April 26, 2015 / Vito Gulla / 0 Comments
Last time we spoke, we had a conversation–though, admittedly, it was rather one-sided–about what made a great opening, and in case you may have forgot (or didn’t read it: you can right here), it was about characters having a problem. But what constitutes a problem?
Let’s start with what a problem is not.
Over the years, I’ve had, not exactly the opportunity, let’s call it the profitable displeasure, of serving as a reader for a couple novel contests. I was tasked as the first line of defense to insulate those sanctimonious judges at the top from bad literature. Invariably, I didn’t need to read past the first few pages to know that something was wrong–and not in a good way. And though I did manage to find a few gems, the best parts came from comparing a novel’s synopsis against the final product. Of all the one to two page summaries, there was one that made me so excited to read it that I had to put off the stack of student papers I had to grade to spend an hour with this anonymous genius. The novel was set to tell the story of a superhero but not just any hero. While Spider-Man may have been bitten by a radioactive spider and Daredevil may have gained his from toxic waste and the Hulk from gamma radiation, this novel’s hero gained his from a goldfish eating contest. Now if that isn’t enough, his powers were even more amazing: He ate toxic waste. Concept-wise, this sounded brilliant, in that gonzo, mescaline-infused, fairy-dust, surrealist sense. I thought if this dude can come up with such an insane premise, he must be able to deliver in some way. Then I started reading it. And then, after ten pages, I stopped. Why? What happened?
For a little less than four-thousand words, the author had his hero walk around his wannabe batcave, doing nothing.
To be fair, that book was unpublished, and if there is any justice in the world, it most likely still isn’t. But what about things out there already? Surely, they can offer us a better answer.
I guess, before I get into this next point, I should probably preface that I know how unoriginal this is. It’s one thing to beat a dead horse: It’s another to fuck it. But I’m still unbuckling my belt regardless.
E. L. James has taken her fair share of shit. Most people point to her unbelievably bad prose. Others point to her awful dialogue (“You beguile me”). Some say the fault lies in her inability to create real people or her fan-fiction roots or fondness for kink and lack of subtlety. Needless to say, these are valid criticisms. However, I haven’t heard too much about her (lack of an) ability to create problems and conflict.
In the first of her Grey Trilogy, she begins, “I look with frustration at myself in the mirror. Damn my hair–it just won’t behave, and damn Katherine Kavanagh for being ill and subjecting me to this ordeal.” Here, unlike the previous example, there is a problem. I will give her that. And it does actually relate to the overall problem of the novel. But here’s the bigger question: Who gives a fuck? Why should we care? Yes, your hair won’t do what you want. That is too bad. But does that at all tell us your actual fucking problems? As I said before, through the words of Hitchcock, fiction is life with the boring bits snipped out. I would file hair problems under the boring part.
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I know a guy. He loves his kids, works three jobs to support his family, has three cats, would give his left nut to help you out, but he fucking hates his wife. She doesn’t work, doesn’t cook, doesn’t go out with the kids for their birthdays, just says, “Hey, bring me back something.” And the kids aren’t too fond of her either. But this guy, he stays. He stays because if he goes, it means that they’ll have to sell the house. It means that the kids will have to leave, and he doesn’t want that to happen. That’s his life, and he’s stuck. That’s a problem. That’s conflict. But it’s not a story, not a plot. This is an anecdote about his status quo. It’s the life he wakes up to and the one that’s waiting for him when he gets home. It’s never changing, never evolving. It’s having things you love but being incapable to change the things you hate because you have too much to lose. It’s being comfortable being uncomfortable.
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My girlfriend and I go to the movies every so often, and we usually talk about them for a while after. She likes to pick my brain about this kind of stuff as if being a writer gives me anymore insight, but often I find, she’s thinking the same things: She just doesn’t know how to articulate them. And whenever we talk about this stuff, I often use the first Star Wars as an example that demonstrates how a story is supposed to work.
Somewhere, she’s reading this and rolling her eyes.
