“Three words for a writer: make me care”
Buffy Andrews
So you’re poured over a year of your life into a manuscript. Countless hours pondering the correct word, laid awake at night untangling a plot knot, and it’s finally done. The best it can be, so you cross your fingers and send it out to an agent. They pop it open and within five pages they close it. Never to be opened again.
Why?
Because even if I weren’t to tell you which is which, you’d know which one of these is a better guitarist, even if you know nothing about playing guitar.*
Similarly good writing leaps off the page and grabs you by the collar, yanks your head into it’s world and says “Watch this shit”
So let’s see what that looks like in a film, this opening versus this one. One is fine, one is incredible. The amount of character, tone and sheer likeability Edgar Wright fits into that opening is ridiculous.
Similarly refined prose and unrefined prose is easy to tell apart quite quickly, especially with extremes like these
“Let us go then you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table.”
T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Versus
“Don’t you like the butt drawer?”
E. L. James, Fifty Shades of Grey
Generally I can judge within or 6 pages whether I’ll like something or not. And once that first impression is set, carrying on I’ve never been proven wrong, unfortunately. And I read absolutely nothing compared to the people you’ll be putting your manuscripts in front of. Imagine how much more quickly you’ll have to grab them as a writer?
So how do you start out on the right foot, how do you win people over onto your side immediately and keep them firmly in your corner, so much so that they’re willing to actually fight to get your manuscript made over all the others?
Well, lets ask ourselves. What’s the basic purpose of a book?
To get the reader to turn the page.
That’s it. If I pick your book up and finish it before I put it down, you’ve done an awesome job, better than Jane Austen did with me. That’s what you want from a reader. For them to be unable to put the damn book down. Reading the last of Enders game at 3am, fighting off sleep to see what happens next.
What causes that?
You need two things, rarely you can get away with one, but both is always better.
1) Make us care
“The test of good fiction is that you care for the characters”
Mark Twain (paraphrased for sexiness)
Stories are fundamentally broken if they’re not rooted in characters we care about.**
Wait, what’s that thought you just had about your work in progress?
But it’s a horror!
But it’s a thriller!
But the plot twist!
But they’re an anti-hero!
I don’t give a flying fuck if your protagonist is Hitler himself.
We need empathy rooted in a character. Writers have made us empathise with serial killers, Dexter, and even child molesters, Happiness. Good writing has the incredible power to bring empathy to something completely unimaginable, even in song.
I’ll write an article on how to do this at some point, so watch this -> space. <-
For example, In the scene above Baby is robbing a bank with a bunch of criminals, yet the writing shows off such an enjoyable side of his personality that you’re instantly onside with him. He doesn’t even have to say anything for us to want him to get away with putting people’s lives at risk. That’s great writing.
If you really don’t want to root our empathy in your character, or you’re not sure how, then at the very least, root our interest.
2) Make us fascinated
I think one of the best examples of this is a blacklist script called The Traveller.
A man is driving to work one day, in a normal world. Everything is calm it’s 7:55
Suddenly, he’s rolling across the road, car nowhere to be seen.
And it’s tomorrow.
He goes home, confused, and tries to rationalise it. He settles down to relax with his wife and son.
Then, at work, come 7:55 he skips two days into the future.
He’s terrified. He doesn’t understand what’s happening, or why. Desperate, he stands in front of his wife at 7:55
And rearrives with her in tears he’s been gone four days. It’s getting worse.
How am I gonna put the book down after reading that?
The utter strangeness of it was enthralling, I simply had to know what was happening to ruin this man’s life. Why it was happening to him at 7:55
Often prologues set this up for stories, for example, showing us a man realising he’s insane and turning into a goddamn mountain. What an opening that is from Wheel of Time.
Similarly the 2012 intro from above tries to set this up, the sun is being extra hot or whatever, but it’s a little redundant at this point by virtue of the fact that we’re watching a film called 2012: no-one in the cinema was curious for a second if that was gonna be bad. They’d all seen the trailers.
The scene is also kinda redundant in that we’ve seen many, many scenes like it before, you’re much better off using a scene that’s a completely original approach to it.
So make us care, make us fascinated or we’ll put it down.
That’s it.
If you haven’t done one of these, or preferably both, by the end of page 5 then you’re probably in the slush pile I’m afraid.
And if you can make M.J. Sayer’s steel heart bleed then you’re onto a winner. Or you messed up the proportions on your calzone.
“If it’s bad on page six, it’s bad to the end.”
– John August
* Nothing against the girl: she’s a fine guitarist, but John Gomme is one of the best on the planet.
** A caveat is that with really avante-garde stuff, this isn’t necessarily the case. But if you’re writing crazy avante-garde stuff than you probably read this sentence as a challenge anyway… go make something insane.
The Fellowship Of Ink 