Get a Grip -- In The
First 131 Words
By Terry Hickman
© 2006,
Terry Hickman
If all your stars are lucky, the art and blurbs on the outside of your book
will be so attuned to the life you've poured inside it that your reader's
already halfway under your spell as she opens the cover. The lifting of the
burden of disbelief has received some advance help from the cover artist and
cover copy writers.
But the author seldom has anything to say about her book's cover art.
Worse, oftentimes the artist doesn't even get to read the whole book -- or
any of it -- before creating the cover art.
So, left with a cover that may not even have anything to do with the story,
you must capture the reader with that first page. You have to lift the
heavy box of disbelief off the floor all by your authorial self.
That would be hard enough on its own, but you also need to draw that reader
in and make those first sentences so compelling that the reader has
to keep reading.
I tried an exercise recently that really helped me enliven the opening lines
of a story. You can try it with any book whose first page grabbed you into
the story. It's a method I adapted from lots of similar advice I've read
about crafting first pages -- but I'm impatient and my time is precious, so
I made it a fairly quick method.
I chose Jeff Long's The Descent. I counted the words of actual text
on page 1. (I ignored the quotations and epigrams at the top of the page.
That's a device that wouldn't have worked for my story.) There are 131
words:
In the beginning was the word.
Or words.
Whatever these were.
They kept their lights turned off. The exhausted trekkers huddled in the
dark cave and faced the peculiar writing. Scrawled with a twig, possibly,
dipped in liquid radium or some other radioactive paint, the fluorescent
pictographs floated in the black recesses. Ike let them savor the
distraction. None of them seemed quite ready to focus on the storm beating
against the mountainside outside.
With night descending and the trail erased by snow and wind and their yak
herders in mutinous flight with most of the gear and food, Ike was relieved
to have shelter of any kind. He was still pretending for them that this was
part of their trip. In fact they were off the map. He'd never heard
When I first picked up the book, that
opening got me to turn the page – I couldn't not! What followed kept
me reading long past my bedtime, but if the first 131 words hadn't seized my
attention, I'd never have gotten to page 2.
How did Long do this? What's in those few words, and more to the point, do
they have something I could apply to my own stories?
In the beginning was the word.
He's immediately set us up for something Biblical, or at least epic on a
Biblical scale. He's also telling us that this is to be the very beginning
of something, and the sense is that it's something Big.
Or words.
Whatever these were.
He introduces some confusion here, some mystery.
They kept their lights turned off.
This tells us we're in modern times. If he'd said "torches" or "lanterns,"
the picture emerging in our mind would be subtly suggestive of an earlier
era.
The exhausted trekkers huddled in the dark cave and faced the
peculiar writing.
So there are several of them, and they're huddling together in a cave! --
because the space is small? Cold? Are they afraid as well as exhausted?
Scrawled with a twig, possibly, dipped in liquid radium or some other
radioactive paint, the fluorescent pictographs floated in the black
recesses.
Here's the central weirdness of this page: pictographs, scrawled with a
twig, in fluorescent pigment, a bizarre combination of primitive and very
modern concepts -- and they've been given no backing yet, no hint as they
float in the blackness of what they're scrawled upon.
Ike let them savor the distraction.
Finally, a person's name: Ike. Sounds American, and like an ordinary guy.
If it had been Carleton, for example, or Festus, how would your mental
picture of him been different? "Ike" carries the baggage of American
President Ike Eisenhower: the reluctant hero, the self-effacing leader. And
this Ike seems to have some authority over the huddled trekkers, since he's
"letting" them fixate on those mysterious glyphs.
None of them seemed quite ready to focus on
the storm beating against the mountainside outside.
They're inside a mountain cave, then; there's a storm outside, and
Ike's group of trekkers seem willing not to face that reality. Also, it
suits Ike, apparently, to put off the moment when they do face it.
Presumably he's exhausted, too, but this tells us he's sensitive to people's
moods and when they're capable of coping.
With night descending and the trail erased by snow and wind
There's no going back tonight!
and their yak herders
Aha! The Himalayas!
in mutinous flight with most of the gear and food,
No sitting around hoping for rescue, then, either. And hunger, cold, and
discomfort, can be expected.
Ike was relieved to have shelter of any kind.
He's got a realistic understanding of their predicament, and is grateful for
this lucky break.
He was still pretending for them that this was part of their trip. In fact
they were off the map.
His trekkers are naive, not seasoned travelers. And Ike is either trying to
avoid their ire, or spare them from fear.
(The last three words on page 1, "He'd never heard," are just a fragment and
I'll discard them for this exercise.)
So that's all we get on that first page. All? We know we've got an
American trek guide and several naive customers holed up in a Himalayan
mountain cave without gear or food while a blizzard batters the mountain
outside. They're exhausted and, the guide alone knows, lost. And there are
some mighty peculiar glow-in-the-dark hieroglyphics seemingly floating in
the lightless air.
