Writing Structure Upside Down

Normally, I try to address supernatural things in this blog: ghosts, cryptids/cryptozoology, ghosts, unexplained events, ghosts, and ghosts. But as I work on book 3 of the Bridgeton Park Cemetery series, I started thinking about opening lines for books. This is a common topic among writers and is featured (or should be) in writing classes because a story opening, which may be one line or an entire paragraph, is what is used to grab your reader by the throat so that they keep on reading. It is also to grab editors and agents by the throat for those working authors who submit their manuscripts traditionally. 

 

Naturally, I started thinking about my own story openings. Here they are, along with the title of the work they open:

 

Mary Beth is dead. There won't be any more dreams. (Dead of Summer)

 

The madness started in September, and to tell you truth, I hope it hasn't ended yet.  (Saving Jake)

 

"Okay, then," I said. "First question. Can a ghost follow you home?"  (Hunting Spirits)

 

The four-year old girl looked up and saw Uncle Tee stepping through the front door and coming toward her, her mother a little behind him - AND - No one knew exactly who started the Thursday night ghost stories, or when.  (Haunted)

 

Michael Penfield awoke to a presence in his room.  (Dead Voices)

 

The first two openings, for Dead of Summer and Saving Jake, were enough to get my foot in the door with an editor. Teresa Basile, who edited Saving Jake, is an unusually generous editor in that if she likes an opening line, she'll read the entire first page of a manuscript. I hear most editors will read the first paragraph. If the opening line doesn't cut it, well, so long, Charlie. Getting published can be brutal!

 

But I digress. Opening lines set the tone of the book and sometimes can encapsulate a large part, if not all, of the story. Next time you read a book, go back and reread the opening and see what you think of it, now that you know where the writer went. I'm partial to Stephen King when it comes to this: "Once upon a time, a monster came to Castle Rock" or "Jack Torrance thought: Officious little prick" or even "Here is what happened." 

 

When I teach writing classes, I always spend some time having students come up with opening lines, and then we share them. Invariably, we always hear at least three or four of them where we wish we knew the rest of the story. It's a good exercise but a cruel one, if you want to know what happens next. In situations like that, even the author can't usually answer that.

 

On the other hand, endings are a completely different animal. I'm beginning to think that a line that is good for starting a story might be good for ending it, as well. When you take an opening and end the book with it, you leave the reader wanting more. Sometimes you might be writing a series, but maybe not. There are good and satisfactory endings like "They lived happily ever after" or Dumas" "...the count just told us that all human wisdom was contained in these two words: Wait and hope" from the Count of Monte Cristo, or Gaiman's "But between now and then, there was Life; and Bod walked into it with his eyes and his heart wide open"  from The Graveyard Book. Great endings, all of them, that put a final cap on the story and leave the reader with a contented sigh.

 

Still, there is a part of me that enjoys endings that read like openings. I tried that with Haunted and for my trouble was told in no uncertain terms that my ending was really the start of the next book. I never saw it that way, but hey, if intelligent readers did, then who am I to argue? I'll write another book. Just to clarify things for myself, though, I put an ending on Dead Voices that made it stunningly obvious that there was another book on the way. I want my readers to come back!

 

But indulge me for just a second and go back up to the list of my openings. Reread them and pretend they are each the last lines of a novel. It's probably just me, but I think all of them would make really stellar endings. Really. It would invite the reader to keep going with the story in his or her own mind. I'm a writer. I like the idea of my characters taking on a life in someone else's thoughts. And I can't help thinking that ending with a beginning is a hell of a way to do exactly that.

 

(Originally published on the author's Ubiquitous Ghosts blog)

Excavating a Scene

I take it as an amazing compliment when someone tells me that a sad scene in one of my books made her cry. (I have never had a male reader admit to that and don't expect I ever will.) I am equally delighted when a reader tells me that a scene I had written to be scary actually managed to scare her. Stephen King once said that nothing gave him more pleasure than scaring the socks off his readers, or something to that effect. I know what he means.

