Short and Snappy

pinterest: the white sail's shaking

There is something incredibly overwhelming about being asked, "So, what's your story about?" 

On the one hand, our egos just love to be tickled by the question (if the asker actually cares; when they're only being polite, it isn't any fun at all): I don't know about you, but for me there's always a giddy burst of adrenaline that makes me grin and look altogether idiotic.  Then I bumble around for a minute or so, trying to cram a 100,000+ word story into a respectable sentence, and in the end they put on their uncomprehending face and say, "Oh!  That sounds interesting!" Which is nice of them, but I'm pretty sure my performance wouldn't garner any enthusiasm from an agent in a similar circumstance.

That reaction is, I think, fairly universal - and understandable, since if you have a particularly intricate story, it's no easy matter to convey its plot succinctly.  But if you intend to sell your story, especially in a face-to-face setting, it becomes necessary to bring the bumbling up a notch or three.  You're no longer trying to explain to your aunt what you do with your time; you're addressing an agent or a publisher who you kinda-sorta-really would like to take on your book.  (Depending on your family, the latter might actually seem less daunting.)  You have to condense your story, preferably into a pithy one-sentence summary that in film-speak is called the logline and in novel-writing the elevator-pitch.

When I'm not called upon to use them, I find this sort of thing enjoyable, so I was most pleased to be asked to read a slim book on the subject called Finding the Core of Your Story.  It isn't a large treatise at all, and wonderfully to the point - and it has examples.  I love examples.  The author, Jordan Smith, is a filmmaker, but the subtitle of the book pretty well encapsulates its usefulness to all forms of story-telling: How to strengthen and sell your story in one essential sentence.

Smith coaches the reader through the ins and outs of logline-writing, starting with the basics of what a logline is and its importance, then moving on to the nuts and bolts.  A second skim-through of the chapters brings out the key points - things we already know, hopefully, but which are irritatingly difficult to squeeze into a single sentence.  Protagonist and goal; antagonist and goal; conflict; setting.  There is also the usefulness of irony in conflict.  His example here was a logline for Jurassic Park (which I've never watched), wherein a scientist who hates kids has to protect two children.  I think this tends to denote humor, though that is not the case across the board: sometimes it merely emphasizes the tension.

One of the book's most helpful points, I thought, was Smith's chapter on finding the main thread of a story.  Of all the hang-ups when it comes to explaining to a stranger what my story is about, this is the most common: trying to make sense out of the confounded thing.  I've got subplots, and I've got themes, and I've got a half-dozen characters "what need keeping track of" - and it can be deuced tricky deciding what to say and what to leave unsaid.  I haven't yet begun a synopsis or query for Tempus Regina, but I fought about six different versions of a logline for it after reading Finding the Core of Your Story and still don't like what I came up with. 

"Well, bother it!  There's a woman, and there's a watch, and there's Victorian England - and then there isn't Victorian England because there's time-traveling - and there's a dude and another dude and a third dude, but the third dude is less important than this other gal, and there's the White Demon (but you don't really need to know about him, so forget I said that), and there's alchemy and some STUFF and other STUFF and LEGENDS and the first woman's younger brother and then some DOOM and GLOOM and now you're going to represent me, right?"

All right, so that wasn't a serious attempt, but it's about how I feel.  Pulling out the main thread is a difficult business, but I did feel that the process of narrowing down the loglines helped to clarify my own vision of the story.  I don't know that I would try loglining a story before writing, as Smith suggests - my stories don't usually take on a proper scope until I've written three-fourths of the plot - but I have a feeling it will be helpful, not just in the querying process, but in the nearer work of editing.  You've got to know what your story is primarily about before you can bolster the weak bits.

Of course, after you do all that you still have to memorize the logline and practice delivering it.  I haven't worked up the courage for that last bit, though I did fiddle with a preliminary pitch for The White Sail's Shaking:

A bumbling young man's good intentions land him in the U.S. Navy, where his hopes of winning glory are turned inside out by the murder of a fellow officer - and the presence of the killer on board.

It is, at least, a start.  And once you have the basic structure in mind, and the tips to help you along, it's actually quite enjoyable.  You're inserting your monocle and peering at the story until you find its core (which helps with editing), then finding out how many ways you can succinctly express that core (which helps with pitching and marketing).  It is a little daunting, but also, in an egotistical way, rather fun.  And we are an egotistical bunch, aren't we?

