Get a Literary Agent: The Complete Guide to Securing Representation for Your Work (16 page)

Think of a busybody business professional texting with one hand while scrolling through e-mail on a computer with the other hand—all in front of a high-definition television. It’s going to be pretty difficult to get him to sit down and read a book, right? Today’s successful writers realize that, now more than ever, it’s imperative to grab someone’s attention quickly and pull him into your story or world. No longer can books “get good on page 44” or “really start to cook in the fourth chapter when all hell breaks loose.” A book has to grab us from the first chapter, page, paragraph—and even sentence. There is no time to waste.

I once heard a successful novelist describe what he believed to be the cliché, unoriginal opening to many people’s first novels. Paraphrased, it went something like this.

What’s the message here? Get your characters moving. Even more important, get them outside of their own heads. Construct a
scene
. Create an interaction where something of importance is happening. Feel free to have the character(s) be in the middle of something happening.

Immediately when reading a book, readers—agents or everyday people—need to feel there is some kind of tension, trouble, problem, or conflict. These elements keep people reading. Keep in mind that “conflict on page 1” does not mean a gun to someone’s head (though that tends to work). It also doesn’t imply you should start with heavy action, like a battle scene. Just aim for some kind of scene where things aren’t all peachy—where there’s something beyond the ho-hum conflict of the girl in the previous example.

For example, a couple just sat down to dinner at a fancy restaurant for their usual date night dinner. The wife says, “Did you order the veal the last time we were here? I want to order it but can’t remember if I liked it or not. Oh heck, I think I’ll go for it and just get the veal again.” Then the husband wipes sweat from his brow and says, “Uh, honey … we need to talk. I’m joining the seminary.”

Boom. You have a problem on the first half of page 1. There is conflict here. It’s neither a battle sequence nor a gun to someone’s head, but you’re immediately showing us tension and also creating questions in our heads:
Why is he joining the seminary? Did she not see this coming at all? How long have they been married? What will she do?

Don’t wait until the middle of your novel to drop us into the heart of the problem. One of the most common things agents say about the work of aspiring writers is that the first five to forty pages of the manuscript should be cut. The trick is to start the book in a place where the story is already moving and give the reader crucial details here and there so that we’re not confused even though things are moving fast.

Consider these two potential beginnings to a middle-grade novel.

• FIRST OPTION:
  A narration inside the mind of a boy headed to summer camp reveals that he’s depressed that he has to go and he’s not speaking to anyone in the car. He’s thinking about the jerks—and the love interest—who will be at camp.
  
• SECOND OPTION:
  “An hour hadn’t gone by at Camp Skylight before someone slapped me across the back of the head. The first thing I focused on was the pain. All I wished for in the whole world was that a second slap wouldn’t come. One slap was an accident or a bully having some fun. Two slaps meant a fight—no doubt about it. The second slap came about four seconds after the first. It was going to be a long summer.”
  

Which of these two books would interest you more after reading the first paragraph? I’d guess almost everyone would say the second option. After all, why do we need ruminations on the car ride over? Just get us to the scene where the kid finds himself in over his head while facing a bully.

A few summers ago, I sat with two literary agents on a “Literary Idol” panel at a writers conference where people read their first page and we would raise our hands when we would’ve stopped reading the submission if we were considering a page in the slush pile. I specifically remember two participants for whom the agents had similar feedback. One story started out with a man stewing in his apartment about something. At the end of the first page, there was a great, jarring line about how the man set down his gun on the windowsill—a gun that we did not know he was holding. The two panel agents both told the writer that this mention of the gun should be the book’s first line or at least be in the first paragraph. The second submission had the same issue: A fantastic potential first line—something like “I was forced to grow up at such an early age that I have no true memories of my childhood”—was pushed too far down in the text.

These great opening lines were buried—all because of the simple fact that writers do not start their books with the best, most carefully chosen words and hook us immediately. Then it hit me: Holy cow! Maybe examining the start of a movie could help writers understand this problem.

For example, this is how the 1994 film
True Lies
begins (I’ll be a bit broad).

This is how the
movies
get to start a story. This is not how a
novel
should start. A movie can go
outside-in—
it can start by circling the heart of the scene, slowly working its way to what matters. A novel should go
inside-out—
it should begin with the most critical hook to the scene and then work its way out to describe what else is going on.

If this story were a novel and you wanted to get the audience’s attention, what would your first line or two be? Something like, “Harry’s knife cut through the ice from below. His eye line ascended above the freezing water, and he could make out guard dogs in the distance even before the fog in his scuba mask cleared.” Once the audience is hooked, the story can slowly move outward, engineering the beats of the movie in reverse. The whole start to your novel could look like this.

• Harry’s knife cuts through the ice. (intrigue)
  
• Harry secretly emerges from the freezing water. (danger)
  
• Mention the guard dogs. (more danger)
  
• Mention the men with automatic weapons. (more danger)
  
• Mention the chateau. (Harry’s desired destination)
  
• Mention nighttime.
  
