JEFF MILLER WRITES

williebhines:

Sleeping with the Television On. I am having a Glass Houses marathon in my brain.

I touched upon this in my long post defending Billy Joel a few years go, but it’s worth mentioning again.  Everyone has an image of what it means to sleep with the television on; it’s instantly relatable in the kind of “how come no one else put that into a song” kind of way.  But of course no one else put it into a song, because you didn’t sing about things like that before 1980 or so, and you didn’t sing about things like that after 1980 or so.  Around 1980, you could write a meaningful, earnest, vulnerable song about lonely people trying to make connections.    (The Pina Coloda song came out in 1979; if it had been released in 1974, or if it had been released in 1984, you never would have heard of it.)

“Tomorrow morning you’ll wake up to the white noise.”  I love when the last line of a verse foreshadows a chorus.  Genius, really.

High-res My wife and I went to Hawaii for a long week back between drafts of The Bubble Gum Thief. I lugged a heavy collection of Raymond Chandler books around the islands; as a result, Chandler’s writing will always sound like crashing ocean waves to me.   Above, you’ll find the first page of The Long Goodbye.  Look at the first sentence … two lines of text and not a single comma.  It just flows. Look at the second sentence of the second paragraph.  It’s a mile too long, but it doesn’t matter because it’s perfectly natural.  The problem with a run-on sentence isn’t its length; it’s that the reader has to stumble through it.  There’s no stumbling here.   Consider:  ”[H]e looked like any other nice guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and for no other.”  If that doesn’t sing to you, maybe it’s because we take this for granted now; Rubber Soul doesn’t sound ground-breaking to the kids today either.   I love everything about Chandler’s voice.  It’s not mine, but it gave me the courage to find the one that is. 

My wife and I went to Hawaii for a long week back between drafts of The Bubble Gum Thief. I lugged a heavy collection of Raymond Chandler books around the islands; as a result, Chandler’s writing will always sound like crashing ocean waves to me.  

Above, you’ll find the first page of The Long Goodbye.  Look at the first sentence … two lines of text and not a single comma.  It just flows. Look at the second sentence of the second paragraph.  It’s a mile too long, but it doesn’t matter because it’s perfectly natural.  The problem with a run-on sentence isn’t its length; it’s that the reader has to stumble through it.  There’s no stumbling here.  

Consider:  ”[H]e looked like any other nice guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and for no other.”  If that doesn’t sing to you, maybe it’s because we take this for granted now; Rubber Soul doesn’t sound ground-breaking to the kids today either.  

I love everything about Chandler’s voice.  It’s not mine, but it gave me the courage to find the one that is. 

nouvellabooks: Philip Roth will headline this year’s National Book Festival. Check out the full list of authors (including Jeffrey Eugenides, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Junot Diaz) here. The National Book Festival is my favorite event of any kind, anywhere, ever.  It’s Christmas for books.   Fantastic authors attend.  You sit under a tent all day listening to them; most of them are talented and thoughtful speakers.  It’s free.  Usually, someone is giving away tote bags too.   When I daydream about becoming a successful author … I never picture my name on a bestseller list.  I picture myself speaking at the National Book Festival.  Because that’s as good as it gets.

nouvellabooks:

Philip Roth will headline this year’s National Book Festival.

Check out the full list of authors (including Jeffrey Eugenides, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Junot Diaz) here.

The National Book Festival is my favorite event of any kind, anywhere, ever.  It’s Christmas for books.   Fantastic authors attend.  You sit under a tent all day listening to them; most of them are talented and thoughtful speakers.  It’s free.  Usually, someone is giving away tote bags too.  

When I daydream about becoming a successful author … I never picture my name on a bestseller list.  I picture myself speaking at the National Book Festival.  Because that’s as good as it gets.

