across the street to the Firebird and came back with a tire iron. “Maybe we can pry the door open.” She put the tire iron to the doorjamb and another car drove by. The car slowed as it passed us, and then took off.

“Maybe we would try the back door,” Lula said.

Sandra Brown, Play Dirty, end of Chapter 13:

She must have parked around back, where he’d parked the first time, because the red Honda was the only car in the driveway. In the time it took him to reach it, he was already considering going back inside to apologize. He was still mad as hell, but he couldn’t afford his anger. The price tag of it was half a million now, and millions more to come. Not worth it. Not by a long shot.

He turned on his heel and had started back toward the house when he spotted something that drew him up short.

Susan May Warren, Happily Ever After, End of Chapter 21:

He needed Mona. But he was the last thing she needed. She had her hands full building her life, and the Joe Michaels deluxe package, complete with handicapped brother and covert identity, did not fit into that reality. She needed a man who could hang up his backpack and invest in her dreams.

Instead he’d spent the past month knitting together a façade of white lies. Lies meant to keep him and Gabe safe. Lies that could unravel at any moment.

No, he couldn’t stay.

He closed his eyes and fought the urge to weep.

Linda Windsor, Maire, end of Chapter 25:

Unable to speak, Maire strained against the hold of the guards, leaning into the sword and toward the fire as though she too were ready to walk into its deadly mouth, even if it meant perishing with him . . .

Rowan stepped to the fire’s edge where the heat slapped him and reached into his lungs with invisible hands, clutching his breath. The perspiration on his forehead evaporated. Lord, use my example to Your glory. He lifted his foot, ready to take the final plunge from which there would be no return, when a voice of protest cut through the bonds of tension holding all in check, save the beasts of flame.

“Hold, in the name of God Almighty!”

For Discussion:
Are there some scenes/chapters in your WIP in which you can apply one (or more) of these techniques to tie the scene to what comes after it (sequel)? What are some ways in which you’ve planted information or dropped hints that the hero doesn’t know everything he needs to know before facing the next conflict? Do you tend to immediately follow your disaster with a scene that resolves it, or do you leave your character hanging off the cliff and cut to another character/subplot?

On Tuesday, we discussed the five elements of keeping the reader hooked into our stories: characters, POV, suspense, balance, and bomb-dropping. Today, we’re going to look at what goes into the development of an individual scene, and for help, we’re turning to my new favorite writing-craft book, Scene and Structure by Jack Bickham.

According to Bickham, the structure of a scene is threefold:

• Statement of the character’s goal
• Introduction and development of conflict
• Failure of the character to reach the goal; a disaster

The scene should start with the POV character who has a definite, clear-cut, attainable goal: Anne is going to show George potential sites for (what she thinks is) his engagement party. George is going to reveal the identity of his employer to Anne before the man shows up at the site for the party. Meredith is going to the pet store to buy food for the puppy she found. Major is attending his employers’ New Year’s Day open house because they’ve asked him to come to talk to him about something. And so on. Each scene should start out with a goal that is an important step in the character’s game plan—a small goal that gets them one step closer to attaining the main goal of the story (or what the character thinks is their main goal for the story—that’s where the conflict/disaster part comes into play). But the goal cannot be easily attained—it’s your job as the author to make sure your characters suffer.

Once you know what your character’s goal for the scene is, you must determine what Bickham calls the “disaster” that will happen at the end of the scene to keep them from reaching that goal. Now, when I first read this, I thought, but that doesn’t work in every genre. But I think I’ve figured out what he means. From the examples above:

