"Jim gripped the wheel, his knuckles white, but it was no use, the tires had lost all purchase on the icy road. He was spinning into oblivion..." 
A manuscript I read recently started with a car wreck like this one. Exciting, isn't it? Or is it? We may wonder whether Jim lives or dies, but the fact is, we don't know Jim. If he's the villain on the heels of our protagonist, we would cheer his demise. But if he's an adorable Labradoodle who has accidentally engaged the transmission in his human's car, we'd cringe and squeeze our eyes shut. So much depends on knowing our protagonist, and this is where many beginning novelists have trouble: they don't understand that actions are not inherently dramatic. A car chase, a bomb going off, a burglary: these can be artificial means to inject drama into an opening chapter and they don't always work. If we don't care in some way about the people involved, those events won't have dramatic impact for the reader.

Creating dramatic tension requires finding the right place to begin your story, and that can be surprisingly difficult to do! A novel's opening should find the protagonist on the threshold of a major change, where the change is a shift from one emotional state to another. Sure, a bomb going off is a state-shift for a protagonist, but if we don't know what's at stake for the protagonist--and if the change happening to the protagonist is merely passive--it won't matter for the reader. If your protagonist is a soccer mom who turns to a life of crime, you may find that starting with a bank robbery in progress is less interesting to the reader than the moment at which an otherwise highly unlikely person says to herself "I don't have enough money to get my kid his new soccer shoes. And the only way to solve it is that I'm going to walk into that bank and rob it, using the bar of soap in my pocket as a gun." Starting with the moment of decision or inciting incident will also spare you having to fill in a lot of back story while your robbery is in progress.

There are many great resources for thinking about plotting, including Lisa Cron's Story Genius. But if you've written a manuscript and you're just not sure whether it starts in the right place, a manuscript evaluation of either the entire manuscript or the first 100 pages can help you quickly get to the root of the problem.

Here's to strong beginnings in 2018!

Writers are so conscientious. We're always trying to help our characters out. This is especially true of writers new to fiction, who hate to make their protagonist move from Scene 1 to Scene 2 without giving them a lift. Take the fictional Sharlaine. In Scene 1, she’s having dinner with her mother. At the end of a long, awkward dinner, Sharlaine’s mother confesses: "'I never told you this. But Keith Hernandez is your real father!’" That seems like a dramatic stopping point, doesn’t it? But you’d be surprised how many writers keep on going with logistics: "After dinner with her mother, Sharlaine drove the shimmering streets of Los Angeles, wondering how she would tell baseball legend Keith Hernandez that he was her father. But she had an idea. Picking up her cell phone, she made a reservation on Southwest Airlines for the first flight out of LAX the next morning, heading to New York." Looking at it, you might even be thinking: "What's wrong with that? It explains her thought process and what Sharlaine is going to do next." And there you are, being conscientious again. If you’re willing to let the scene end with the dramatic revelation, how much more surprising and intriguing when we find Sharlaine, at the beginning of the next scene, on her way to New York.

​Driving your character to the airport isn't restricted to filling in all the interstitial details between one scene and the next. Often, writers feel the need to explain where all the characters are positioned in space, especially when they are entering a scene or shifting focus to another character in the scene: "Sharlaine stood to the left of the doorway while Jerry, standing by his bedside table, fished through his desk drawer for Keith's number." Unless you're tackling a scene like the assassination of JFK, in which each person's position is going to be critical to understanding what has happened, you can clear out all of that extraneous detail: Jerry fished through his drawer for Keith’s number.” Stage direction like that is often a vestige of your own thought process but, like penciled in notes, they should be erased in your final version of a scene. Think of your narrative as a camera's lens. If you focus on every single thing in a scene, we don't know which things are important AND we quickly become bored. Save your eye for the things that matter, whether to advance the plot or develop the character or symbolism, and let the rest of it fall to the editing room floor. Trust your reader and trust your own storytelling ability and stop driving those characters to the airport!