High-res If I’m going to ask other authors to provide the thoughts behind the first page of their novels, it’s only fair that I do the same.  You’ll find the first page of The Bubble Gum Thief above.  Now mind you, it’s only my draft—it hasn’t gone through the publisher’s editing yet.  What you see above may change for the better. A few years ago, it occurred to me that most thrillers start with a murder, and then there are more murders, generally similar to the first one in manner and scope.  I decided that if I were going to be a villain, I’d want to work my way up to murder.  I’d want to start small—very small.  And so I had this idea:  what if I wrote a book about a man who started with the smallest crime possible, and worked his way toward the biggest one possible.  That was the idea for the book.  The Bubble Gum Thief became more than just this idea, but that’s where I started. The problem with the idea is that I start with an extremely trivial crime—the theft of a single pack of gum.  Thriller readers expect more, so I needed to promise them more.  That’s why the first line is “Sometimes, big things start small.”  That’s my solemn word to the reader—this story is going to get bigger.  The rest of the page is designed to ratchet up the same kind of suspense for a gum theft that I would for a murder.  So I put the reader in the mind of a teen manning the register of a very small convenience store.  Everything about the situation is uncomfortable.  It is extremely hot inside, and extremely cold outside.  The place smells like cigarettes, and the light above flickers.  The boy is alone.  And then a man comes in, dressed something like that sketch of the Unabomber.   That’s the first page.  Nothing really happens, except that this man walks into the store.  But I hope it’s enough to make you want to find out who he is. This wasn’t how I originally began the book.  In the first draft of the novel, I started right with the action.  Here’s the original first paragraph: It sounded like a gun shot.  Crosby Waller heard it from the back room.   He set down the box of Super Gulp cups and dropped to the floor.  His heart was racing.   He should have been at Suzy Fenner’s New Years’ Day party, but instead, he was going to be shot at Waller’s Food Mart.  At least his parents would feel guilty for making him work today.  Exciting, right?  A lot more exciting than the first page in the picture above.  But by starting with this action, I lost the chance to create anticipation.  The reader didn’t get to know Crosby, or feel what it was like to be in the store, or meet the mysterious man who gave the book its name.  So I decided to back up the story a bit.  It took a lot of tries to rebuild the first chapter.  I spent hours writing things like: From the front door, it was five steps to the magazine shelf, twelve to the candy, fifteen to the hot dog rack, and eighteen to the milk behind the glass at the back of the store. I had endless versions of something like this.  Sometimes I’d throw in some cans of Dinty Moore.  For a long time, I was sure that there was some magical variation that would give you the layout and size of the store.  But none of it really mattered, so I cut it.  I wanted the reader to identify with the teen, not the store. I spent a lot of time on the description of the man who walked into the store.  Dialogue is fun to write; description is not.  Just ordering the sentences was a lot of work.  A paragraph seems clumsy to me if too many of the sentences begin with the same words.  When you’re spending a paragraph describing a man, it’s hard not to have series of sentences that start with “He.”  So I end up with “He wore black jeans …” followed by “The big, orange lenses … ” and then “White gloves—not winter … .”  Writing like this is a lot harder than it looks, because every time you invert the natural order of a sentence, it wants to sound unnatural.  Plus, you’re trying to avoid passive voice. We don’t meet FBI Agent Dagny Gray in the first chapter of The Bubble Gum Thief, even though she’s the star of the book.  That’s okay, because I keep Chapter 1 short, and she gets Chapters 2 and 3.  If you’re writing a thriller, your first chapter ought to be short.  Just give the reader a little.  Make them need to find out more.  A lot of aspiring thriller writers give the reader way too much information at the start.  Only dole out what is absolutely necessary.  If you write well and your story is interesting, readers will keep reading even if they don’t understand everything.  In fact, they’ll keep reading because they don’t understand everything. (Looking at the image above, you can tell how long ago I started the novel; I had Shaquille O’Neal on the cover of Sports Illustrated.  It’s funny how passage of time can change the meaning of things you’ve written.  When I wrote this, a teen in a three-year-old Arcade Fire T-shirt was pretty hip.  Now, maybe less so.  And that’s okay.  He isn’t exactly the same kid that I wrote about back then, but he’s just as interesting to me.)

If I’m going to ask other authors to provide the thoughts behind the first page of their novels, it’s only fair that I do the same.  You’ll find the first page of The Bubble Gum Thief above.  Now mind you, it’s only my draft—it hasn’t gone through the publisher’s editing yet.  What you see above may change for the better.

A few years ago, it occurred to me that most thrillers start with a murder, and then there are more murders, generally similar to the first one in manner and scope.  I decided that if I were going to be a villain, I’d want to work my way up to murder.  I’d want to start small—very small.  And so I had this idea:  what if I wrote a book about a man who started with the smallest crime possible, and worked his way toward the biggest one possible.  That was the idea for the book.  The Bubble Gum Thief became more than just this idea, but that’s where I started.

The problem with the idea is that I start with an extremely trivial crime—the theft of a single pack of gum.  Thriller readers expect more, so I needed to promise them more.  That’s why the first line is “Sometimes, big things start small.”  That’s my solemn word to the reader—this story is going to get bigger. 

The rest of the page is designed to ratchet up the same kind of suspense for a gum theft that I would for a murder.  So I put the reader in the mind of a teen manning the register of a very small convenience store.  Everything about the situation is uncomfortable.  It is extremely hot inside, and extremely cold outside.  The place smells like cigarettes, and the light above flickers.  The boy is alone.  And then a man comes in, dressed something like that sketch of the Unabomber.   That’s the first page.  Nothing really happens, except that this man walks into the store.  But I hope it’s enough to make you want to find out who he is.

This wasn’t how I originally began the book.  In the first draft of the novel, I started right with the action.  Here’s the original first paragraph:

It sounded like a gun shot.  Crosby Waller heard it from the back room.   He set down the box of Super Gulp cups and dropped to the floor.  His heart was racing.   He should have been at Suzy Fenner’s New Years’ Day party, but instead, he was going to be shot at Waller’s Food Mart.  At least his parents would feel guilty for making him work today. 

Exciting, right?  A lot more exciting than the first page in the picture above.  But by starting with this action, I lost the chance to create anticipation.  The reader didn’t get to know Crosby, or feel what it was like to be in the store, or meet the mysterious man who gave the book its name.  So I decided to back up the story a bit. 

It took a lot of tries to rebuild the first chapter.  I spent hours writing things like:

From the front door, it was five steps to the magazine shelf, twelve to the candy, fifteen to the hot dog rack, and eighteen to the milk behind the glass at the back of the store.

I had endless versions of something like this.  Sometimes I’d throw in some cans of Dinty Moore.  For a long time, I was sure that there was some magical variation that would give you the layout and size of the store.  But none of it really mattered, so I cut it.  I wanted the reader to identify with the teen, not the store.

I spent a lot of time on the description of the man who walked into the store.  Dialogue is fun to write; description is not.  Just ordering the sentences was a lot of work.  A paragraph seems clumsy to me if too many of the sentences begin with the same words.  When you’re spending a paragraph describing a man, it’s hard not to have series of sentences that start with “He.”  So I end up with “He wore black jeans …” followed by “The big, orange lenses … ” and then “White gloves—not winter … .”  Writing like this is a lot harder than it looks, because every time you invert the natural order of a sentence, it wants to sound unnatural.  Plus, you’re trying to avoid passive voice.

