November's Craft Book of the Month: The First Five Pages

The First Five Pages  is a relatively short book. I knew within the first five pages that I was going to find it very valuable. And sobering.

Lukeman is an agent. In his introduction, he says he has read thousands of manuscripts. In doing so, he discovered that regardless of whether the author came from Texas, California, or Japan (or England, or Oregon) the same exact mistakes were being made. Furthermore, he realized that by scrutinizing just the first few pages, he could make a determination about the whole manuscript. As he says: "if you find one line of extraneous dialogue on page 1, you will likely find one line of extraneous dialogue on each page to come." And, in reality, it doesn't take the astute reader five pages to make an evaluation. In fact, Lukeman says, the book should have been titled "The first five sentences."

Harsh, you may be thinking. Lukeman's rationale is this:

Agents and editors don't read manuscripts to enjoy them; they read solely with the goal of getting through the pile, solely with an eye to dismiss a manuscript--and believe me, they'll look for any reason they can, down to the last letter.

Gordon Bennett! This is positively Darwinian. But if you think about it, readers make the same evaluations. How often have you browsed in a bookstore (very often, I hope!)? You see a book your friend recommended. She usually has good taste, you think, so you read the flap, open to the first paragraph. Nope, the story didn't grab. You scan another couple of books. Same thing. And then: a book you've never heard of, but it has a prominent display on the shelf. You open it, start to read, and five minutes later you're still reading. Something has resonated with you, sucked you in. You may even hand over hard-earned cash for it.

Agents and editors are doing the same thing with manuscripts, except they can give you specific reasons why they connect or don't connect with a work. In Lukeman's opinion, this is not usually an issue of plot. ("A great writer can produce an amazing piece of writing with virtually no plot at all.") It is an issue of prose, of how you execute your writing. It is an issue of craft.

But first off, Part I talks about preliminary problems. Presentation is key. Don't come off as unprofessional. ("Agents and editors don't view someone who shies from the standards as unique or unusual. they view him as a nuisance...") Devote time to researching agents and editors, and make sure you're not sending your thriller to someone who only represents non-fiction. (Lukeman suggests you send a query via FedEx, but that sounds over-the-top to me. It also shows that the book was written before e-mail queries became almost ubiquitous!)

Lukeman spends a couple of pages talking about proper formatting, and then reveals that certain quirks will also signal an early dismissal: the overuse of question marks and exclamation points. Also, cliches. ("I can't tell you how many manuscripts open with cliches or have one on their first page. This is almost always an indicator of a commonplace sensibility and will thus lead to instant rejection.") Finally, in chapter 2, Lukeman shows how an abundance of adjectives and adverbs marks a writer as a beginner, and someone easy to reject. (The rest of Part I deals the sound of one's writing, the way one uses metaphor or simile, and stylistic errors. The end of each chapter also has a number of exercises. Very useful.)

Next Week: Part II--Dialogue as a revealer of a writer's skill.

Noah Lukeman is an agent. In addition to The First Five Pages, he's the author of The Plot Thickens.

10/10 in my Rearview

October was a busy month. On the personal level, it's the month of my wife's birthday (as well as her sister's) and our family goes all-out for birthdays. I don't call it a "birth month" for nothing.

Then, it's been all-go on the Halloween front, with my middle son decoratiing the front of our house in his inimitable fashion. Let's just say that plastic flies in a puddle of fake barf is the least of it... (Costume note: Middle is going to be a vampire, and Youngest a Pirate. Oldest thinks this is all, at 14, beneath him.)

There was also a sad note. A 13-year-old girl at our church died on the 19th. She suffered from myotonic dystrophy, but was an amazing force of life. We have all been mourning Leona, while celebrating her life, these past couple of weeks.

Two writers who have died this month: Eva Ibbotson and Stephen Cannell. (Actually, I see that Stephen Cannell died on September 30, but it seems more recent.). Ibbotson was a tremendous writer whom I have long admired (she had a mysterious Kings Cross platform in one of her novels several years before J.K. Rowling made Kings Cross the most famous railway station in the world). And Stephen Cannell once spoke at the Willamette Writers annual conference. What struck me about him was that he was dyslexic and told (by a teacher, I think) that he wouldn't amount to a hill of beans, let alone be a writer. Yet he persevered and went on to have a highly successful career.

Perseverance is my key word as we head into November. I've sent out a couple of queries on my latest novel and had swift form rejections from two agents. I'm hoping that they just don't "do" my kind of stories, rather than it's my writing that stinks. But hey, I wouldn't be a writer if I wasn't prone to spiralling self-doubt and bouts of self-induced melancholy, would I? And it's all grist for the mill, eh?

Microfiction Monday: Pumpkin Attack and A Rocky Horror Query

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's the world's best meme, coming to you from Susan at Stony River. One of the highlights of a dangerous writer's week. Enjoy.

She didn't hear the evil pumpkin flying in behind her, but Blackie did. What could he do to make sure her Halloween didn't end with a SPLAT?

I missed last week's MM because things were entirely crazy, but can't resist. After all, better a week late than a pound foolish, don't you think?

At the Writing Conference:

The agents and editors were waiting for their costumes to arrive. Then they'd show those writers a Rocky Horror of a "query."

Craft Book of the Month:November's Choice Unveiled

So dull and dark are the November days.
The lazy mist high up the evening curled,
And now the morn quite hides in smoke and haze;
The place we occupy seems all the world.

- John Clare, November

O John Clare, were you with me and my second-grader as we stumbled through the darkness to the bus stop this morning? Fall has come to Oregon with a vengeance: wind, rain, and blowing leaves. And dark, dark mornings.

