Underway?

I’m leading a fiction and memoir workshop for the next ten months, and as always, I’m writing along with the group. I’ve revived a project that I’d had underway and left at the side of the road a couple of years ago. Now I know what it’s about. That helps.

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Rich Hall wrote a book in the 1980s called Sniglets, in which he invented words that didn’t exist but should. One of those words was “triorities,” which he defined as three things that all had to happen first. 

That’s what the first chapter of a book is. We have so much stuff to do! We have to introduce the characters and the setting and the time and the personalities and the narrative voice and the fundamental problem they’ll all face and the relationships between everyone and all that stuff has to come first. It’s absolutely impossible.

The good news is that we don’t really have to do all that.

My friend Nathan said something once that has really resonated with me. “The first chapter of a novel teaches you how to read the book.” And I think that’s absolutely true, what we encounter in the first few pages needs to set us up for the emotional journey that we’re about to go on. 

• If it’s a plot-focused book, like a mystery or a thriller, then we need to understand the stakes right away.
• If it’s a character-focused book, then we need to feel the complexity and the inner workings of this character right away.
• If it’s a setting-focused or circumstance-focused book, then we need to lay out the landscape right away.
• If it’s a literary book filled with ideas and delicious language, then we need to be introduced to the complexity and density of the language right away.
• If it’s a book about a relationship, we need to see that relationship early on.

Basically, the first few pages of the book establish the deal we’re making with our readers. We’re promising them a particular kind of experience, in exchange for their investment of time and attention and emotion. If, to quote Peter Ho Davies, the novel is a machine to keep us reading, one of the ways that machine can fail is by delivering an experience other than the one we promised.

One thing that implies is that we might have to go back and rewrite the introduction sometime later on, once WE know what the book is about. There’s no need to understand right off the bat what a book is about. We might discover that along the way. If we’re writing truthfully, we probably WILL learn that the story has more going on than we imagined when we started.