We don’t meet FBI Agent Dagny Gray in the first chapter of The Bubble Gum Thief, even though she’s the star of the book.  That’s okay, because I keep Chapter 1 short, and she gets Chapters 2 and 3.  If you’re writing a thriller, your first chapter ought to be short.  Just give the reader a little.  Make them need to find out more.  A lot of aspiring thriller writers give the reader way too much information at the start.  Only dole out what is absolutely necessary.  If you write well and your story is interesting, readers will keep reading even if they don’t understand everything.  In fact, they’ll keep reading because they don’t understand everything.

(Looking at the image above, you can tell how long ago I started the novel; I had Shaquille O’Neal on the cover of Sports Illustrated.  It’s funny how passage of time can change the meaning of things you’ve written.  When I wrote this, a teen in a three-year-old Arcade Fire T-shirt was pretty hip.  Now, maybe less so.  And that’s okay.  He isn’t exactly the same kid that I wrote about back then, but he’s just as interesting to me.)

The 2012 NIJ Conference

I’m going to let you in on a secret.  Each year, the National Institute of Justice holds a summer conference in Arlington, Virginia.  NIJ is the research, development and evaluation agency of the United States Department of Justice.  This year’s conference (link above) is scheduled for June 18-20.  Registration is free.  Let me repeat: registration is free.

Sessions at NIJ conferences cover all kinds of criminal justice issues.  This year, they include topics like:

  • Applying an Action Research Framework to the Problem of Untested Sexual Assault Evidence
  • The Role of Science in Policing 
  • Protecting Officers by Taking NIJ Body Armor Research to the Field 
  • Molecular Autopsies:  It’s all in the Genes 
  • W.E.B. Du Bois Fellows and the American Immigrant: Crime Victimization Experiences of Immigrant Populations
  • Whodunnit? Latent Fingerprints: Making a Powerful Crime Fighting Tool Even Better
  • Sexual Assault Forensic Practices
  • Crowd Sourcing Crime Fighting 
  • Automation as a Cost Efficient Addition to the Forensic DNA Laboratory

And that’s just a small sampling of what is offered.

I’ve attended a couple of these conferences in the past, and I hope to attend at least some of the sessions this year.  If you are a thriller writer, this is a fantastic and free (FREE!) way to keep abreast of the lastest criminal justice research and technological developments.  It will make you writing seem more authentic; it will give you ideas for plots.  

