Writer Unboxed

Hook and Inciting Incident: The Power Couple of the “Must Read Now”

August 13, 2020 By Kathryn Craft 23 Comments

When I set out to write a “body of work,” I didn’t intend a “string of failed proposals” to define its completion. I had hoped to leave a legacy of, well, you know. Actual written novels.

Yet it was time to try again. From a fresh page, my cursor blinked at me; I cursed and blinked right back. Where to go from here?

My attention strayed to my bookcases—in particular, the way I’d organized them. The one on the left holds a couple hundred new and used novels that piqued my interest. I plan to read them someday.

The bookcase on the right holds a couple hundred new and used books that piqued my interest and which I’d promptly read.

It seemed worth my time to determine what made the books on the right “must-read-nows.” I don’t want one of my titles to languish on someone’s left-hand bookcase, where more urgent reads will find a way to slip ahead in line, and where the sum total of the sale is the $1.15 that was banked toward earning out my advance. A great read is certainly great whenever it is read, but “someday” may be dangerously close to “out of print,” a time when discussion, review, or word-of-mouth recommendation can no longer help drive sales.

It is important to be read. I want my novels to be in the right bookcase. How about you?

I assessed the books I’d gobbled as if choosing them for the first time: reading the back-cover copy, where I could find the inciting incident that would suggest the type of story, and then opening lines, where the prose had a chance to set its hook. Some results from my “right bookcase study” are below. Red type signifies what about each of them said I have to read this now.

For this exercise, I set aside one hook that can be particularly compelling—buzz—since it did not emanate from the work itself. The following examples hooked me all on their own, whether through opening lines that begged my continued interest, an inciting incident from the back-cover copy that raised a question to which I needed the answer—or, in some cases, both. I dove right in because I was hooked.

These examples will address a question from WU commenter Cheryl O’Donovan on my last post, “Identifying and Crafting Your Inciting Incident”, who asked whether hook and inciting incident are the same thing. The answer: sometimes. More on that at the end of the post. [Read more…]

Begin at the Beginning … or Maybe Not

August 12, 2020 By Barbara Linn Probst 19 Comments

Lewis Carroll advises, through his creation the King of Hearts: “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end. Then stop.”

The King of Hearts is speaking about telling a story aloud, to a listener. As novelists, we don’t always tell our story in chronological order, and that’s fine. But when we do break the King’s rule, we need to know why we’ve chosen to do that, and why it’s the best way to start this particular book.

A few things to keep in mind as we try to pin down that opening sentence and scene …

Principle #1: The beginning of the story is rarely the beginning of the POV character’s life (unless you begin with his birth). The character had a history and an existence before the events in the book occurred.

So where do we enter the character’s life? Before the key event happens, the one that launches the tale? Right smack in the middle of the event? Afterward, when the character is grappling with the consequences?

Take the first sentence of Barbara O’Neal’s novel When We Believed in Mermaids, as an example. “My sister has been dead for nearly fifteen years when I see her on the TV news.” This is the hinge, the moment when Kit’s world is upended. O’Neal opens her book right at the pivotal instant.

She could have begun in a different place, of course. She could have shown us Kit’s life as-it-is before the inciting incident occurred. Or she could have started with Kit boarding a plane to New Zealand where she will search for the sister she now thinks is alive—after the inciting incident—and reveal the events that led up to the plane ride bit-by-bit.

Kathryn Craft’s The Art of Falling also opens in mid-story, though differently. She shows protagonist Penelope as-she-is-now, after certain key events have taken place, but before the main story begins to unfold. Certainly, Craft could have opened the book by showing us the event that landed Penelope in the hospital. Instead, she chose to withhold that event until the reader has had time to bond with the protagonist.

In her recent—and brilliantly structured—book The Last Flight, Julie Clark opens with a short prologue on the day of the flight, the pivotal moment, and everything that follows is told in relation to how long before or after that moment it occurred. It isn’t until the very end of the book that we are back in the “day of” and learn what happened.

One of the most perfect openings ever, to me, is the first line of Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You: “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” Ng has begun smack in the middle of the story and let the reader know the very thing that the characters will spend most of the book trying to find out. We read to find out why Lydia died and how—something that’s not fully revealed until the very end.