To that end, when I run across a particularly satisfying, well-written scene, whether it be scary, sad, funny, or poignant, I come back to it over and over to take it apart and see if I can figure out the magic. Particularly if the author is dealing with something that requires the reader to suspend any possibility of disbelief. Most of the books I love have story lines that would look preposterous written down on paper in plain sentences. A boy wizard whose destiny is to destroy the most powerful and evil wizard in collective memory? A ring powerful enough to enslave a world? A trio of outcasts in a boys' boarding school in England who manage to pull off retaliation after clever retaliation without ever leaving a shred of evidence -all at the ages of 15 and 16? Or a king with a magical sword whose kingdom has fallen through corruption but who sleeps until the time that his country should need him again? How is it that the writers of these tales are able to invite me into a world that is not geographically located but is easily as real as long as I am there?

I read to learn.

For sheer fright, I look to Mr. King, of course, whose books could make me so tense I would jump on the bus when someone hit the "stop" buzzer for their particular exit. I took note of how he paced the scene, the particular phrasing he used, and the situational elements that are universally unsettling: the chills up the spine, the approaching footsteps in an unoccupied house, the creak of a door or a sigh that may or may not be the wind. His word choices also left me in awe. I think one of the scariest tidbits he ever wrote was the phrase carved into a tombstone in the book Salem's Lot: God Grant He Lie Still. That still freaks me out, the implications are so deep.

For funny, I love Gordon Korman. No More Dead Dogs had me laughing out loud. Mr. Korman is an expert at capturing situational humor. The fun in his books arises from the behaviors his characters exhibit, and those behaviors are right on target, given the age group (eighth grade) and the gender (boys) the work focuses on. Of course, there is an equally funny parallel girl's thread running through it, but I don't want to go into that in case someone out there has missed this amazing work.

But for crying? I have wept over classics like Little Women and A Christmas Carol, but there is one particular work, the third book in an obscure series (about the O'Nolan Family and published in the 60's) by an equally obscure writer (Mary Wallace) that I cannot for the life of me figure out. She begins book three with a scene that is so spectacularly heart-wrenching that I can pick up the book, read those first 20 pages, and have tears running down my face by the end of that chapter. No matter how many times I read it, and no matter how hard I try to figure out how she worked that magic, I cannot deconstruct the scene to the point where I can say Aha! It's the narrative! Or, it's the dialogue!. But it still works on me every time I read it and I wish I knew how she constructed that spell. Sigh.

Currently I've been trying to get my hands on a copy of Cloud Atlas because the movie is having the same effect on me. Every time I watch the movie -and I've watched it a LOT- I come away with one more example of amazing symbolism, one more motif, one more detail that I missed before. And again I find myself scratching my head and asking, how'd they do that?

And can I?

Lonely Little Stand-Alone in a Serial World - Part 2

Last year, I came up with a short piece for this blog about how I didn't write a series but instead focused on stand-alone books, and at the time I was beginning to wonder if that was such a wise thing to do. After all, if a reader likes your work and really likes your characters, it would make sense to continue with that particular universe and that particular population. 

But I have never had a series in mind when I wrote my manuscripts. It's almost as if my characters had the one story to tell, and after having told it, went off on vacation to Patagonia or other parts unknown to me. I can find them if I want to, I suppose, but really they seem to be quite finished with me. Yet, more and more successful writers that I know keep dropping broad hints to me that a series would probably be a better product. I must admit I'm hooked on some series myself. And yet. And yet?

The only series I've ever had in mind is the usual detective kind. I don't think there's any mystery reader on the planet who doesn't carry around his or her own series internally, whether the protagonist is a cop, a detective, a moonlighter, a novelist, or a spiritualist of some kind, and since I'm a mystery reader of the first order, I certainly have a sleuth of my own currently renting space in my attic. I think a murder mystery could be fun to write. I think that all of us who read mystery stories probably would love to write them, too.