High-res A few days ago I told you that I was going to ask authors to write about the first page of their novels.  Since Michael J. Sullivan is both a great friend a great writer, I asked him first. Theft of Swords is the first volume of his acclaimed Riyria Revelations fantasy series.  The first page of this book is pictured above.  As you’ll see in his generous guest post below, Michael is an extremely thoughtful storyteller.   ___________________ Most of you won’t know me because you’re on a thriller author’s website and I’m a fantasy writer. I do those books with dwarves and wizards that only recently have been poisoning the waters by seeping into the mainstream via HBO and that crazy guy Peter Jackson. We fantasy and science fiction authors are like the thriller writer’s little brothers— “Aww Mom, do I have to take him? None of the hot paranormal romances will talk to me with him around. And all he’ll do is yak about elves and hobbits. It’s embarrassing!” So why are you reading this post by a fantasy author on this site? Because Jeff Miller is a cool big brother, who doesn’t mind hearing about magic and castles while he’s researching how to disassemble a Glock 22. Actually, Jeff came up with this nifty idea of posting the first page of a book and having the author explain their thought process in writing it. I’m his first Guinea pig. So shrinking it to an uncomfortable size like a pair of new cotton underwear in an overheated dryer, here’s my story…I wrote a six book fantasy series similar to the Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, and yet not at all like either—helpful I’m sure. I initially published the first book through a small press and later self-publish five of the six books when my original publisher ran into financial hard times. The books did phenomenally well, and recently Orbit Books, an imprint of big-six publisher Hachette Book Group, bought the series in a three-book, six-figure deal and re-publish the whole set, known collectively as The Riyria Revelations. The first book in the series, Theft of Swords, was released six months ago, and the last one, Heir of Novron, came out in late January 2012. The books have been (or are being) translated and published in twelve languages and are selling great, but not so good as to land a spot on the NYT bestseller’s list—yet. I deal in fantasy, remember? So that’s who I am. Now if you want to know the secret formula for writing a killer first page that will not only get you published, but help you earn out your advance and maybe make the down payment on that Central Park West home…well, I suppose you can see now why Jeff invited me to post, as such a thing is also a fantasy. No one knows how to do this. We all have ideas, sure. Guesses and working theories, but no actual answers. Even a bestselling writer is never certain they can do it again. So I’ll tell you what I did, and why I did it. What you draw from that is up to you. When Orbit Books agreed to publish my fantasy series, I was concerned that they might want extensive edits. Given these books had done remarkably well already—they had sold 70,000 copies by the time the Orbit books were released—I didn’t want people tinkering under the hood. Some authors embrace changes, but still I’ve heard horror stories about editors violating words they spent years nurturing. Sending a novel to a big six editor is like shipping your kid off to school, or the military, or maybe the Peace Corp. You have to wonder if they will come back…changed, and if so, you pray it’s for the better. Mine came back with suggestions, but no changes. In other words, just things to think about, but nothing required. One of Orbit’s thoughts related to the way the story started. In the original, I began with a minor character who also happened to be a “bad guy.” Having already published the books, I knew from fan mail that a lot of people almost didn’t read them having been turned-off by who they assumed was the book’s main character—a sleazy, arrogant bastard, who the reader isn’t supposed to like. I had to guess that a lot of folks—those that didn’t send me fan mail—had similar feelings. Orbit thought that the story ought to start with the heroes. I envisioned my original opening (not shown here) as the setup you might see at the start of a movie or TV show where you witness the crime and then later, after the credits, meet the sleuth who will solve it. In the case of Theft of Swords, you see the crime from the vantage of the victim and then meet the thieves. I thought this clever, particularly as the book ends with the same character and I enjoyed the symmetry of the work. In retrospect the opening should have been a prologue, but I hate prologues. Orbit suggested I rewrite the theft from the vantage point of the thieves (my heroes.) But that didn’t work for me as the whole point was to see the magic trick first and then have the secret explained. Revealing the trick as it happens kills the awe, which was the whole point of the first chapter. What I came up with was to add a ten page scene in advance of the should-be-a-prologue-start in which I introduce the main characters en route to do the job. This was actually a modified version of a section I had written at the request of my wife for a another book in the series, which was later cut because it didn’t fit in that narrative (but that’s a whole ’nother story). My intention with my new beginning was to encapsulate the characters and the flavor of the entire series in ten pages. Given my series is about 700,000 words long, that was no easy feat. I needed mystery, tension, suspense, humor, and an unexpected twist. I also needed to communicate the essence of the main characters and the general pace and flavor of the writing. You’re not going to see all that in this first page of course. In the first page all I wanted to do was get you to read the second. I wanted to provide a compelling beginning. Most fantasy novels that I have read all start slow. They want to acquaint you with the world they’ve created, the races, religions, political factions, and all the funny new names they’ve given normal things. There is usually so much to explain—unlike real world stories where everyone knows which countries are which and what a car is—that the writers feel they have to educate the reader before they get the story started. How else will readers understand the importance of the exciting murder about to take place if they don’t understand the extensive political fallout it will cause? They usually start something like: In the reign of King Gor’Ranath, seventh eye to the Vihasian Lords, when the old ones came out of their caves to speak of the darkness prophesied to blanket the realm of Hickom, Sar Jazzel was returning to the great fortress of Thar. He rode upon his wondrous Falifin steed breed for centuries by the Auk people of the south who… And it would go on like this for about three pages before any hint of a story surfaced. This was why I stopped reading fantasy after I graduated high school. I was a teenager and didn’t need any help falling asleep in the middle of the afternoon. I also soon discovered other genres didn’t write this way. Instead authors worked hard to grab those brave enough to open their books with the first sentence, and then put them in a chokehold for the rest of the paragraph until you cried “I yield! I’ll read it! Just let me breath, will you?” Thriller writers in particular understand the power of instantly establishing a compelling idea. This is what I wanted to emulate with my beginning. When a reader picked my book off a shelf at Barnes and Noble, if they went so far as to open the book and actually read that first sentence—like a magical tome of enchantment—I want a spell to bind them to that book demanding they never put it down again. It took a while. I wanted to get the reader’s feet planted firmly in the story, and arouse their curiosity all in as few, and as simple, words as possible. I went through several versions. None worked how I wanted. This was my first try:      Royce and Hadrian drew their horses to a standstill in the middle of the narrow forest road where a pile of pine boughs blocked the way.  (Nicely and explanatory, but boring.) My second:      They were thieves. Hadrian knew this before he saw them. (Less boring, but too vague) My third:      As they approached the pile of branches blocking the roadway, Hadrian was certain of two things—they were about to be robbed, and if they lived, he would never hear the end of it.  (This wasn’t bad, but felt too long and weak. Not gripping enough, and no mystery.) By the fourth I was starting to get somewhere with:      In the darkness of the forest, Hadrian could see little, but he could hear them—the snapping of twigs, the crush of leaves, and the brush of grass. There was more than one, more than three, and they were closing in. (The poetics of the two three-beat sentences sounded good, and it had a nice excitement as if you had been dropped into the middle of something intense.) Then I tightened it up to what it finally became:      Hadrian could see little in the darkness, but he could hear them—the snapping of twigs, the crush of leaves, and the brush of grass. There was more than one, more than three, and they were closing in. What I liked about this opening was that it set an instant mood of tension, it also created a little mystery by not saying what there was more than one of. People? Rats? Zombies? Dragons? What? It demanded you read more to find out what was happening and what was about to happen. Then that’s it. No more description, no exposition, no crazy, unpronounceable names of places and people the reader doesn’t know.  After those two sentences the story drops into dialog, and not the longwinded sort, just a brutish command.      “Don’t neither of you move,” a harsh voice ordered from out of the shadows. “We’ve got arrows aimed at your backs, and we’ll drop you in your saddles if you try to run.” The speaker was still in the dark eaves of the forest, just a vague sense of movement among the naked branches. “We’re just gonna lighten your load a bit. No one needs to get hurt. Do as I say and you’ll keep your lives. Don’t—and we’ll take those, too.” This dialog establishes the situation mostly and also informs the reader the characters are on horseback.  Add to that the fact they have arrows and we can assume this isn’t the new James Patterson, Stephen King, or Dan Brown novel. Already the reader should have a fair understanding of what’s happening. The scene is outside near a forest, and people keeping to the shadows are robbing two people—they know this because the thief said “neither of you move.” So in just a few short sentences that can be read in seconds a scene should have already formed in the reader’s head. They ought to be able to see it happening, a little fuzzy still, but mostly there. Having kind of learned who the “more than three” are, the next mystery is what’s going to happen given the ultimatum. Will the victims give in, fight, or run? Need to keep reading.      Hadrian felt his stomach sink knowing this was his fault. He glanced over at Royce who sat beside him on his dirty gray mare with his hood up, his face hidden. His friend’s head was bowed and shook slightly. Hadrian did not need to see his expression to know what it looked like.      “Sorry,” he offered.      Royce said nothing and just continued to shake his head. These few sentences establish the main characters—Royce and Hadrian. There is a dash of sympathy. People who apologize must be nice. And the reader also gets the idea something has already transpired between them. This adds to the questions the reader might want answered and makes the scene feel more real. As in any point in time there is always the present, future and past. Even though the story starts here, it’s important to show this world and these people didn’t. But still I don’t want to bore the reader with lengthy descriptions, and of course two people being robbed aren’t going to chat much, which is why only one word is said.      Before them stood a wall of fresh cut brush blocking their way. Behind, lay the long moonlit corridor of empty road. Mist pooled in the dips and gullies and somewhere an unseen stream trickled over rocks. They were deep in the forest on the old southern road, engulfed in a long tunnel of oaks and ash whose slender branches reached out over the road quivering and clacking in the cold autumn wind. Almost a day’s ride from any town, Hadrian could not recall passing so much as a farmhouse in hours. They were on their own, in the middle of nowhere—the kind of place people never found bodies. This pretty much completes the picture (except for a visual description of the thieves, which follows as they approach and leave the shadows behind.) This is the biggest hunk of description so far, but by now it is necessary. The reader already understands the situation and the players, now they need to be able to step back and see what’s happening. Still it does more than provide a simple visual. It sets a mood. I was aiming for the look and feel of a creepy Halloween night on a lonely road. I wanted to establish a sense of almost Lovecraftian country-lane-lonely. I also wanted to establish the time of day and year as well as the general location in terms the reader could understand.  Almost a day’s ride from any town, is so much more useful than, on the outskirts of the Earldom of Chadwick near the northern border of Warric where it meets the Galewyr river and its neighbor kingdom of Melengar. Which I could also have said. This then concludes the first page, and as you can see isn’t anything like what a fantasy novel “should be.” The language isn’t antiquated either. My characters speak modern American English. This also infuriates some traditionalists, but I just can’t read people speaking in a turgid sentences and not laugh with embarrassment. I just don’t think anyone ever actually spoke that way—wrote it sure—but when speaking with close friends?  I also don’t like American movies set in other countries that are subtitled when everyone is speaking the same language. For me, doing so adds an artificial barrier between the audience and the story. So there you have it, one man’s take on writing the first page of a novel. It’s not a silver bullet, not even an answer, just the thought process of one author. Hopefully Jeff will coerce a few more…maybe after he reassembles that Glock. Thanks for the invitation to visit. And if you haven’t already, go pre-order Jeff’s new novel, The Bubble Gum Thief; I have, and I’ve already read it. It’s that good.