Would you turn the page? Buy the book? I sure did.
Would you like your books to have the same effect on readers? Who
wouldn't? But how to do it, that's the question. I decided to look at one
of my own science fiction stories, working title "SKRJ," to see if my
beginning was as compelling. I took the first 131 words and analyzed them
as I did The Descent's opening.
Here are the first 131 words from "SKRJ" as
accepted by Raechel Moon Henderson at Eggplant Productions:
He burst from under my feet in a fountain of snow, throwing me to my back so
I floundered for a few seconds before I could get my knife out. By then he
crouched before me, the pelt-traps swinging from his belt, wild-eyed -- and
human.
"Fool!" I lowered the knife. "You should be dead."
"Sorry." He shoved his knife into its worn-out scabbard.
Sorry?
I looked at him again. I wouldn't have expected a mentally deficient human
to survive for any length of time here in the Swan's Half. He had long,
dark blond hair and bright blue eyes that quirked up at the outside corners,
giving his thin, pale face a fey quality. An intelligent face.
He'd relaxed a little, stood up straight, and I could see he was my height,
five-ten. Small
OK, there's a "he." And "we" are in snowy
country, somewhere. And he's human, so there's the implication that the
Narrator expected something or someone non-human, and probably dangerous.
"I" am armed with a knife, and "he" is obviously a trapper, so the inference
is that this is occurring in primitive times, or a primitive place -- or at
least, that modern technology is absent for some reason. The scorn of the
narrator tells us that he or she is accustomed to having the upper hand,
maybe a little arrogant. The worn-out scabbard tells us that the "he" is a
veteran outdoorsman, or maybe soldier? The name of the place where they
have this encounter is the Swan's Half, and it's apparently a pretty brutal
place to survive. We get "his" physical description.
And that's it. We don't even know the gender (or for that matter, the
species!) of the narrator. We know Narrator is arrogant, and about 5 feet
10 inches tall, and that Narrator is apparently a skilled outdoorsperson and
is prepared to kill, perhaps predisposed to kill.
This seems awfully vague to me. I tried again, keeping The Descent
in mind:
He burst from under my boots in a fountain
of snow, throwing me to my back, and I floundered a bit before I could whip
my knife out and leap to my feet. He crouched before me, the pelt-traps
swinging from his belt, thin, wild-eyed -- and human.
I didn't change much there, just made the Narrator's re-gaining his/her feet
specific and immediate.
"Fool!" I lowered the knife. "You should be dead." I felt like killing
him just for delaying me.
This made the impulse to kill more concrete, and added the information that
Narrator was in a hurry when interrupted.
"Sorry, Ranger-lady."
This line of dialogue establishes the gender of Narrator, and her status: a
Ranger.
He stood there waiting, placid, holding his shovel. His shovel!
Personality clues: he's calm, not easily agitated, not an instinctive
fighter. The Ranger is capable of at least inward irony and maybe even
humor.
Sorry?
I studied him. How could someone so apparently stupid survive for any
length of time here in the Swan's Half? He had long, dark blond hair, blue
eyes quirked up at the corners, a fey quality. An intelligent face.
I added the word "apparently" to emphasize the Narrator's sense of the man's
incongruity.
"Any Slitters around?" I asked.
After the surprise of their run-in, here's the first thing on her mind, so
it's probably the danger she'd anticipated, and given the odd name, probably
not human.
He paled. "No."
Two items of information: no Slitters, and the young man is afraid of them.
Standing up straight he was my height, five-ten.
Now we know the Ranger is not a tiny woman: five-ten. I've discarded the
single word "small" for the same reasons as I did the sentence fragment in
Long's page.
So, let's put it all together like a reader would first encounter it:
He burst from under my boots in a fountain of snow, throwing me to my back,
and I floundered a bit before I could whip my knife out and leap to my
feet. He crouched before me, the pelt-traps swinging from his belt, thin,
wild-eyed -- and human.
"Fool!" I lowered the knife. "You should be dead." I felt like killing him
just for delaying me.
"Sorry, Ranger-lady." He stood there waiting, placid, holding his shovel.
His shovel!
Sorry?
I studied him. How could someone so apparently stupid survive for any
length of time here in the Swan's Half? He had long, dark blond hair, blue
eyes quirked up at the corners, a fey quality. An intelligent face.
"Any Slitters around?" I asked.
He paled. "No."
Standing up straight he was my height, five-ten.
I was much more pleased with this opening than the first. It's got more
inherent life and action, and the reader has a better picture of the two
people than with the first version.
Raechel liked it better, too.*
Another nice thing about this exercise is that it didn't take long, maybe an
hour or two. Small price to pay for a better whack at grabbing that reader!
*Some weeks later, Eggplant Productions shut down, before publishing "SKRJ."
-TH
THE
DESCENT by Jeff Long
Publisher: Jove; Reissue edition (November 1, 2001)
ISBN: 051513175X
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