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

What your character REALLY thinks.

Remember, we're still on creating reader identification. Think about this now.

Caste the human quality in terms of what it is from your character’s point
of view. For instance, supposed your character was abandoned by his father
at an early age and even today, as an adult, is seeking his father’s approval.

You and I see that, we know that. But does your character think of it that
way? No, he doesn’t. And he most particularly did not think about it in those
terms when he was thirteen years old. It was a very different issue to him. He
felt anger, perhaps, abandonment – but would he have called it anger or
abandonment? How would it have felt to him? How would it manifest?

Back to this idea of being human: for most thrillers and much other fiction,
your character has also got to be larger than life, capable of those acts of
bravery and heroism that the rest of us just dream about. That doesn’t mean
they can’t be human—in fact, they must be if your reader is to identify with
them. That means they’ve got to have weaknesses and flaws, quirks and
habits just like the rest of us.

Pretty obvious, isn’t it? And most writers do eventually do that. But the thing
is, you’ve got to do it right up front. Not in the first ten pages. On the very
first page.

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

Being a weirdo and reader identification

Bring up that weird thing that you think is so odd no one will ever identify
with – that people always identify with.

The weirdest one that ever got mewas when an author wrote about the fascination with high places and
standing on the edge and a compulsion to jump just to see what it would feel
like. That’s really the point at which I understood what strange critters people
are.

People have lots of things like that embedded deep inside them. Universal
secrets, if you will. Those always resonate – and quite powerfully, too, since
they’re secrets.

That’s how you create reader identification: by creating very human
characters. Human the way we actually are, not how we’d like to believe we
are.

Pyrrhic Victories

Second technique for reader identification: set up one of those strange
contradictions of being human in the first paragraph. Pyrrhic victories are good here.

• How could you hate someone you loved?
• He wanted to go home but was afraid to.
• It was what she’d wanted for years—so why didn’t it matter now?

For more techniques, stay tuned. Or check out First Pages at Bamwriters.com.

Commonality Creates Reader Identification.

State that common human quality or experience up front as a hook in your
opening paragraphs.

• He knew what it was to be afraid.
• Jim understood betrayal.
• How had things gone so wrong?
• Why had his mother abandoned him?

Tomorrow: Pyrrhic victories