A few days ago I told you that I was going to ask authors to write about the first page of their novels.  Since Michael J. Sullivan is both a great friend a great writer, I asked him first. Theft of Swords is the first volume of his acclaimed Riyria Revelations fantasy series.  The first page of this book is pictured above.  As you’ll see in his generous guest post below, Michael is an extremely thoughtful storyteller.  

___________________

Most of you won’t know me because you’re on a thriller author’s website and I’m a fantasy writer. I do those books with dwarves and wizards that only recently have been poisoning the waters by seeping into the mainstream via HBO and that crazy guy Peter Jackson. We fantasy and science fiction authors are like the thriller writer’s little brothers— “Aww Mom, do I have to take him? None of the hot paranormal romances will talk to me with him around. And all he’ll do is yak about elves and hobbits. It’s embarrassing!”

So why are you reading this post by a fantasy author on this site? Because Jeff Miller is a cool big brother, who doesn’t mind hearing about magic and castles while he’s researching how to disassemble a Glock 22. Actually, Jeff came up with this nifty idea of posting the first page of a book and having the author explain their thought process in writing it. I’m his first Guinea pig.

So shrinking it to an uncomfortable size like a pair of new cotton underwear in an overheated dryer, here’s my story…I wrote a six book fantasy series similar to the Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, and yet not at all like either—helpful I’m sure. I initially published the first book through a small press and later self-publish five of the six books when my original publisher ran into financial hard times. The books did phenomenally well, and recently Orbit Books, an imprint of big-six publisher Hachette Book Group, bought the series in a three-book, six-figure deal and re-publish the whole set, known collectively as The Riyria Revelations. The first book in the series, Theft of Swords, was released six months ago, and the last one, Heir of Novron, came out in late January 2012. The books have been (or are being) translated and published in twelve languages and are selling great, but not so good as to land a spot on the NYT bestseller’s list—yet. I deal in fantasy, remember?

So that’s who I am. Now if you want to know the secret formula for writing a killer first page that will not only get you published, but help you earn out your advance and maybe make the down payment on that Central Park West home…well, I suppose you can see now why Jeff invited me to post, as such a thing is also a fantasy. No one knows how to do this. We all have ideas, sure. Guesses and working theories, but no actual answers. Even a bestselling writer is never certain they can do it again. So I’ll tell you what I did, and why I did it. What you draw from that is up to you.

When Orbit Books agreed to publish my fantasy series, I was concerned that they might want extensive edits. Given these books had done remarkably well already—they had sold 70,000 copies by the time the Orbit books were released—I didn’t want people tinkering under the hood. Some authors embrace changes, but still I’ve heard horror stories about editors violating words they spent years nurturing. Sending a novel to a big six editor is like shipping your kid off to school, or the military, or maybe the Peace Corp. You have to wonder if they will come back…changed, and if so, you pray it’s for the better.