• Anne is going to show George potential sites for (what she thinks is) his engagement party. However, by the end of the scene, she’s actually ended up sharing with him the details of her past: that she survived a plane crash that killed her parents—pushing her ever closer to the edge of what she believes is falling in love with a client (because George, after all, is the Stand-In Groom). For Anne, at this point in the story, her real goal at the beginning of the scene was not getting him to choose a party site, but trying to keep herself from falling ever closer to the precipice of falling in love with him.
• I’m not going to reveal the disaster that George faces—you’ll have to read the book!
• Meredith is going to the pet store to buy food for the puppy she found. She’s dressed in her skuzzy clothes because she’s been at her house, which she’s refurbishing, stripping paint. In trying to get the puppy out from under the back porch, she fell in the grass and got soaked (because it’s pouring rain). Though she’s dried off and cleaned up, she’s definitely not looking like she does when she’s planning black-tie events for her parents’ Fortune-500 company. So, naturally, she runs into the recently elected mayor’s wife—a woman who was not only in Meredith’s mother’s sorority, but the woman whom Meredith must work with to plan an upcoming black-tie fundraiser event. Not a great first impression, and Meredith dreads news of the encounter reaching her always very proper and appearance-minded mother.
• Major meets with his employers at their open house and receives an offer for a business opportunity he can’t pass up. Not a disaster, right? Well, he then meets someone who has the potential to make-or-break his career—and his personal life.

See how it works? It’s not a disaster in the truest sense of the word: a car accident, a stock-market crash wiping out the hero’s livelihood, a death, or whatever. It’s a disaster in that it puts our character further into the hole of narrative debt—a setback, a redirection. And, as in Major’s case, it doesn’t even have to be an immediate setback, as he won’t know for several more chapters that this woman he’s met has the potential to affect his life so greatly.

In other words, you’re starting the scene out with a question: can the character do/attain this? To keep a reader hooked into the story, the answer at the end of the scene should be no. Or at least yes, BUT . . . or yes, IF . . . —if it’s a yes answer, it cannot be unconditional. The end of the scene has two primary jobs: to answer the scene question (preferably “NO!”) and to make the reader want to read the next scene to find out when the character will attain that goal.

Sometimes, you may have to work a scene backwards. If you know the disaster that needs to happen—because of what comes after it, because it sets up what happens next (a.k.a., “sequel,” which we’ll get into later in the series), examine the disaster and determine what it is that the disaster is stopping the character from doing/attaining. But don’t forget that all of your “disasters” must also fit logically into the main “disaster” (climax) of the story.

“Well-planned scenes end with disasters that tighten the noose around the lead character’s neck; they make things worse, not better; they eliminate hoped-for avenues of progress; they increase the lead character’s worry, sense of failure, and desperation—so that in all these ways, the main character in a novel of 400 pages will be in far worse shape by page 200 than he seemed to be at the outset.”
~Jack Bickham, Scene & Structure, pg 44.

A good scene will end with the characters making “backwards” progress; it eliminates options for an easy answer or solution; it makes the walls start closing in (think about the trash-compactor scene in Star Wars); and it has an impact on later events (consequences/sequel).

But one caveat: don’t contrive a disaster just to create a cliffhanger—hooks should be unexpected, but they should also be realistic and logical for your plot, the world of your story, and the development of your characters. Make the lead-up to the disaster subtle enough that the reader is suspicious something’s going to go wrong, but not so that they can see it coming from a mile away.

For Discussion:
Pull a scene from your WIP and examine the structure of it. What’s the scene question/the character’s goal at the beginning? What conflicts build during the scene? And, finally, what’s the “disaster” that happens at the end of the scene that keeps your character from attaining his/her goal? Did you find, as I did with Anne’s scene above, that the character’s goal at the beginning of the scene was actually more subtle than you originally thought?

A sign of a novice writer is that
he begins scenes too early
and ends them too late.

I don’t know if it’s a quote, a maxim, a proverb, or just something that was said at a writing conference a decade ago that everyone took to heart. (It’s probably from Don Maass or Sol Stein, but I couldn’t find it quickly.) I’m sure that most of the people reading this blog have had the experience of reading someone else’s work in which the scene starts with the character waking up in the morning, going through the morning routine, thinking about what they have to do that day, having breakfast, kissing the family goodbye, getting in the car and setting off for work. Then, once they arrive at the office, they’re fired. Or their boss turns into a big green monster and tries to eat them.