Luke Skywalker follows the archetypical Hero’s Journey in A New Hope, and it’s part of what makes it such a great film to watch. Both he and Ana Steele have their problems at the start of their quests. Ana is upset that her hair won’t do what she wants, but nothing is really missing from her life that she knows of. She is content to spend the rest of her days sexless and satisfied. But Luke doesn’t like his situation, just like my buddy. He is unhappy. He doesn’t want to be a farmer–on a desert planet. (To be fair, they are, apparently, moisture farmers.) He wants to be a pilot. He wants to live an exciting life of adventure. But what’s holding him back? Family. He’s bound to his aunt and uncle. Yeah, he loves them, and sure, they’re nice people, for the most part. But he’s still stuck. He’s comfortable being uncomfortable.
So how does he get out of this jam? Is he proactive about it? No. He goes to see old Ben and is like, I’d love to come with you and do all that stuff I want to, but I got this farm, bra. The only reason his situation changes: His aunt and uncle are murdered, and the farm is burned down. This essentially frees him of his debt to his family but changes the direction of his short-term goals. He still wants that life of adventure, but rather than being pissed at his uncle, he is now pissed at the empire. Ironically, of course, this process of revenge allows him to attain all those things that he thought were missing.
This is conflict. This is what moves the story forward. Characters are real people who want things but like so many of us, can’t attain them. There is something that is holding us back. That is their problem, but when the status quo is disrupted and they might lose those things they love (along with that bad baggage), that’s when things get interesting. It’s a question of do I accept this opportunity to change, even though it might cost me? Conflict isn’t just two things in opposition. Nobody goes to a football game because they want to know what’s going to happen next. There will be an outcome one way or the other. They go because, if they enjoy watching football, they have a stake in it, and that’s what makes it interesting. Conflict is two things in opposition where a loss means something bad for the guy we’re rooting for.
April 19, 2015 / Vito Gulla / 0 Comments
I’ve been thinking about the first lines of novels and stories for a while now. Even though my professors in undergraduate literature classes stressed how everything you needed to know was right there in that first page or paragraph or sentence, it’s something, largely, I ignored. It wasn’t that I didn’t value them: I just didn’t give them any thought. That is until I started trading stories with Jeff Minton, an up and coming fiction writer and fellow professor.
The first thing I noticed about his stories was that I was immediately and irrevocably hooked from the first sentence. (Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way, since Jeff received honorable mention from Glimmer Train during one of their contests.) I wondered to myself what it was that Jeff was doing, what magic did he put in his words, and why, when I looked back at my own fiction, did all my openings seem dry and boring by comparison?
It’s a question that came up just this last week at a writer’s workshop. We were sitting around the table, discussing one of the pieces, when I mentioned the first line of this novel in progress. It was the typical “the sky was this color today,” and no one else seemed to question it. Even before I had read anything Jeff had written, I knew enough not to start by describing the weather. I asked the most obvious question: Why? Why start with that? What was it doing for the narrative? What did it contribute? Besides, isn’t it clichéd?
One of the other attendees was quick to challenge me, pointing to William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which begins, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Now while I pride myself on being the dumbest guy in the room, I’m not too dumb to see the difference. It didn’t take long for my adversary to see the folly either. Obviously, describing the bland orange of the sky versus some crazy ass shit is a big difference.
You know, I just got a copy of the latest Boulevard, and as soon as I laid my hands on it, I flipped through the pages and read the first lines of all the pieces of short fiction. Here’s one of them: “It was actually a joint multidisciplinary seminar undertaken by English, Philosophy, Women’s Issues and Paraplegic Studies” (Barbarese 80). Now I get there’s that winking sense of irony by the end of that first sentence, but really, who the fuck cares? What about that line makes me want to read further? Maybe I’m not the intended audience. Maybe this is aimed at academics who get a chuckle out of their own absurdity.