Mine came back with suggestions, but no changes. In other words, just things to think about, but nothing required. One of Orbit’s thoughts related to the way the story started. In the original, I began with a minor character who also happened to be a “bad guy.” Having already published the books, I knew from fan mail that a lot of people almost didn’t read them having been turned-off by who they assumed was the book’s main character—a sleazy, arrogant bastard, who the reader isn’t supposed to like. I had to guess that a lot of folks—those that didn’t send me fan mail—had similar feelings. Orbit thought that the story ought to start with the heroes.

I envisioned my original opening (not shown here) as the setup you might see at the start of a movie or TV show where you witness the crime and then later, after the credits, meet the sleuth who will solve it. In the case of Theft of Swords, you see the crime from the vantage of the victim and then meet the thieves. I thought this clever, particularly as the book ends with the same character and I enjoyed the symmetry of the work. In retrospect the opening should have been a prologue, but I hate prologues.

Orbit suggested I rewrite the theft from the vantage point of the thieves (my heroes.) But that didn’t work for me as the whole point was to see the magic trick first and then have the secret explained. Revealing the trick as it happens kills the awe, which was the whole point of the first chapter. What I came up with was to add a ten page scene in advance of the should-be-a-prologue-start in which I introduce the main characters en route to do the job. This was actually a modified version of a section I had written at the request of my wife for a another book in the series, which was later cut because it didn’t fit in that narrative (but that’s a whole ’nother story).

My intention with my new beginning was to encapsulate the characters and the flavor of the entire series in ten pages. Given my series is about 700,000 words long, that was no easy feat. I needed mystery, tension, suspense, humor, and an unexpected twist. I also needed to communicate the essence of the main characters and the general pace and flavor of the writing. You’re not going to see all that in this first page of course. In the first page all I wanted to do was get you to read the second.

I wanted to provide a compelling beginning. Most fantasy novels that I have read all start slow. They want to acquaint you with the world they’ve created, the races, religions, political factions, and all the funny new names they’ve given normal things. There is usually so much to explain—unlike real world stories where everyone knows which countries are which and what a car is—that the writers feel they have to educate the reader before they get the story started. How else will readers understand the importance of the exciting murder about to take place if they don’t understand the extensive political fallout it will cause? They usually start something like:

In the reign of King Gor’Ranath, seventh eye to the Vihasian Lords, when the old ones came out of their caves to speak of the darkness prophesied to blanket the realm of Hickom, Sar Jazzel was returning to the great fortress of Thar. He rode upon his wondrous Falifin steed breed for centuries by the Auk people of the south who…

And it would go on like this for about three pages before any hint of a story surfaced. This was why I stopped reading fantasy after I graduated high school. I was a teenager and didn’t need any help falling asleep in the middle of the afternoon. I also soon discovered other genres didn’t write this way. Instead authors worked hard to grab those brave enough to open their books with the first sentence, and then put them in a chokehold for the rest of the paragraph until you cried “I yield! I’ll read it! Just let me breath, will you?”

Thriller writers in particular understand the power of instantly establishing a compelling idea. This is what I wanted to emulate with my beginning. When a reader picked my book off a shelf at Barnes and Noble, if they went so far as to open the book and actually read that first sentence—like a magical tome of enchantment—I want a spell to bind them to that book demanding they never put it down again.

It took a while. I wanted to get the reader’s feet planted firmly in the story, and arouse their curiosity all in as few, and as simple, words as possible. I went through several versions. None worked how I wanted. This was my first try:

     Royce and Hadrian drew their horses to a standstill in the middle of the narrow forest road where a pile of pine boughs blocked the way.  (Nicely and explanatory, but boring.)

My second:

     They were thieves. Hadrian knew this before he saw them. (Less boring, but too vague)

My third:

     As they approached the pile of branches blocking the roadway, Hadrian was certain of two things—they were about to be robbed, and if they lived, he would never hear the end of it.  (This wasn’t bad, but felt too long and weak. Not gripping enough, and no mystery.)

By the fourth I was starting to get somewhere with:

     In the darkness of the forest, Hadrian could see little, but he could hear them—the snapping of twigs, the crush of leaves, and the brush of grass. There was more than one, more than three, and they were closing in. (The poetics of the two three-beat sentences sounded good, and it had a nice excitement as if you had been dropped into the middle of something intense.)

Then I tightened it up to what it finally became: 

    Hadrian could see little in the darkness, but he could hear them—the snapping of twigs, the crush of leaves, and the brush of grass. There was more than one, more than three, and they were closing in.

What I liked about this opening was that it set an instant mood of tension, it also created a little mystery by not saying what there was more than one of. People? Rats? Zombies? Dragons? What? It demanded you read more to find out what was happening and what was about to happen.

Then that’s it. No more description, no exposition, no crazy, unpronounceable names of places and people the reader doesn’t know.  After those two sentences the story drops into dialog, and not the longwinded sort, just a brutish command.

     “Don’t neither of you move,” a harsh voice ordered from out of the shadows. “We’ve got arrows aimed at your backs, and we’ll drop you in your saddles if you try to run.” The speaker was still in the dark eaves of the forest, just a vague sense of movement among the naked branches. “We’re just gonna lighten your load a bit. No one needs to get hurt. Do as I say and you’ll keep your lives. Don’t—and we’ll take those, too.”

This dialog establishes the situation mostly and also informs the reader the characters are on horseback.  Add to that the fact they have arrows and we can assume this isn’t the new James Patterson, Stephen King, or Dan Brown novel. Already the reader should have a fair understanding of what’s happening. The scene is outside near a forest, and people keeping to the shadows are robbing two people—they know this because the thief said “neither of you move.”