Last week a client sent me a manuscript with a fantastic starting premise: a man whose husband dies in a tragic accident drowns his sorrows in high-fat cheese, discovering that cheese is the only thing that makes him feel better. In fact, his sorrow drives him to become a professional cheese maker, an art for which he discovers he has an uncanny talent. The protagonist's mother is also dying. She never approved of his relationship. His love for cheese takes him to France, where he learns from master cheese makers. While tasting cheese, he meets a handsome Frenchman and grapples with finding love again. And then he confronts a former colleague who undermined him after his husband died, offering him reconciliation in the form of a wheel of monchego. And then he sets up his own cheese shop in Brooklyn. And he finds love with a dog walker who stops into his shop every day to buy the dogs some cheese.

Are you bored yet?

At some point after "his grief drives him to cheese making," my client's story became a string of tangentially related events. I think it's pretty obvious how disjointed the example of the opening paragraph is, but you'd be surprised to learn that it wasn't obvious at all to the writer! "But they're all about cheese!" the writer protests. Yes--the incidents in the protagonist's life may all be about the same unusual theme, but without a logic of causality linking these scenes together, they aren't a story. Note, too, that the premise doesn't become a problem the protagonist is trying to solve. (What might tgat problem be? Discovering his facility with cheese, the hero could decide to enter a brie into France's Top Cheesemaker competition--a crazy goal, because it has never been won by someone who isn't French! His determination to win takes him to France, to study with Michel LeFromage, a man recovering from a loss of his own. Soon the two have fallen in love, forcing our hero to decide if it's cheese that he wants to win, or love...) 

South Park  screenwriters Matt Stone and Trey Parker sum up the problem of causality in this short video. Whether you're plotting or revising, it's worth watching. Because, if your story doesn't establish a chain of causality, as Matt and Trey conclude, "you're f*ed!"

Let's be honest. There's one editorial comment we all want to hear from a reader, whether professional editor or friend: "This is THE most BRILLIANT thing I have EVER read! DON'T CHANGE A THING!" Every writer holds this hope in his or her secret heart, but it's the kind of hope that breaks our hearts, because in this world of ours, there's very little innate perfection. And that's the good news!

The wish for validation is both deeply human and potentially quite destructive. Before you give your work to a reader, you can protect your vulnerable writer's heart by re-framing the implicit question. Instead of hoping for a response that answers "Is it good enough?" or "Is this ready yet?" a more helpful way of thinking about feedback is: "What's working here?" and "How can I make this better?" You'll get a jump start on this process if you can identify the places where you have struggled with your own work. Where have you tried to improve on past mistakes? Is it working now? And where do you feel stuck?

We can't always identify those issues for ourselves as writers. Sometimes all we know is that we've written and revised to the best of our ability and the work feels done. A trusted reader or editor can help you articulate those questions for yourself and help you move forward. That's one reason good editorial feedback often resonates with the writer: the editor is telling you something you always knew or suspected about a piece of your writing but which you were hoping no one else would notice. If a reader notices that spot, it's great news for you! You know what to work on next! 

Taking feedback is hard. It's one of the hardest things you have to do as a writer. In fact, it's one of the hardest things you have to do as a human being. That's why feedback that gives us a way forward with our work is such a gift.

Remember: you're good enough; you're smart enough; and, gosh darn it, people like you! Those are the resources you need in order to make use of real feedback and get back to work.

Natalie Goldberg tells a story about a writer friend who was mugged on the Lower East Side: "'She threw up her hands and yelled, 'Don't kill me! I'm a writer!'" "Writers get confused," Goldberg muses. "We think writing gives us a reason for being alive. We forget that being alive is unconditional and that life and writing are two separate entities. Often we use writing to receive notice, attention, love. 'See what I wrote. I must be a good person.' We are good people before we ever write a word." Writers, Goldberg reminds us, don't need to justify our existence by writing, or publishing. But books do need to justify themselves.

All readers come to any book they pick up with a question: "Why should I read this?" Even your mom isn't going to stick with your memoir about your summer in the fisheries of Alaska if it can't answer the fundamental question: Why does this story begin here, now? I don't care if you're writing a murder mystery or an essay about life in Tokyo. A story must justify its claim on the reader's time and attention. I've said it for the Chicago Writers Conference and I'll say it again here: A story ​story needs to tell us why this is the moment it begins. If a writer can’t locate the reason, it can be a clue that the manuscript is taking too long to find the story – or hasn’t found it yet. 

So, if a reader says, "I just didn't get that into it," don't throw your hands in the air and scream: "But you have to read it! I wrote it!" Instead, ask yourself whether your story has justified its existence. And remember that you don't have to.