There are many books that proceed from beginning to end, following chronology, just as the King of Hearts recommends. Lily King’s Writers and Lovers and Jennifer Rosner’s The Yellow Bird Sings do that, and it suits the stories they’re telling.

No right or wrong, better or worse. Just different ways to do it. [Read more…]

Terrified About Writing Your Novel? Excellent!

August 11, 2020 By Guest 26 Comments

Please welcome multi-published author and returning guest Randy Susan Meyers back to WU! Randy is an internationally bestselling and award-winning author of five novels, most recently Waisted, which releases TODAY in paperback. Randy’s books have been translated into over twenty-five languages and been chosen three times as a Massachusetts Book Award “Must Read.” Besides reading, her obsessions include gardening, painting garden art, and, during the pandemic, bingeing on ER reruns. She lives in Boston, where she teaches at Grub Street Writer’s Center.

Follow Randy on Twitter, and be sure to visit her website to learn more about her novels.

Terrified About Writing Your Novel? Excellent!

I played with the first line, “Everyone hates a fat woman,” for a decade (and published four other novels) before writing Waisted. The story of women obsessed with the scale screamed in my head, but I kept the words locked away. Because writing it meant facing myself. Writ honest, the novel would have to include tales of self-loathing, food needs so intense one snatches it back from the garbage, and dressing room terror because, for me, no story is worth writing without emotional honesty at the core.

And I wanted to avoid this particular honesty.

When I was a child, my mother hid everything sweet and delicious in a giant lobster soup pot on top of the tallest cabinet in the kitchen. Thus, my sister and I, at the tender ages of perhaps five and eight, learned to be mountain climbers. (Only recently did I consider that maybe Mom was hiding the cookies from herself.) Living with my thin, beautiful, food-hiding mother, I learned:

The many places I could stash food, such as the bottom of our hamper.
I could hide food better than my mother, who never found the buried hamper cookies I’d retrieve and cram in my mouth (running the faucet hide sounds of chewing.)
Nothing devoured fast and furious (while perched on the edge of the tub) can be savored, but even when they barely register, any cookie can taste almost-delicious.
When sugar is the drug you need, you don’t need the perfect delivery system. I didn’t need a pretty plate—or even a napkin. (When eating in the bathroom, you have a towel right there.)

All of which led to my novel, Waisted, where weight-obsessed women chosen for a documentary about women and their bodies—an endeavor that promises to heal them—find themselves on lockdown at a hardcore reality show run by punishing, fat-shaming filmmakers.

Before writing Waisted, I didn’t feel ready to hit the personal nadir delving into issues of women and weight could/would ignite. Hiding from the truth was far more inviting. And yet, “Everyone hates a fat woman” wouldn’t let go. So, I began.

Once embroiled in the story, I never wanted to eat again, and I wanted to eat every minute. I never wanted to look at a scale, and I wanted to weigh myself three times a day. Part of me wanted to continue denying the cruelty we face from ourselves and others, but if I wanted to write an authentic story, I had to open myself to every loathsome thought I’d ever had about myself and every bit of self-hatred I (and I imagined other women) held.

Writing Waisted forced me to reckoned with my mother teaching me to hate anything short of perfection. I remembered and confronted the question she’d ask on almost every phone call: “How’s your weight?” as though “my weight” was something separate. Like a roly-poly puppy, I dragged behind me. Or a snarling feral bear.

Inhabiting my weight-obsessed characters forced terrifying introspection. Could I be at peace with my body and choose who I wanted to be? Could my life be other than a reaction to my mother, to self-hatred, to impossible societal standards?

Could I stop denying how my weight—whether up or down—controlled me?