So in just a few short sentences that can be read in seconds a scene should have already formed in the reader’s head. They ought to be able to see it happening, a little fuzzy still, but mostly there. Having kind of learned who the “more than three” are, the next mystery is what’s going to happen given the ultimatum. Will the victims give in, fight, or run?

Need to keep reading.

     Hadrian felt his stomach sink knowing this was his fault. He glanced over at Royce who sat beside him on his dirty gray mare with his hood up, his face hidden. His friend’s head was bowed and shook slightly. Hadrian did not need to see his expression to know what it looked like.

     “Sorry,” he offered.

     Royce said nothing and just continued to shake his head.

These few sentences establish the main characters—Royce and Hadrian. There is a dash of sympathy. People who apologize must be nice. And the reader also gets the idea something has already transpired between them. This adds to the questions the reader might want answered and makes the scene feel more real. As in any point in time there is always the present, future and past. Even though the story starts here, it’s important to show this world and these people didn’t. But still I don’t want to bore the reader with lengthy descriptions, and of course two people being robbed aren’t going to chat much, which is why only one word is said.

     Before them stood a wall of fresh cut brush blocking their way. Behind, lay the long moonlit corridor of empty road. Mist pooled in the dips and gullies and somewhere an unseen stream trickled over rocks. They were deep in the forest on the old southern road, engulfed in a long tunnel of oaks and ash whose slender branches reached out over the road quivering and clacking in the cold autumn wind. Almost a day’s ride from any town, Hadrian could not recall passing so much as a farmhouse in hours. They were on their own, in the middle of nowhere—the kind of place people never found bodies.

This pretty much completes the picture (except for a visual description of the thieves, which follows as they approach and leave the shadows behind.) This is the biggest hunk of description so far, but by now it is necessary. The reader already understands the situation and the players, now they need to be able to step back and see what’s happening. Still it does more than provide a simple visual. It sets a mood. I was aiming for the look and feel of a creepy Halloween night on a lonely road. I wanted to establish a sense of almost Lovecraftian country-lane-lonely. I also wanted to establish the time of day and year as well as the general location in terms the reader could understand.  Almost a day’s ride from any town, is so much more useful than, on the outskirts of the Earldom of Chadwick near the northern border of Warric where it meets the Galewyr river and its neighbor kingdom of Melengar. Which I could also have said.

This then concludes the first page, and as you can see isn’t anything like what a fantasy novel “should be.” The language isn’t antiquated either. My characters speak modern American English. This also infuriates some traditionalists, but I just can’t read people speaking in a turgid sentences and not laugh with embarrassment. I just don’t think anyone ever actually spoke that way—wrote it sure—but when speaking with close friends?  I also don’t like American movies set in other countries that are subtitled when everyone is speaking the same language. For me, doing so adds an artificial barrier between the audience and the story.

So there you have it, one man’s take on writing the first page of a novel. It’s not a silver bullet, not even an answer, just the thought process of one author. Hopefully Jeff will coerce a few more…maybe after he reassembles that Glock.

Thanks for the invitation to visit. And if you haven’t already, go pre-order Jeff’s new novel, The Bubble Gum Thief; I have, and I’ve already read it. It’s that good.

High-res The passage above comes from Patricia Highsmith’s Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction. Highsmith’s recognition of the importance of the first page of a novel isn’t unique.  In The Successful Novelist:  A Lifetime of Lessons about Publishing, David Morrell counsels: Common sense tell us that the first sentence, the first paragraph, and the first page are the where a book makes its strongest impression. Similarly, Literary Agent Janet Reid has said: When I look at a book in a bookstore, I open it to the first page and read for maybe five seconds.  If it doesn’t get me involved in that very short amount of time, I set it back down and look at something else. But I think Mickey Spillane put it best: The first page sells the book.  The last page sells the next book. There are 130 million books in this world.  If you want someone to read yours, you’re going to have to grab them from the start.   I’m fascinated by first pages of novels—not just because of the work they have to do, but also because of what they tell us about the author.  When you write a novel, you build a world.  You can put a door to this world almost anywhere, but you only get to make one door.  For a thriller, do you start with the protagonist?  Do you start with the villain?  Has the murder happened?  Is it about to?  Do we descend into the scene from above, or do we start with the hand that holds the gun.  Whose head are we in?  Whose voices do we hear?  Are we disoriented, or is everything clear?  Is it now, or later, or sometime long ago?  The same story can start a million different ways.   Now that I write, I can’t read the first page of a novel without wondering why the story started where it did.  But why wonder, when I could just ask?  That’s what I’m going to do.  I’m going to ask writers I admire to explain why they started their stories where they did.  If they respond, I’ll post it on this blog.  I hope it will be as interesting to others as it is to me. The first writer I’ve asked to participate is Michael J. Sullivan.  Michael is a good friend of mine, and his advice to me over the last few years has been invaluable.  He is the author of The Riyria Revelations, an acclaimed and popular six-book epic fantasy series.  He’s been kind enough to draft a guest-post about the first page of first volume in the series, Theft of Swords. I’ll be posting it shortly.

The passage above comes from Patricia Highsmith’s Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction. Highsmith’s recognition of the importance of the first page of a novel isn’t unique.  In The Successful Novelist:  A Lifetime of Lessons about Publishing, David Morrell counsels:

Common sense tell us that the first sentence, the first paragraph, and the first page are the where a book makes its strongest impression.

Similarly, Literary Agent Janet Reid has said:

When I look at a book in a bookstore, I open it to the first page and read for maybe five seconds.  If it doesn’t get me involved in that very short amount of time, I set it back down and look at something else.

But I think Mickey Spillane put it best:

The first page sells the book.  The last page sells the next book.