First Impressions, Scribbles Edition

I don't like beginnings. That is to say, I don't like writing them; I would rather write anything - even a death scene - than a beginning, whether it be of a whole novel or just of a chapter. I have quite a horror of them, perhaps from hearing the constant refrain, "Create a good hook! You must hook the reader! Create a good hook!" After a while it begins to eat into your soul, and when you open that blank document all you can do is stare as the word pounds over and over in your head, "Hooooooooook!"

However, I do like to admire the work of other writers in this area and pretend that they had as difficult a time producing theirs as I do with mine. Jenny did a post a few days ago on the first sentence of each of some of her favorite books, and although naturally she took some of mine, I wanted to follow her example. So without further ado, and in no particular order...

"Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her."
jane austen, emma

"It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet."
james fenimore cooper, the last of the mohicans

"As I left the railway station at Worchester and set out on the three-mile walk to Ransom's cottage, I reflected that no one on that platform could possibly guess the truth about the man I was going to visit."
c.s. lewis, perelandra

"The Jubel es Zubleh is a mountain fifty miles and more in length, and so narrow that its tracery on the map gives it a likeness to a caterpillar crawling from the south to the north."
lew wallace, ben-hur

"Hill House, though abandoned, had remained unscathed during the years of the Dragon's occupation."
anne elisabeth stengl, veiled rose

"Sing, O goddess, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans."
homer, the iliad

"It was a dark and stormy night."
madeleine l'engle, a wrinkle in time

"In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army."
arthur conan doyle, a study in scarlet

"There was once a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself - not just sometimes, but always."
norton juster, the phantom tollbooth

"It is impossible to estimate the significance of the life of C. H. Spurgeon without knowing something of the religious condition of the land at the time when his ministry commenced in the middle of the last century."
iain murray, the forgotten spurgeon

"When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?"
william shakespeare, macbeth

"The first Wednesday in every month was a Perfectly Awful Day - a day to be awaited with dread, endured with courage and forgotten with haste."
jean webster, daddy-long-legs

Most of these are simply spectacular beginnings, each in its own way. The opening line of Emma sets the tone for a light, witty read that seems to indicate that the authoress had her tongue in her cheek the whole time she was writing it; The Phantom Tollbooth introduces you to poor Milo, who doesn't know how to spell 'February' and doesn't much care; A Study in Scarlet introduces you to good old John Watson and then gradually slides the reader into the shock of meeting Sherlock Holmes, who first enters the scene flailing a test tube and crying, "I FOUND IT!"

I'm not sure who doesn't love the first line of Daddy-Long-Legs and decide right away that it is the perfect book for a rainy day. And the person who doesn't know the chilling pronouncement of the First Witch in Macbeth obviously never acted the play out with stuffed animals as a child. And then there's The Iliad. One wonders if the person who first wrote down the poem realized how chillingly epic that first line is - wonders if he stopped, sat back, peered at the introduction and remarked, "Hey, that's pretty good!"

I can never decide whether Madeleine L'Engle's beginning for A Wrinkle in Time was frank or tongue-in-cheek, but it certainly is catchy. Veiled Rose begins with a prologue that is actually the almost-end of the book, introducing the reader to the Dragon, then moving back in time to the summer when everything began to happen at Hill House. Even The Forgotten Spurgeon, a biography, grabs the interested reader by the collar; what was the religious condition of Britain at that time?

Granted, at least two of these are not hooks. As much as I love The Last of the Mohicans, I did not remember that opening line and frankly I think I skipped it; and with Ben-Hur, a caterpillar mountain is not the most exciting way of introducing such an epic novel. But these are exceptions, and they work because the rest of the book is splendid and by the time readers are in the middle of the forest with Uncas, Hawkeye, and the rest or escaping a naval battle with Judah Ben-Hur, they don't really care what the first sentence of the book was. For the rest of us mere mortals, hooks are important and we have to muddle through as best we can. But who knows? Maybe some day people will go around quoting the first line of Wordcrafter like they do with Macbeth.

...Yeah, I'm not holding my breath.