Tag Archives: openings

Writing Tips from The Count

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Dracula's castle, Romania

Castle where Vlad the Impaler (“Count Dracula”) was imprisoned (photo: the author)

Inspired by Halloween’s rapid approach, the editors at Writers Digest have used the opening of Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a way to demonstrate 10 key writing techniques, as revealed in the book’s annotated version, with annotations by American horror author Mort Castle.

Among Castle’s observations are how tiny clues provide insight into the character of the book’s narrator, Jonathan Harker, including his domesticated notes to himself about getting recipes for his fiancee back in Victorian England. He praises how masterfully Stoker moves Harker through time and space to get the story moving, rather than lingering on blow-by-blow details of his journey to Hungary and on to Transylvania: “The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.” Leaving the familiar, in other words, and crossing into the realms of the barely known.

A little further on, Stoker describes the people of the Transylvania region, “I read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool.” Again, as Castle notes, he is setting the reader up for happenings that are beyond everyday knowledge. This must have been quite thrilling for people living in 1897 London.

There was a real Dracula, of course, a 15th c. leader of Wallachia, south of Transylvania. Here’s a well-regarded history of his cruel and violent rule—fighting those Turks, as well as his rivals—written by two Boston College history professors. Don’t read it unless you have a strong stomach. I couldn’t finish it. If Londoners nearly 120 years ago knew even dimly of this real prince, their bones were shivering from the start of Stoker’s tale!

Thrilling First Sentences

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homeless, dog

(photo: shiftfrequency.com)

Thrillerfest—the International Thriller Writers’ annual summer get-together—this year sponsored a first sentence contest, in which seven leading thriller writers looked through a pile of manuscripts submitted for critique and picked their favorite openers. Below is what some of the masters find gets them going. Let’s hope the authors polish up their manuscripts and deliver them into the hands of publishers soon! Watch for them! I marked my favorites—the more stars, the better. Yours?!

Wylde knew it was too early, but when the girl started screaming, he went in anyway. (Judith O’Reilly)

**Death couldn’t part us soon enough. (Katalin Burness)[I like the narrator’s tone already!]

Sophie was late—and naked. (Terry Rodgers)

Quizz Murphy propped himself against the cold facade of an office building and summoned a nearby sparrow to pluck the lice from his beard. (J. E. Fishman)

***I knew what I was doing; I just didn’t know what I was capable of. (Nathaniel Free)[lots of possible places to go after an opener like that. And a semi-colon. Whoa!]

Dad, are you and mom getting a divorce? (Ray Collins)

*Sleeping with a married guy was one thing, telling his wife he was dead was another. (Margaret Carroll)[OK, you got me. She could have borrowed the semi-colon, though.]

Off to a Good Start

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cake, Hello Kitty

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

The delicious aspect of reading Chuck Sambuchino’s article in The Write Life article on the worst ways to begin your novel, is that you know these Outrageous Openings have been tried many times. You know that, because the opinions come from literary agents, who every month read hundreds of “first pages,” or maybe only first paragraphs, sentences, or words submitted by hopeful authors. Some of their advice is right up there with one literary agency’s strict warning to writers not to accompany their query letter with baked goods or anything hand-knit. (Your desperation is showing!)

Since, they say, everyone has a book in them, and since nearly everyone who finds out I’m a writer says, “I’ve always wanted to write a book,” there should be a ready audience for this advice.

1. Avoid prologues and lengthy first-chapter descriptions (“scene-setting”) and jump right into the action. (Thankfully, this wasn’t the preference in Dickens’s time, or we would have lost “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .”) Get right to the plot, they say, characters’ backstory “is in their DNA.” It stays with them.

2. Agent Dan Lazar puts it a different way. He dislikes openers where characters are doing “essentially nothing. Washing dishes and thinking, staring out the window and thinking, tying shoes, thinking.” Perhaps such openers are meant to contrast with the many thrillers in which not much thinking is done.

3. Love this one: “The [adjective] [adjective] sun rose in the [adjective] [adjective] sky, shedding its [adjective] light across the [adjective] [adjective] [adjective] land.” Fail.

4. Similarly, “laundry list” character descriptions. I recently read one so long its parts had to be separated with semi-colons, including this bit: “porcelain skin, white as china; pale green eyes.” If only they’d been Wedgwood blue eyes, we’d have a whole place-setting. As writing coach Lauren Davis says, description should tell who your characters are, not just what they look like.

5. Cliché openers. In crime novels, a really bad hangover. In fantasy, a battle or (apparently this is common) herb-gathering. The battle thing seems to go against the advice to start with action, but this agent says the problem is, “I don’t know any of the characters yet so why should I care about this battle?” In romance, waking to find a stranger in the bed. More ill-conceived action.

Finally, one of the agents reveals what she actually likes in an opener—one that makes her curious about your characters and fills her with questions. You have the rest of the book for the who, where, when, and how.