There are 130 million books in this world.  If you want someone to read yours, you’re going to have to grab them from the start.  

I’m fascinated by first pages of novels—not just because of the work they have to do, but also because of what they tell us about the author.  When you write a novel, you build a world.  You can put a door to this world almost anywhere, but you only get to make one door.  For a thriller, do you start with the protagonist?  Do you start with the villain?  Has the murder happened?  Is it about to?  Do we descend into the scene from above, or do we start with the hand that holds the gun.  Whose head are we in?  Whose voices do we hear?  Are we disoriented, or is everything clear?  Is it now, or later, or sometime long ago?  The same story can start a million different ways.  

Now that I write, I can’t read the first page of a novel without wondering why the story started where it did.  But why wonder, when I could just ask?  That’s what I’m going to do.  I’m going to ask writers I admire to explain why they started their stories where they did.  If they respond, I’ll post it on this blog.  I hope it will be as interesting to others as it is to me.

The first writer I’ve asked to participate is Michael J. Sullivan.  Michael is a good friend of mine, and his advice to me over the last few years has been invaluable.  He is the author of The Riyria Revelations, an acclaimed and popular six-book epic fantasy series.  He’s been kind enough to draft a guest-post about the first page of first volume in the series, Theft of Swords. I’ll be posting it shortly.

Amazon and the Infinite Bookshelf

When I was a kid, the local bookstore was nestled in a strip center between a grocery store and a florist.  The entire store was the size of the average family room.  It was a great place to shop … if you wanted one of the top 25 selling fiction or non-fiction books, or the kind of classic literature that was assigned in school, or Cliff Notes for those same books.  If you were interested in Science Fiction, there was a shelf that had some Asimov and Bradbury.  If you wanted some humor, you could buy one of the Garfield and Peanuts books that sat on the humor shelf.  If you wanted a book by Thomas Berger, or a Kurt Vonnegut novel that wasn’t Slaughterhouse-Five, well, there was always the library.

For readers, that local bookstore could be a frustrating experience.  For aspiring writers, it killed dreams.  The ranks of published authors seemed so small in that bookstore.  The odds against ever making it to its shelf seemed insurmountable. 

Barnes and Noble changed all of this.  They had all of Kurt Vonnegut’s books, and some of Thomas Berger’s too.  Readers had a whole new world of choices.  There wasn’t just a Mystery shelf; there was a mystery section.  For writers, the dream seemed a little more real.  Maybe, just maybe, there’s room on one of these shelves for me.

Since Barnes and Noble was great for both authors and readers, you’d think that people would be happy.  A lot of people were not happy.  They bemoaned the potential demise of the neighbor bookstore.  They fretted about the concentration of power in really large companies.  (Some of the people fretting worked in publishing for really large companies.)  But despite all of this fretting, things had never been better for authors and readers.

Barnes and Noble may have had row after row of shelves, but Amazon introduced something even bolder … the infinite bookshelf.  For readers, it offered a chance to buy any book there was.  For authors, if meant that if you wrote a book, there would be room for it.  Endless choice; endless opportunity.  Fantastic for readers and writers alike.  Completely and utterly terrifying to the entrenched players in the publishing industry.   

I have no interest in vilifying the publishing industry, but more importantly, I don’t think it’s fair to.  The publishing industry is wonderful, filled with wonderful people who are wonderfully talented and do wonderful work.  Over the last many decades, these people have discovered and promoted some incredible literature.  I am amazed and awed by all this industry has done.  And I expect to be amazed and awed by all that it will continue to do.  Do some people have horror stories about the industry?  Sure.  But compare it Hollywood, or politics, or your average law firm or hospital.  Publishing ain’t bad.  It’s filled with people a lot like the people you and I know.

Almost everyone is afraid of their world changing.  Happiness research shows that people overestimate their current circumstance, and underestimate the possible good that can come from change.  For along time, we’ve cut down trees, turned them into paper, stamped them with ink, bound them with a cover, and shipped them to stores.  None of this is particularly easy to do, but the big publishing companies became very, very good at this.  Of course it’s terrifying to these companies that this skill may not matter the way it once did.  But chopping down trees isn’t the core competency of the publishing industry.  Identifying, fostering, and promoting good written work is the core competency of the publishing industry.  Those are skills that technology cannot replace.  The problem, however, is that those skills that have a low barrier to entry.  And that means competition.

Jeff Bezos famously said:  “There are two kinds of companies: those that try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.”  If the big six publishers engaged in collusion in order to raise prices, it doesn’t offend me in the slightest.  I don’t think it really offends Jeff Bezos either, because he’s pretty sure the second kind of company is going to win.  To win, however, Amazon still needs good products to sell.  I’m guessing that’s why Amazon made its push into publishing.  Had publishers decided to be the second kind of company, it wouldn’t have been necessary.  

When Amazon created the infinite bookshelf, it made room for every author who wanted to sell a book.  And by becoming a publisher, Amazon gave authors a new potential publishing market.  These things have made this very instant the best time to be an author in the history of the printed word.  And yet the head of the authors’ guild, one of my favorite authors, the guy who is maybe the reason I wanted to write thrillers in the first place … can’t see any of this.  

Every day, my twitter feed is filled with links to screeds against Amazon or against the Big Six, as if this is some grand battle of good versus evil, and everyone has to choose a side.  All of this seems crazy to me.  In the world of the infinite bookshelf, I suspect there’s room for everyone.  Room for the self-published, room for the Amazon-imprinted, room for the Big Six-published, room, even, for the small-pressed.  Readers don’t care who publishes a book; they just care that it’s good, and available, and affordable.  Anyone who can deliver that will do just fine.