This is a prime example of starting the scene too early. There is no hard and fast rule that says, in both cases, the scene should have started in the boss’s office—with the character receiving the pink slip, or with the boss turning into the big green monster. In the second case, especially, there is a need for the establishment of “normal” before something like that happens if it is at the beginning of the book. Hopefully, if this isn’t the opening scene of your book, you’ve already established that in the “normal” world of your characters, bosses don’t usually turn into big green monsters, so opening the scene with your already-established character walking into the already-established boss’s office will seem normal until the extraordinary happens—as soon as the scene opens.

Starting scenes in media res, or in the middle of the action, hooks the reader. Just as we don’t want to open the book with the boring scene of someone going through the morning routine (unless he wakes up to discover he’s metamorphosed into a giant cockroach overnight), you don’t want to start any scene in your book that way. Readers don’t want the mundane, day-to-day stuff. As I quoted from Stein last week, readers are looking for something that they don’t usually experience—they want to be put smack into the middle of this fictional fantasy you’ve promised them.

“Suspense is achieved by arousing the reader’s curiosity and keeping it aroused as long as possible.” (Stein, How to Grow a Novel) A reader is hooked when she can’t put the book down—she just has to turn the page to find out what happens next. “Immerse the reader so deeply in the story that he’ll let go of the book only when the real world intrudes” (Stein).

Once you’ve created characters the readers will invest in, then you have to start writing each scene, each chapter, to a hook. The structure of a chapter is similar to that of the novel itself—except the chapter ends before the resolution of the conflict.

Reality TV as well as scripted shows like LOST, Heroes, Jericho, and soap operas have perfected this in the visual storytelling medium. It’s the long pause by the reality show host before announcing who’s getting kicked off the island. It’s the commercial break right before Heidi Klum announces who’s in and who’s out. It’s the cliffhanger at the end of the show—followed by the snippet of a preview for the next week—that leaves us worried about whether Jake and Stanley and Robert will all survive and keep the bad guys from using the last nuclear weapon to take out the new government.

There are five key elements to making sure you’re continually hooking the reader in each scene you write:

1. Credible Characters. As has already been mentioned many times, the reader must identify with and become invested in the characters.

2. Strong POV. Go deep. Show, don’t tell. Eliminate structures that keep the reader at arms’ length. Don’t write, “He saw something happen.” Get so deep in the character’s head that you’re writing, “Something happened.”

3. Suspense. Your hero is hanging off the cliff by his fingertips. The reader wants you to rescue him. Your job as the author is to avoid rescuing him as long as is possible (and believable). The reader gets more and more hooked by a story when she wants something to happen and it hasn’t happened yet.

4. Balance. You must have a good balance between narrative and dialogue, introspection and action. Every scene needs to serve the novel—to move the plot ever closer to the climax—while revealing who the characters are and why they’re here.

5. BOMB DROPPING. Imagine all the action in your scene is happening in a small room. You, the author, are standing at the door, directing everything that’s happening. You’re getting to the end of the scene/chapter. You casually pull out a grenade and yank the pin. Toss it in, and slam the door closed. This is the end of your scene. Think about those TV shows or movies that do this—they throw the characters into mortal peril then either cut away to a commercial, flash to be continued on the screen, or cut away to another scene. You’re on the edge of your seat. What’s going to happen? Will the “grenade” explode? Will anyone be hurt? Will someone be heroic and sacrifice himself to save others? We have to make the reader want to wrench the door open (read the next chapter) to find out.

Remember, though, what we talked about with plots—your action/drama/suspense cannot be unrelenting. There do need to be quieter moments as well. Not every single scene can end with a dropped bomb—at least, not all on the same magnitude. But you do need to have built up enough questions in the reader’s mind that a “happy” scene ending doesn’t lead them to putting down the book feeling like all their questions have been answered, all the conflicts resolved. [For more on this, see (Narrative) Debt and Simple vs. Compound Interest.]

