The other ways to screw up your first pages

Okay, a quick review. In the first few paragraphs of your manuscript, you need to hook your reader and created reader identification and suspension of disbelief.

But that's not all you have to do. There are three other small matters to attend to within those very very FIRST paragraphs. (Hey, nobody said it would be easy. If you're not doing the these things, that's probably why you're not selling.)You must:

• Prove you have a voice
• Begin your story
• Avoid giving an editor a reason to say no.

Stay tuned.

Selling blue pigs

Sell the small details, sell the big world. NOT the other way around.

This is closely akin tothe previous principle. Really, it’s just filtering the
above facts down to what you really need to sell the world.

Blue pigs, right? Remember Lonesome Dove and the blue pigs on the porch?

It’s like selling anything. Get the customer nodding over small things and
you’re going to close the sale. Get your reader to buy into one bit of your
world and they’ll forgive a lot later on. Remember, they WANT to
suspend disbelief. They WANT to love your book. All you have to do is
get it right so they can.

So, there you are. Four techniques for creating your world.

Resting on the seventh day optional.

Creating the world and reader identification.

Work with facts, not conclusions. Focus on your sensory details.

Run down a list of your senses. What to you hear, see, taste, feel, smell?

Write those facts, not the conclusions from them. And oh, if you’ve
given your character a few extra senses, either because it’s an alien or a
psychic, run through those, too.

You’ve seen this at work a thousand times, even if you didn’t realize it.

Take old Western movies, for instance. How do you tell the bad guys
from the good guys?

Classic: the good guys wear white hats. They have lighter-colored horses.
Modernly, they don’t smoke (unless you’re doing some sort of anti-hero
thing, maybe.)

Or take the Vulcans. When they place their fingertips on your temples
and get that pained, constipated look on their faces, you know they’re
doing a mind meld, right? They don’t say, “I’m in your mind.” They just
grimace.

That’s the way senses work. Ours and the Vulcan ones.

More on the "As you know, Admiral," mistake

The “As you know, Admiral,” syndrome is quite common in
technothrillers. Heck, I’ve done it myself on numerous occasions. You
know what I’m talking about—it’s when the hotshot pilot who’s about to
take off on a suicide mission says something like, “As you know,
Admiral, the Phoenix missile has a maximum range of one hundred
nautical miles and flies at a speed of Mach 4.”

Now, don’t email me to complain that that’s not accurate. I don’t care. I
don’t write missiles very often any more.

The point is that there’s a character telling another character stuff that
they both already know. Come on, the guy’s an ADMIRAL. You think
he got those stars without knowing what a Phoenix can do? No – he
didn’t, and you’ve violated a bunch of principles of good storytelling,
including the ones about creating human characters.

Now, there ARE times when you’ll need to fill your reader in on
technical details of some sort or another. That’s fine, with two caveats:
do it in narrative, not dialogue, and don’t do it in the first paragraphs.
Because that’s what we’re talking about here, right? The first few pages.

One other small point about first paragraphs and worlds – many new
writers lack confidence that they’ve actually created the world. They’ll do
something, then do it again in another way just to make sure they’ve
made their points.

You’ll get over this with time. The immediate cure is to have an
experienced writer look over your work.

Second, the world has to be immediate. It’s got to be all right there,
humming along and working at the moment the reader opens the book.

ASSUME the world. Plunge into middle of the scene in the everyday world
you’ve created. Don’t spend any time explaining it. Just have your characters
react to it. 

Two ways to really screw this up are the backstory dump and the infamous, “As
you know, Admiral.”

Backstory is why the world and the characters are the way they are. Writers
have a tendency to want to explain the rules and delve into their characters’
motivations right up front. Don’t do that. You’ve got time. Assume the
world—plunge into it.

Do not data dump fives pages of backstory into the beginning. In some
cases, a prologue is one way around backstory issues, but you can’t use them
just any time you want to. A prologue must be about a pivotal episode
separated in time and/or space from the actual story. It’s not just a way
around the hard work of getting backstory in.

Execute a backstory dribble by assuming that the reader knows the world
and letting the context define the terms, or by explaining them in the context
of a minor conflict. (The Ebook Backstory Dribble is available at BAMWriters.com

Examples:

Context:

It had been two weeks since his last seissa, but Charrtq’s scent was still mild
and pleasant. While rolling around in hot sand held no attraction for me, I
supposed if I’d had feathers, I would have felt differently about it.

Minor conflict:

“Let me use your tajj.”
“No, I just had it calibrated. Besides, my mother is supposed to riff me
sometime. Her brother is sick.”
“Selfish.”
I kept quiet at that. Every time Dale was unplugged from the web, it was
someone else’s fault and I had no intention of….

Science fiction writers are exceptionally good at this. Check out Challenger’s
Hope by Feintuch or any good SF writer.

Techniques for Suspending Disbelief

First, create complete worlds, not partial ones. You can’t sell the world
if you don’t believe it yourself.

Wait, that’s not exactly what I mean – it’s not necessary that you believe
it but it is necessary that you’ve created it in such detail that you would
believe it. It’s got to be all there, all the details.

Good writers can sell a world they don’t believe it. But it’s almost
impossible to sell a world that’s not adequately created.

I don’t mean that you need to know the details of your world’s orbital
mechanics. It doesn’t need to be that large. But you do need to know
your characters and why they’re doing what you’re doing.

If you've read BAM:Structure, you already know this. You know it
because you had to sketch out the levels of conflict and the escalations of
those conflicts and those couldn’t exist without knowing what the world
looked like.

More on suspending disbelief tomorrow.

Final Thoughts on Reader Identification

A few final pointers. First, defer a physical description of the character until
you’ve established that reader identification connection. Once that’s set, the
reader will buy almost any combination of hair and eye color and such.

Second, write toward your secrets. Don’t write away from them. You may not
use your secrets in your final version, or you may change the details
sufficiently so that they’re not recognizable. That’s fine. That’s what you
should do. It’s the emotional resonance and content you’re after and
sometimes the only way to capture that is to write into fear.

Here’s a weird truth: what you may think is so odd or aberrant or completely
bizarre and alien in yourself, so strange that to reveal it would result in your
being completely ostracized by polite society – that’s what people will
identify with most. Not in the sense that it’s happened to them, too. But
something about our deepest issue evokes empathy in almost everyone, and
empathy is a good thing in terms of reader identification.

Finally, one warning. Don’t confused creating likable characters with reader
identification.

For more techniques, check out FIRST PAGES at BAMwriters.com