My characters are not my family or me—and yet, of course, they are. The inner lives, traumas, and history of novelists flavors their work. I knew my experiences with body image issues would be baked into Waisted, but I didn’t want this novel to be memoir, just the butter in the story’s cookies. Magic happens when that infusion hits just the right notes. Could I come close to balancing truth and imagination? [Read more…]

A Moment of Betterment in Flux

August 10, 2020 By Guest 22 Comments

Please welcome guest Milo Todd to Writer Unboxed today! Milo is a Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction, a writing instructor at GrubStreet, a regular presenter at the Muse and the Marketplace and the Boston Book Festival, and a consultant for transgender inclusion within the classroom. He wrote THE FALCON OF DOVES, a novel about a trans pirate and his surrogate cis father, during GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator Program, where he was a Pechet Fellow. An excerpt of the story was published in “Emerge: 2019 Lambda Fellows Anthology.” Milo’s work also has appeared on Dead Darlings, Grub Writes, Everyday Feminism, and others.

You can learn more about Milo by visiting his website, and by following him on Twitter and Instagram at @todd_milo.

A Moment of Betterment in Flux

I instruct writing sessions, talk on panels, and chat with fellow budding writers at events. “How do you know when you’re finished?” is the most popular question I’m asked. Or rather, as I can see from the worry in their eyes that mirrors my own insecurities, “How do you know when it’s perfect?”

I tell them it’ll never be finished because it’ll never be perfect, and it’ll never be perfect because your work is always a reflection of yourself. Your work can only be passed off to that place of permanence when you feel you’ve done the best job you can in your current state of being in this current state of time in this current state of the world.

I say this because I’ve experienced it many times myself. After countless editorial passes with the diligence of an unhealthy perfectionist, I finally noticed that a detail in a scene I’d long since believed to be safe was wrong. Set in the late 1600s, my novel offhandedly mentioned a sugar cube, but sugar cubes weren’t invented until the mid-1800s. I was not only frustrated for overlooking this fact for years, but I’d also recently sent that exact scene off for publication in an anthology. It was too late for an edit. That flaw would be in print. Even if my full novel was ever published, I’d know there was that version of the scene floating around the literary stratosphere.

When I was on a writing panel last year, the presenter read aloud my pitch as part of my introduction—which included the phrase “sea daddy,” the term of the time for non-biological father-son relationships on the sea—and the crowd gave a few suggestive, lighthearted hoots. “Please change that phrase on your website to ‘surrogate father,’” my agent asked me soon after, we readying for the submission process. “I worry it’ll be misconstrued if any of the publishers Google you before reading.” I changed it, but the audio recording of the panel still remains on the permanence of the internet.

There are also countless examples beyond my own experiences. The “text speak” of YA novels is now considered cringeworthy. Countless hist fics were left in shambles when Jack the Ripper was believed to have finally been identified. I still have a 90s hardcover copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban with a typo on page 285. Even “Jurassic Park” has lost some of its glow since scientists learned that most dinosaurs likely quacked instead of roared.

Change is swift, inevitable, and constant. It is the enemy of words fixed in place. If you’ve done what you believe is the best job you can—in research, in craft, in editing, in beta and sensitivity readers, in community, in self-reflection—then the issue isn’t imperfection so much as the anxiety of change, even if it’s for the better. For once you’ve changed, once you’ve improved yourself, you’re embarrassed that your old self not only ever existed, but that everyone can still see it. [Read more…]

Writing With Mental Illness

August 7, 2020 By Cathy Yardley 54 Comments

I can’t speak for everyone who has mental illness, and I’m in no way, shape, or form a medical professional. I can only speak about my experiences with it. I am diagnosed ADHD and bipolar 2, and it has taken me years to finally write this post. (I tried last August, but wound up pulling my punch and writing a more generalized post about anxiety.)

There’s a lot of romanticizing of mental illness by various writers and poets throughout history, either as a necessary element of creativity, or creativity as a balm for it. Do a Google image search on “madness” and “writers” and you’ll see dozens of arty quotes about “beautiful insanity” and the like. They see mental illness as this glorious, passionate, technicolor acid-trip of imagination… when oftentimes it’s just being shackled to a high-school bully who won’t shut up.

Allow me to illustrate.

When your brain is not necessarily your friend.

You write a thing.

After a brief burst of happiness, you start questioning said thing. Slowly, you convince yourself that the piece actually sucks. It’s not just “bad but revisable.” It’s trash.

It doesn’t stop there. [Read more…]