But when it comes to my YA supernatural stuff, a series never crossed my mind. UNTIL. I realized a few weeks ago that when I first started writing my little ghost story books, one of the most important settings was a place called Bridgeton Park Cemetery. When I wrote my second YA book, Saving Jake, I threw Bridgeton Park Cemetery into the story just as a private joke for myself. I didn't figure Jake was going to see the light of day anyhow. But he did. My next manuscript is awaiting my corrections and rewrites, and there is actually a wonderful place in the story to include Bridgeton Park Cemetery. I think I will.

Does it make sense to have a series that continues with a place -in my case, a cemetery- instead of with the characters? A friend of mine who is a professor of literature told me that William Faulkner centered a number of stories around a particular location. Stephen King, the King himself, set so many stories in Castle Rock that I can't even remember all of them. Not that I could compare myself to Faulkner or King, but I keep thinking that having a sense of place might give a reader continuity as nicely as a more traditional person-oriented series. It would not be like seeing the same characters book after book, but it would certainly expand the universe of every book I write that is built around that graveyard. And it would suggest that these characters could very well run into one another - or even know each other.

My still-to-be revised manuscript could use a sequel, I've been told, so I guess I would have to work up another story around Bridgeton Park. But as someone who spends free time visiting cemeteries, that probably wouldn't be much of a stretch.

Anyone else out there know of a series based on place rather than on people?

Letters, I Write Letters

I am an inveterate letter-writer. I write letters of praise to tell someone when I have been pleasantly surprised or just delighted with a service, a meal, a really good news article, you name it. I write letters of complaint when I feel I have suffered at the hands of someone who should know better (read: retail workers or customer service reps.)

But the best letters have gone to creative people -- be they writers, musicians, or actors-- and have gotten me a reply. I have a binder of plastic sleeves protecting each one of these missives and I cherish all of them. I started writing fan letters as a grade school kid and was encouraged when I got replies -publicity staff replies, to be sure, but at the age of eight years, I had no idea. Carol Burnett wrote me back. So did Madeleine L'Engle. A member of the rock band The Association wrote his reply to me as an original poem. I still know it by heart. I have a letter from the lead guitarist of the defunct British punk band The Vapors. It's handwritten and ends with his agreement to go to dinner with me if I ever pass him on the street and recognize him. Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick replied via phone call. Too bad I couldn't record that conversation!

As an adult, I also branched out into approaching my hero authors. Alan Dean Foster did me the kindness of telling me to include a SASE because writers would be more inclined to reply if I did. British writer K.M. Peyton invited me to tea, if I ever got across the Atlantic and was able to look her up. (I get the feeling she'd freak if I ever turned up on her doorstep, though.)

David Morrell wrote me one of the best letters of all. I had inquired about a sequel to his amazing book The League of Night and Fog. Mr. Morrell sat down at his typewriter to explain to me, on one single-spaced sheet of paper, that he would never write the sequel. "But," he added, "here is what happens to the characters." And he proceeded to tell me in detail where the story would have gone if he had written it. Sometimes I think about framing that one!

I embarked on writing YA fiction because Stephen King told me to do it. I have the note to prove it! Richard Peck himself advised me that I could stop attending writing workshops involving critiques because they were becoming more discouraging to me than encouraging. I have that on paper, too!

Lately, I've even tried to contact writers through e-mail, and had some terrific replies from the likes of Douglas Preston and James Rollins. Still waiting on Neil Gaimann, though! E-mail is fun, and quick but it can't quite take the place of getting that surprise (but-oh-s0-hoped-for) self-addressed/stamped envelope that brings a response from a writer I admire. Or to put it in the vernacular, a writer that turns me into a tongue-tied fan girl.

So is anyone else out there writing letters and collecting replies? If you are, we ought to swap stories. If you aren't, hey, if you've ever been inclined to write a writer, you should give it a try. It's amazing what some of them will tell you!