How to Write a Brilliant Novel: The Easy Step-By-Step Method of Crafting a Powerful Story (Go! Write Something Brilliant) (16 page)

How do you find those private values of your character? Earlier we talked about finding the identity of your character and following that down to his values. Here are some simple questions to help you find those values.

Ask
: What matters most to him in life?

Ask
: What would he avoid at all costs, and why?

Ask
: What defining incident in his past has molded him to the person he is today?

Ask
: What are his goals, and why?

How do you create sympathy and connection with your readers?

We’re only going to read a book about someone we can, at least remotely, relate to. Someone we can understand. Maybe they don’t live in the same culture we do, or they lived 200 years ago, or maybe they’re from another planet, but if they care about the same things we care about, or if they find themselves in a situation we might find ourselves in, then we can identify with them. Creating that piece of identification at the start will give our readers enough of a connection to entice them to let our characters into their lives.

I’m going to use an example from my own collection of books:
Flee the Night.

My heroine is an ex-CIA agent, on the run from a crime she is accused of committing years ago. Not many of us have been accused of a crime and are on the run from an international assassin. However, many of us have had a secret we don’t want revealed, and it was this collective sympathy that I used when crafting the first line:

The past had picked the worst time to find her.

I go on in the paragraph to insert another element of sympathy, or identification with the reader. The heroine’s daughter is traveling with her, and if my heroine is killed, her daughter is also in jeopardy.

How do find that sympathetic element?

• Ask yourself: What do I have in common with my character? What need, or
  dream, or situation, or fear, or past experience do we
  share?
  
• And what facet of that can I extrapolate and fit into my
  story?
  

Give your reader a reason to
care
about your character, something that touches his/her own life, and they’ll turn the page to see what happens!

How do you pull your readers into the Storyworld?

So many books these days start out with dialogue or action, leaving the reader to guess the
where
and
when
and even to some extent, the
who
. You, on the other hand, want your reader to know where they stand in a book, what the world is like, who the players are, and why they’re there. And you want to do it in a way that helps your reader capture the mood and framework of the book. By the end of the first paragraph, and for sure the first scene, you should have anchored your character into the scene by using the Five Ws: Who, What, Where, When, and Why.

Since we touched on this in the previous Storyworld section, I’m just going to give a short example here. Here’s a continuation of the previous sample scene from
Flee the Night
.

The past couldn’t have picked a worse time to find
her.

Trapped in seat 15A on an Amtrak Texas Eagle chugging through the Ozarks at
4:00 on a Sunday morning, Lacey . . . Galloway . . . Montgomery—what was her current last name?—tightened her leg lock around the computer bag at her feet.

We know who our character is, where she is, and what the timeframe is, so we know the Who, the Where, and the When. Lacey has fictitious last names, which raises the element of mystery. We can safely suppose that a person who has an alias might be afraid of something and on the run. This information, along with Lacey guarding her computer bag for some reason, gives us the What. These are four of the Five Ws. The only W missing is the Why.We don’t know “why” she’s doing the “what.”

She dug her fingers through the cotton knit of her daughter’s sweater as she watched the newest passenger to their compartment find his seat. Lanky, with olive skin and dark eyes framed in wire-rimmed glasses, it had to be Syrian assassin Ishmael Shavik who sat down, fidgeted with his leather jacket, then impaled her with a dark glance.

The fifth W (Why) is addressed here. Lacey is afraid because she is on a train with an assassin who recognizes her. Note the words I use to create fear: Trapped. Chugging (can you smell smoke?), lock, dug, impaled. These words give a sense of doom and set the mood of the paragraph.

Well used, the Five Ws can evoke emotions and give us a feeling of happiness, tension, or even doom in the scene.

Try this:

• What is the one emotion you’d like to establish in this first sentence, paragraph, or scene?
  
• Using
  the
  Five
  Ws,
  what
  words
  can
  you
  find
  for
  each
  category
  that
  conveys
  this sense of emotion? Use these in the crafting of your first paragraph.
  

Have you started your scene in the middle of the action?

Dwight
Swain,
in
Techniques
of
the
Selling
Writer
,
says
“.
.
.
a
good
story
begins
in
the middle, retrieves the past and continues to the end.”

A good hook already has your character in the middle of the Inciting Incident, or at least prefaces it with foreshadowing. It’s a blip in time in the middle of that incident that zeros in on the character and gives us a glimpse at his life and why this situation is important.

For example, in the previous excerpt, Lacey is on the train, and the assassin has already walked on board when we open the story. If we started it ten minutes earlier, we’d have to wade through the backstory and setting. We would have to start with Lacey relaxing on the train, and then ramp up the tension when the assassin walks in. Although that might work, starting the story two steps into the Inciting Incident heightens the tension, and we are drawn into the scene.

Let’s take another story. How about
Reclaiming
Nick
?