For Discussion:
From something you’ve read or from a TV show/movie, what is the best cliffhanger scene ending you’ve ever read/seen? How did the writer/filmmakers build up to it—how did they hook you into caring about what happened to the character(s)? Then, from your own writing, have you ever written a scene ending like that? One that just made you clap your hands and laugh maniacally, knowing you’d just dropped a big bomb on your readers? What kind of feedback did you get from people who’ve read it? Did it make you want to write more scene endings like that?

Don’t forget, every comment gives you another entry into the drawing for the $15 Amazon Gift Certificate at the end of this series!

I had the opportunity during my Christmas vacation to read the ARC of a historical romance. The opening Hook Line was good, the first few paragraphs strong. But then as I read, I started losing confidence in the writer. You see, the story started with a bang . . . then went stagnant pretty quickly as the author had to go back and explain, in about two full pages of narrative, the events immediately preceding the opening line. Then, the hero, whose POV this is all seen through, not only comes up with an implausible plan—which takes several pages—he ends up accidentally taking an action that makes those pages and pages of his original plan null and void, as the accident sends him on the run. Then, once he’s on the run, the logic of the story falls apart even more with various and sundry minor characters suddenly popping up as someone he’s supposedly built friendships with, not to mention the poor historical research.

I put the book down at the end of the fifth chapter and haven’t picked it up since. What might have kept me reading? A character I liked. There are a lot of flaws I’m willing to overlook in a book if the author immediately draws me into the character, gives me a reason to care what happens to him. In that ARC, not only did I not care what happened to the main character, he was unlikable.

Once again, Creating Credible Characters is a topic I’ve already covered at length, but let’s take a few minutes to look at how, once we create them, we can use them to hook the reader into the story.

A couple of weeks ago, my agent forwarded an e-mail to me from an editor at one of the big CBA houses in response to the proposal for the Ransome Trilogy. The gist of the very long e-mail was that while they like my writing, they don’t like how gloomy the heroine is when we first meet her. They wanted to know if there was a way I could either revise the opening or write a prologue that would introduce Julia when she’s in a happier frame of mind, so that the reader understands that Julia isn’t going to be like that throughout the whole book. Guess what I’ll be working on this weekend!

Last year, I judged an entry in the YA category of the Genesis in which the main character, in first-person POV, was so extremely negative, after a couple of pages, I didn’t want to read any further.

Yet there are some authors who are so adept at characterization, they can introduce a gloomy or negative character as a POV protagonist in the beginning of their novels and they don’t lose us. The secret is building the rest of the narrative around the character so that the reader feels invested in what happens to the character—whether for ill or for good—and wants to know what happens next.

One of my favorite quotes about writing comes from historical novelist Jeff Shaara: “When the characters are ready, the story will come out of me.” As a character-driven writer, this has almost become my mantra. For me, story comes from character. If the characters aren’t well developed when I start writing, or if I’ve misinterpreted who they are, I write myself into a hole and usually have to start over. When I start thinking of a story idea, I don’t just write out a summary of what the story’s about. I write page after page of backstory for each main character—figuring out who they are before I can figure out what the story’s about. Because I have to care about the characters before I can start writing their story.

Not only do they have to be real to me, they have to be unique. F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “Begin with an individual and you will find that you have created a type; begin with a type and you will find that you have created—nothing.” I think that’s the problem with most books in which we aren’t immediately invested in the main character from the first page. The author didn’t spend as much time getting to know the character before they started writing. They just started out with a type—a “good guy,” perhaps—and worked that type into their story.

Readers don’t necessarily have to like our characters—I mean, look at the popularity of characters such as Scarlett O’Hara or Hannibal Lechter. They can be morally ambiguous or even morally reprehensible like those two are—and yet the authors managed to draw us in, to make us want to know what happens to them. Readers must have a reason to invest in the characters, to care what happens to them next—even if it is more of the morbid curiosity that makes us slow down to rubberneck at a car accident.

For Discussion:
Who is your favorite literary character? What makes you like (or even loathe) that character? How was the character introduced in the book? Why did you care what happened to that character? What was it about the character that made you want to read the book?