It's reading and writing weather. (Must be one of the reasons Portland has so many book stores and writers per capita.) And what better book to read in this dour month than... Noah Lukeman's amazing, astute, and indispensable The First Five Pages.  Join me next Wednesday and every Wednesday in November as I reveal what I learned from this terrific tome.

Anyone for leaf-raking?

Craft Book of the Month:The Fire in Fiction

Week 4: First lines, last lines

It's the last Wednesday in October already?! Man, it feels as if the month has just started, and now we're about to be overrun with candy-hungry ghoulies and ghosties (or, in my house, vampires and pirates.) But before that auspicious event, we have to get in my final post on the book which will set your fiction ablaze: The Fire in Fiction.

There is so much in this book, and I barely scratched the surface. It could be "Craft Book of the Year," were I so inclined. However, I have set myself a goal to introduce a new craft book a month, and I am nothing if not inflexible.

First lines, last lines is an important technique to improve your scenes. In Maass' experience, many authors don't bother to pay attention to the importance of first and last lines in their scenes. As Maass says:

That's a shame. Like a handshake, an opening and closing line can create impressions and expectations. They can set a tone. They can signal where we're going, or what we've done, or serve any number of useful story purposes.

Maass' examples include one by Meg Cabot. I'll recap what he says about her use of first lines and last lines from a scene in How to be Popular (2006).

The protagonist, Steph Landry, is an eleventh-grader with the reputation for being a klutz. With the help of an old book titled How to be Popular, she finds herself in with the in-crowd. One of her big breakthroughs comes when her friend, Jason, can't drive her home from school. Steph's faced with riding the bus. But popular Mark Finley shames one of the A-listers into giving Steph and her B-list friend a ride. Here's Cabot's scene opener:

I think I died and went to heaven.

Here are Maass' comments:
Eleventh grade is far from heaven, if you ask me, but we get the point. Notice that at the beginning of the scene, Steph has not yet copped a ride... Cabot is creating anticipation, a form of tension, by framing the scene. We read ahead to find out why Steph's so elated. This flashback structure happens so quickly we hardly notice. It's not a technique that will work for every scene, but it illustrates the importance of tension in line one.
By the end of the scene there are uneasy hints of the cost of Steph's new popularity. Still, Steph is happy--maybe irrationally so. How would you cap off this scene? Here's Cabot's choice:

Jason freaking out and refusing to give me rides anymore might just be the best thing that ever happened.

The very best thing, ever? I wonder if that's true... which is exactly what Cabot wants us to do at this moment.

Finally, Maass advises us to do a "first line/last line draft"--doing nothing but honing the bookends of every scene in our manuscripts. Making these little changes, he believes, will give our stories a more effective shape.

I'll be announcing November's craft book tomorrow. Till then, may all your little tricks be treats.

Craft Book of the Month:The Fire in Fiction

Week Three: Striding Forward, Falling Back

It's a beautiful sunshiney day in Portland, Oregon. So my "goal" is not really to blog. My goal is to be in the sunshine, letting it dapple my strong and manly features as I speed-read through the Hunger Games Trilogy. (I've just started Mockingjay.) How am I going to do this, and still remain true to my blogging schedule...?

I suspect the above paragraph appeared because I've been ruminating on Donald Maass' advice about scene creation. Send your character into a scene with a goal. It seems obvious, but Mr. Maass says we'd be surprised at how many middle scenes in many novels have characters having no particular reason to do something.

If I may segue back to the Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins' novels work as well as they do because the characters have clearly defined goals. The most important one being: Stay Alive. On a micro level, not all of the goals are articulated so forcefully, but they are always there under the surface, so that when they are artfully revealed the reader says: "Why, of course! Now I see why she was doing that. It makes sense."

As writers, we have to have at the forefront of our minds what it is our characters want or need in each particular scene. Maass puts it far better than I could:

At the end of a scene, we want to feel that something important occurred. A change took place. The fortunes of the character and the path of the story have shifted. We won't get that feeling unless we get, in some way, a prior sense of what we're hoping for--a hope that in the scene is either fulfilled or dashed and delayed.

At the end of each chapter, Maass has a series of exercises. I found the ones on this topic to be very helpful:

1. Write down what it is in this scene that your protagonist or point-of-view character wants.
2. Create three hints in this scene that your protagonist or POV character will get what he wants. Also, build three reasons to believe that he won't get what he wants.
3. Write the passages that express the results of Steps 1 and 2. In rewriting the scene... incorporate those passages. Eliminate as much else as possible.
4. Discussion: Just as stripping down dialogue helps punch up a scene, reducing a scene to a few strong steps toward or away from a goal also lends force and shape. Many authors wander through scene drafts, groping for the point. You can do it differently. Instead, start with the point and enhance from there.

So... Mike got up from his computer and set his strong and manly features towards the sunshine streaming through the back door. He was on the point of opening the door when he remembered his book was still on the bedside table. He turned to get it, and heard the chain-rattling sound of the school bus as it bumped down his street. Now his children were coming home. Sod the book, he thought. He raced out the back door and rejoiced in the sunshine for 15 seconds before a chorus of "Dad!".... (You get the picture.)

Happy writing, everyone.

Microfiction Monday: "Big Brother: The Middle Ages"

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's the world's best meme, coming to you from Susan at Stony River. One of the highlights of a dangerous writer's week. Enjoy.

Next on Lara's to-do list: winning "Big Brother: The Middle Ages." First, fake 'em out with frowny face. Then, fling some fancy rock cakes. (139 characters)