• Mention the snow, the reflection, the darkness, the beauty of a European countryside in the winter, etc. Perhaps here you would even mention that the location is actually Switzerland.
  

That’s how you take an opening and make it go inside-out. If you begin your novel with two paragraphs describing the trees and night and moonlight and then spend another two paragraphs describing the chateau and the yellow light and the winter landscape, then the agent reading it will never even get to the semi-good part—the guys with guns—let alone the true hook line about the man on a secret mission cutting through the frozen river.

An “information dump” is a situation where the author fills in a lot of description and backstory before the story starts to move.

For example, a manuscript begins when the main character, Jody Miller, is being arraigned in court. The judge says that she’s now had three DUIs in one year and must serve time in a minimum-security prison. Jody asks for mercy and gets none. The gavel bangs down, and Jody’s destination is clear: jail.

That’s an interesting beginning. It started in the middle of the story, and all kinds of interesting questions were raised in readers’ minds. You resisted the urge to start two days earlier when Jody wakes up from a dream, has a long day at work where we meet minor characters in her circle of friends, and gets into an accident that night.

But—an information dump will derail any great start, including this one. So let’s continue with this hypothetical manuscript. Right after Jody is arraigned, the author starts explaining things.

• What Jody looks like
  
• The shape of her face and nose
  
• Her hair color
  
• What she does for a living
  
• Her height and possibly her dress size
  
• Her age
  
• Where she went to school
  
• What she likes and dislikes
  
• Her dating situation
  
• The irony of the fact that her godfather is a judge
  

This collection of details makes for an information dump, plain and simple—and it’s exactly what you want to avoid. But that’s just the beginning. The author also describes the detailed looks and backstory of every other character that’s introduced for a chapter or two. It’s as if the author began his story well, only to abruptly stop and turn directly toward the reader, saying, “Hi there. We’re going to stop the story for fifteen minutes so I can fill you in on all the things I believe you need to know.”

One of the main problems with a dump like that is that the author is
telling
, and one of the most common pieces of advice to novelists is “Show, don’t tell.” Don’t tell us that Jody is mad at her boyfriend, Matt. Have Matt greet her outside the prison so we can watch them get into a spat with years of unsaid things finally being said in those crucial moments. Instead of explaining, set up a scene and let the characters loose.

Writers have a lot of trouble pruning down their prose and avoiding an information dump. I imagine that movies are to blame for this. If you’re watching a film and the main character walks into the room, so much information can be passed along very quickly—from everything about her looks to her age, to what she does for a living, to her general morale. The picture paints a thousand words. So writers feel the need to lay out so much about characters as they are introduced, assuming that if they did not do so, the reader would be confused and stop reading. Also, many writing exercises urge authors to describe characters in depth and flesh out their backstory, and writers may wrongly think this means they have to include that much detail in lump sums in their book.

But that’s not true, is it? Personally, when I read a new book, I like to know if the person controlling the narrative on page 1 is male or female, adult or child. Besides that, you have me. The key to locking me in is to keep the story moving and to tell me details slowly, organically—on a
need-to-know basis
. Just ask yourself, “Does the reader really need to know at this moment that her age is thirty-seven? Is this a logical place for Jody to mention her age, or does it feel slightly forced?” Consider these two options.

1. A line at the beginning such as: “But that’s just me, Jody Miller, thirty-seven years old and still having lots of fun with my life.”
   
2. An exchange with a prison guard where the guard says, “Honey, if you’re thirty-seven and you aren’t married yet, you ain’t ever getting hitched.”
   

Note how the second way is
showing
, not telling. The mention of her age came about organically—and served double duty by explaining not only that she’s thirty-seven and unmarried but also suggesting a potential relationship with the guard.

Years ago, while playwriting, I saw a play where there was only one cast member on the stage—a woman standing front and center. She was addressing the audience directly while holding a bag in her arms that only she could see inside of. I remember that the play started like this.

1. The woman tells you that she was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer and is dying. She vents for a few minutes that she is not prepared for death and is very scared that she has little time to live.
   
2. She quickly glances inside her bag.
   
3. The woman tells you she has two children and no idea how to explain to them that she will not be around to witness their next birthdays. She feels like a bad mother but can’t explain why.
   
4. She quickly glances inside her bag.
   
5. The woman tells you that she now has no faith that God actually exists—for what kind of God would take a loving mother away from sweet young children? She talks more about her big questions about life and the afterlife and what happens when her time in this world is done.
   
6. She quickly glances inside her bag.
   

And even though this woman is looking right into your eyes and explaining that she will cease to exist on the planet Earth in a matter of weeks, the only thing you are wondering is—
What’s in the bag?

This play proves that the one thing she did
not
tell you was somehow more interesting than all the things she
did
tell you. Humans tend to want what we cannot have. The unexplained is interesting. In other words, do not underestimate the value of having the reader ask questions. Indeed, it is the questions, uncertainty, confusion, intrigue, and perplexing notions that actually propel the reader forward. That’s why we use cliff-hangers at the end of chapters.