Here’s another: “He shared the room with no one in the New River Barracks” (Dow 133). While I get a little bit of a sense of the character’s isolation and loneliness, any interest I have is immediately gone when I read the following line: “In the room a car battery was hooked up with wires to an automobile tape player…. His shift would begin in an hour” (Dow 133).
Now call me an asshole, but neither of these stories’s openings really do anything for me. And the funny thing is that neither of these writers are amateurs. One has publications (poetry) in The Atlantic and The New Yorker, and the other was in The Best American Poetry. So maybe readers will stick around based on name and reputation alone.
I guess everyone is guilty of it, even the greats. DeLillo starts his masterful novel Cosmopolis with “Sleep failed him more often now, not once or twice a week but four times, five” (1). (And don’t get me started on the first chapter of The Body Artist.) Now again, there’s something of interest, a hint of a problem, but it’s not the central question of the novel, not the great quest that Packer sets out on, holds no kernel of what we as the reader will eventually find. In truth, it’s a lot of boring exposition–about some multi-billionaire who spends his time reading poetry and listening to classical music in his private elevator. (I guess because that’s what DeLillo does or wants to do.) If you ask me, the novel would have been a hell of a lot better without. In fact, I know the point of attack, the moment that I said to myself, “Now I’m interested”: “He didn’t know what he wanted. Then he knew. He wanted to get a haircut” (5).
Of course, by now, you must be wondering, what’s the secret? And I’ll tell you: Great openings have to introduce a problem.
Meville is probably one of the best examples, though you have to be familiar with the Bible to get it: “Call me, Ishmael.” Why is this one so good? Because we know something about the character in three words. With that one allusion, the narrator tells us that he has adopted this name, that it’s not who he is but who he has become. He, like the biblical character, has spent or will spend those 40 years (or is it days–and why is everything in the Bible 40? Because it’s an old way of saying a lot) in the desert adrift. He is a bastard child. He is the outcast child, punished only for the circumstances of his birth. I’d say that’s one hell of a problem.
Here’s another classic, this time from Fitzgerald: “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.'” In two sentences, we’re told that our narrator wants to be a nice guy, but then, throughout the entire book, all he does is judge people. He just never does it to their faces. Again, wanting to be a nice guy but having to think about it, that’s a problem.
Here’s one more: “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.” This one is probably the most mundane, but it’s great for what it implies, what’s underneath the surface. Our narrator and protagonist, Jake Barnes, gives us a portrait of a man he more or less despises. Why? Because Cohn thinks he’s hot shit, but Barnes sees right through him–and knows he could kick his ass. (A side note about the novel: That first page is even more brilliant since Barnes goes on to tell us that Cohn was “treated like a Jew at Princeton,” pretty much telling us that even though he thinks Cohn is a prick, he’s a prick because he’s a prick and not because he’s a jew–discrimination Barnes finds both sorrowful and pitiful.) One last time, in case you missed, there’s a problem: Two people who don’t see eye-to-eye.
So really, what’s the point of all this? First lines don’t exist in some vacuum of cleverness. They aren’t some bullshit hook. (Have you ever blah blah blahed?) They shouldn’t be trying to build some lame ass fantasy or sci-fi setting. (Just look at Startship Troopers for an example: “I always get the shakes before a drop.”) First lines lay out the rest of the story in such a way that if the rest of the paragraphs were accidentally deleted, you could still imagine the rest of the story. They have to infect everything that follows. They have to present that burning problem at the center of the work. Sure, they can bookend a work so there’s a nice little parallel between beginning and end, to show how much your character has grown by the story’s, but that’s more advanced shit that’s not always required. It’s not just the intrigue. It’s not the question of what happens next. It’s that moment when you say, “There’s something wrong here.” And it doesn’t have to be huge either. Not everything needs that flashbang open. Life isn’t a James Bond movie. Even, I doubt, real MI6 agents have that kind of life. Art is, as Hitchcock said, life with the boring parts cut out. Cut out the boring parts and start with a problem. Of course, now there’s the only problem left to solve: How the fuck do you do it?