Alpha and omega…
The beginning and end, two very important parts of a novel. I work and rework them. Every author should. Readers expect good ones and are disappointed when they don’t get them. An author wants his readers to continue with her or his novel; s/he wants the reader to say, “I want more,” when the book is finished. Readers want to feel that way too.
The beginning is often called the hook. That’s a bit insulting to the reader—s/he’s not a fish, after all. But the author shouldn’t wait too long to grab your reader’s attention. While Howey’s Wool is a wee bit too disconnected (he published the different parts separately at first), his opening line is great: “The children were playing while Holston climbed to his death; he could hear them squealing as only happy children do.” I would only change that semicolon to a period. Although I began to lose interest when the book became a treatise on potato farming, Weir’s beginning of The Martian gets your attention: “I’m pretty much f&*^$ed. [This is a PG-13 blog—sorry, Andy.] That’s my considered opinion. F&*^$ed.” I would only omit the word “considered” here—it’s superfluous. In each case, your curiosity is piqued.
Here’s another great beginning, taken from Deaver’s Garden of Beasts (probably his best book): “As soon as he stepped into the dim apartment he knew he was dead. He wiped sweat off his palm, looking around the place, which was quiet as a morgue, except for the faint sounds of Hell’s Kitchen traffic late at night and the ripple of the greasy shade when the swiveling Monkey Ward fan turned its hot breath toward the window.” Got your attention? Here’s one from my Teeter-Totter between Lust and Murder: “One-two-three. As I raised my middle finger, SWAT team leader Joey Tate broke down the door. I let his young team members take the lead and only entered after they called ‘Clear!’ It was their gig.” [I’ll use some examples from my own books. I’m not claiming they’re comparable in quality with the above, but I know my own work best.]
All these examples grab the readers’ attention. Maybe those other authors just naturally write that way, but I tailor my openings carefully to accomplish that goal. They also show how a strong opening is important for all genre fiction—it’s like the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth (the symphony, not his Jameson whiskey). Maybe literary fiction, that old trash bin for forlorn manuscripts, can get away with pages and pages of boring narrative (a torture instrument for high school pupils?), but genre fiction can’t. Sci-fi might start out with world-building (narrative) too, but Howey and Weir don’t do that, and it’s not advisable.
Consider the beginning of my Survivors of the Chaos: “The marauders swept down on Jesse Lane. Wild spirits bent on revenge, their outlines ill-formed in the snow squall, they used their wide-brimmed hats to pummel their steeds, urging them on towards the rancher. He knew them—such gangs were blights on the Midwest.” You know this is a scene from life after an apocalypse, in this case, the Chaos. (OK, it could be a Western, but you know it’s not from the cover.) If you don’t care about what’s going to happen to old Jesse, you must be a robot. (Like Asimov, I have a few robots who have feelings in my novels, though.)
These first lines continue on to finish first chapters, also written to keep you reading. If critics and writing instructors insist on that hook metaphor, then, like any good fisherman, the author must not only hook the fish but set the hood so the fish doesn’t get away. (I’m sure PETA will object to this metaphor, if PETA members read this blog.) That’s the alpha in a nutshell—the beginning must be strong. What about the omega—the end? In this case, the author shouldn’t be thinking about the very last lines. They’re often found in the denouement, which is often in a last chapter or epilogue (some time later, bla-bla-bla…). But strong endings are also important. Even if the book’s not part of a series, an author wants readers to look for his or her other books, after all.
Teeter-Totter again: “Her back was turned to us as she rummaged in the purse. I was going to say something about secondhand smoke when she spun around, automatic in hand. I pushed Stuart down, trying to cover her. Patty emptied the whole cartridge. I looked up, saw her, saw the senator. His coiffed head of white hair now rested in a low-rimmed soup or salad bowl—I didn’t know which. Blood and brain matter was filling the plate as if to make soup for the Devil.” That’s the climax. The rest of the chapter and next plus an epilogue represent denouement. A lot is going on in this book. You can think of denouement as Poirot or Miss Marple bringing her characters together to explain the crimes and who committed them.
Deaver’s book has a long denouement but an interesting climax too, always necessary. Consider Wool (spoiler alert for this quote): “This was not Lukas dead before her. This was a man who deserved none of her tears.” Surprise! That’s the climax…and twist! (BTW, you don’t know WHO it is at first, just that it’s not Lukas, as you might have expected.) Everything that follows is denouement. The Martian has no denouement, though, ending as it began: “Anyway, my ribs hurt like hell, my vision is still blurry from acceleration sickness. I’m really hungry, it’ll be another 211 days before I’m back on Earth, and, apparently, I smell like a skunk took a s&%t on some sweat socks. This is the happiest day of my life.” (BTW, having taking high school PE when it was really PE with showers and such, let me say that no sweat socks ever smell as bad as a skunk or his defecation—you have to age the socks a few weeks in a gym locker.)
Authors are often tempted to end with a cliffhanger to entice readers to read the next book in a series, by which I mean an ending that leaves readers hanging. That’s NOT an ending; it’s a “to be continued.” Never, never end with a cliffhanger. Write complete stories. Want to lead your reader into the next book in the series? Include an excerpt from the next book at the end. That’s legit. Cliffhangers aren’t. If I read a book that’s not a complete story, I don’t read any more books from that author. Always write complete stories. In general, work on the alpha and omega as much as everything between. Your readers expect it.
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