When the lanky form of Saul Lovell walked into the Watering Hole Café, dragging with him the remnants of the late April chill, Nick Noble knew that his last hope of redemption had died.

This is not a high-action scene, but the lawyer is coming into the café, and we know that Nick had redemption at stake before he walked in. The scene is already unfolding as we join Nick. Notice we also have Who, Where, When, as well as some precise words that convey a sense of dismay: dragging, chill, died.

The paragraph continues with a glimpse at what Nick is up to:

Nick didn’t have time to deal with the arrival of his father’s lawyer. Not with one fist wrapped in the collar of Stinky Jim’s duster and a forearm pinning his cohort Rusty to the wall.

“We were simply offering to buy her lunch,” Rusty snarled.

The first paragraph tells us that Nick has some sort of “protector” element about him (creating sympathy and a touch of heroism). Whether he’s a bouncer, or a cop, we don’t know. And we know that something has happened to his father, because his father’s lawyer shows up.

It’s
so
easy to give into the temptation and start at the beginning. We want people to know and love our character, to understand them, to understand
why
this situation so rocks their world.

Trust me, it’s much more fun for the reader to figure it out on the run than to front load that information.

One of my favorite shows is
Lost
. The writers totally won me when they opened their first season with a shot of a plane down and people wandering the beach. I didn’t have to know their backgrounds to understand that they were shocked and scared, and to feel instantly sorry for them. The fun of the series has been figuring out who they all are, and how they fit together.

When all is said and done, what is your story about?

This is the last element, and probably the most important element, in creating a hook: the Problem, or identifying the Story Question.

We already talked at length about Story Question in the section “The Four Things All Stories Must Have.” Just to recap: The story question is the one thematic question that drives the book. Will Richard Kimball ever find out who killed his wife? Will Frodo be able to destroy the ring? This question permeates the hero’s and/or heroine’s every decision throughout the story, and needs to be hinted at in the first sentence, in the first paragraph, and in the first scene of your novel.

How do you incorporate all these elements? It can be daunting, I know from personal experience. If you have to, for your own rough draft purposes, write the story from the beginning. Then, about a paragraph after the Inciting Incident, search for your first sentence. It’s in there, I promise.

Then, copy and paste this first sentence into a new Word document, and start your first chapter there.

If you don’t want to do all that, here’s another technique I often use. I stop the action about two to five minutes into my brain and I interview my character. “How are you feeling now? Are you surprised? What is at stake? Give me one sentence to explain your current situation to an onlooker.” I take these answers and use them to form that first sentence, as well as the first paragraph.

So, let’s look at some of
my
attempts to create a hook. It can take few trys! This is the premise of a book I’m working on called
Where there’s Smoke
(a romantic suspense). After I give you the premise and some pertinent information, I’ll share a couple of sample hooks with you.

When wildland photographer Kacie Billings moves home to Ember, Montana, all she wants is to earn redemption for her part in the accidental death of five firefighters. But redemption doesn’t come easy when she runs right into Hotshot Boss Jed Ransom, the man who saved her life while his crew died. Jed isn’t interested in payback—he just wants to forget that day on the mountain and start again. But memories and blame aren’t easily extinguished, and it seems as though someone is after Kacie. In a season of forest fires, Jed and Kacie are about to discover that where’s there’s smoke . . . there’s death.

What you need to know: Kacie’s father died in a firestorm years ago, and the arsonist was never caught.

Stakes:
Public – a repeat of the previous loss: five firefighters killed

Private – (Kacie) – saving firefighters versus finding her father’s killer

Heroine Identity:
facing what her father faced and knowing that part of him/guilt for her mistakes.

Anchoring:
windy, out of control, heat, dirt, a feeling of looming danger

Run:
At the point either right when the flames are consuming her, or just before it, as they are running toward her.

Problem:
Will she ever escape the grip fire has on her life?

It
was
a
cool
August
day,
on
the
south
slope
of
the
Klondike
ravine,
that
Kacie Billings
caught
her
first
glimpse
of
hell.
She
framed
it
in
her
viewfinder:
a
wall
of orange
clawing
toward
the
group
of
raccoon-eyed
hotshots,
all
grinning
up
at
her under
their
grimy
red
helmets,
in
their
flag-yellow
Nomex
shirts,
as
if
they
might
be the
world’s
definition
of
heroes.

In
her
book,
they
always
would
be.

Kacie
Billings
had
waited
half
her
life
to
get
a
glimpse
of
hell,
to
feel
the
heat
blast from
its
core,
taste
the
dry
air
parch
her
throat,
hear
the
crackle
as
it
chewed
up
the fuel
behind
the
fireline.
She’d
grown
up
with
pictures
from
her
Catholic
Bible embedded
in
her
head,
with
stories
from
her
Uncle
Shep
and
the
other
firefighters churning
in
her
thoughts.
Fire
fascinated
her,
hypnotized
her,
taunted
her
with
its cunning.