Tag Archives: fiction

Starting out

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dark and stormy nightContemporary readers raised on TV, film, and video game narration don’t give the writer much slack in the opening of a novel. The impact of those other forms of storytelling has been enormous. Compare today’s fiction to virtually any Victorian, or even early 20th century fiction, and you will be struck by how different is the pacing of a book’s first pages. I used to joke that my youngest son (now 23), raised with the modern mix of narration, thought the perfect plot was three explosions connected by a chase. 

I believe it was Madeline L’Engle who referred to the first words of a novel as “an opening door.” I’ve also heard those words called “the hook.“ Years ago I read the memoir of a man who (in the 1930s) was a contract writer of a popular book series, when a series numbered fifty volumes. Virtually all plots of the books were pre-formatted, but he still spent a huge amount of time on the opening page. “If I couldn’t hold them on the first page, I’d never hold them.” Then, there’s always “It was a dark and stormy night,” the opening words of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s (1830) novel, Paul Clifford. 

One of my readers wrote to me, “I read your book, True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle.  It was boring at first, but by the second page it got good.” 

Whew!

Fictional logic

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Readers don’t often think about logic when reading fiction, but they know it when it’s not there: “That makes no sense!” Or, “I don’t believe it.” Or, even “But on page thirty, you wrote . . . .“

Fictional logic, by which I mean cause, motivation, and result, needs to be seamless, perhaps invisible, yet that logic is the inner core of the story. It makes a story go from page one to “the end.” Yet, it if it is too obvious, the tale seems predictable, perhaps dull. Too obscure and the reader can’t follow the trail. To make it more complex, I love the notion I have quoted many times, Robert Frost’s dictum, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.”

What’s a writer to do? He/she must imagine—and set down—the whole complexity of the characters’ world, but in the subtlest way possible.

As in life, all people are complex. Imbedded in that complexity are multiple choices. The complex character thus can logically do any number of things, and the reader will believe.  Is that hard to achieve? Oh my, yes!

Commingling fact and fiction

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Sophia's WarThe most difficult aspect of Sophia’s War is the commingling of fact and fiction. The story of Benedict Arnold’s treason, and John André’s fate, is not just well known, it has been researched and detailed to an extraordinary degree. One of the books I used to research the event provided photographs and descriptions of everywhere André went during that extraordinary moment—virtually step by step. Moreover, my attempt to describe New York City during the British occupation (1776-7183) is based on detailed research that has been done by others. It is all as “correct” as I could write it. 

But Sophia herself, and her story, is very much fiction. How can the two connect? It is because as the historians of the events record, there are two key moments in the Arnold/André saga that have never been satisfactorily illuminated. Historians speak of “luck,” “fate,” and “coincidence.” Perhaps. But it is just at those points that I have been able to create a character, motive, and means, for these mysterious events to be explained. Not the least of what makes it all work is that Sophia does not want to be noticed, is not noticed, and indeed, cannot be noticed in the context of who and what she is—an independent young woman. It’s very much like that wonderful book title, Anonymous Was a Woman. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson said (if I have it right) “History is biography.” Sophia’s War is Sophia’s autobiography. Just don’t look for her in history books. You can only find her here. “The writer’s task,” as I once heard Paula Fox say, “is to imagine the truth.”