Do you believe in love at first sight? I don’t, but that’s not actually important for this discussion. We’ve discussed openings here on WPWT several times:

Famous First Lines
Not-so-Famous First Lines
What’s the Big Deal about First Lines?
A Last Word about First Lines
Critical Reading: The First Date

So I’m not actually going to go into a lot of detail about first lines or opening hooks. Just remember that a great opening line, followed by a great opening paragraph, followed by a great opening page . . . will hook the reader’s interest—be it an editor, agent, or consumer.

“We have a choice. You can begin with a flash fire in the kitchen that endangers the entire house (melodrama), or you can put a pot on the boil, bubbling and simmering, as you show your characters acting in a situation that is slowly alarming, a conflict developing into the big event that will hold the reader curious, concerned, perhaps even enthralled, gripped as if glued to your story for its duration” (Stein, How to Grow a Novel, pg. 33)

Give your readers a character or a situation that they’re going to love at first sight. Yesterday, most of us said that one of the things we hope most for, when we pick up a book to read, is to get lost in it.

For Discussion:
You have won a gift certificate for two books. All you have to base your choice on is the first page of each book. No title, no front cover image, no backcover blurb. What will you be looking for to help you make your choice? Should you be able to determine what genre the book is from the first page? What would make you not choose it?

Anyone who’s a regular reader of this blog knows (at least) two things about me: I’m a rabid LSU football fan, and I quote from Stein on Writing whenever I can. Well, guess what—no Stein on Writing today!

In How to Grow a Novel, Sol Stein (aha!) compares the act of reading with the phenomenon of sports fanaticism. In the first chapter of the book, Stein writes about how the one person most writers don’t think about when writing is the reader:

“What is amazing is the fact that so many writers with a novel in the planning stage give little or no conscious thought to the reader’s experience. They need look no further than sports to understand the spectator seeks the excitement that does not usually occur in daily life. The joy of winning, even through surrogates, is real” (Stein, 8).

This past year was one of the best—and worst—in college football history. No one, it seemed, could hold onto the top spot. The number one position came with a target, and lots of other teams hit the bull’s eye. This was the season of Appalachian State, the University of South Florida, and Rutgers—under-rated teams from small schools who toppled giants, only to be toppled themselves. But this was also the year of controversy—the year that proved the BCS championship system doesn’t work. Because of all this CONFLICT, it was the most-watched, best-attended, most-talked-about football season ever.

“But let us remember that when a team—even the team we are rooting for—is winning too easily, our enjoyment of the game decreases” (Stein, 8).

I truly believe that the reason it took until the spring for the doctor to get my high blood pressure down is due, in large part, to the 2007 LSU football season. Games that came down to the wire—won by touchdowns with only a couple of seconds left on the board. Two losses in triple overtime. Nail-biters that had me screaming at the top of my lungs. Games so close they kept my complete focus for four—or more—hours. But then there were a few others in which my boys jumped out to a commanding lead and never looked back. The other team may have made a foray or two into the red-zone, but they posed no serious threat to LSU’s winning the game. I could do laundry, write, even read, and not worry about the ultimate outcome.

When we write, we want to give our readers the same kind of experience LSU fans had when Les Miles had our boys go for it on fourth-down not once, not twice, but five times in a neck-and-neck game against defending national champs, Florida. We want to surprise them with faking a field goal and scoring with a no-look, over-the-shoulder touchdown pass to the kicker . . .

Okay, yes, I’m ready for football season five months early—but I hope you’re getting my point. Readers want that kind of enthralling experience—the kind that doesn’t happen in our normal lives—to lose ourselves in. That is the promise we’re making when we put words on paper and call it a story. That’s what we’re going to be discussing over the next few weeks.

At the end of the series, I’ll give one lucky blogee a $15 Amazon gift certificate—so come by daily; every time you post a (topic-related) comment, your name will go into the hat!

To get the discussion started: What kind of experience do you hope for when you pick up a book to read?