Punched in the Face While Reading
Advice columnist, teacher, writer, and editor Ginger Rue shares with us how to keep your readers attention in this inaugural article for the Tips from the Industry column!
Around 1840, Charles Dickens had America in anguish over whether his character Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop would survive her harrowing journey. As the ships carrying the last installment of the manuscript docked in New York, fans could stand it no longer. Unable to wait for the precious cargo to be unloaded, they called out to crewmembers, “Is Little Nell dead?”
Few of us writing today enjoy such enthusiasm and loyalty among our readership (though if your last name happens to be Rowling or Meyer, feel free to stop reading here). If you’re writing for teens, your intended readers are likely juggling five or six academic classes, a couple of extracurriculars, and a wide social network. When they do have downtime, their entertainment options are myriad: video games, internet, texting, TV, movies, magazines heavy on graphics and light on unbroken text blocks, or even a nice, long phone call about who’s taking whom to the homecoming dance.
How are we to compete with all that?
Now, more than ever, writers have to grab readers’ attention.
Before reading any further, take a moment to enjoy this hilarious clip from SNL: http://www.hulu.com/watch/1415/saturday-night-live-snl-digital-short-peo...
It’s not just that I firmly believe that 99% of life can be explained or illuminated by a Saturday Night Live sketch; I also wanted to share this clip because in it, Andy Samberg gets people’s attention in a startling and fresh way. Painful, yes, but still startling and fresh. And you and I as writers can take heed. Though writers in days of yore might have had the luxury of beginning a novel with a long paragraph describing the setting, that approach isn’t likely to work anymore.
Those of us of a certain age may recall when MTV came out and adults warned that our attention spans would be destroyed forever. Guess what? They were right. Most of us under the age of 50 have a low tolerance for boredom, so just imagine how today’s teens must feel. If you want them to read your book, you’re going to have to get their attention.
How to do it? A great place to start is with a cool title. I say this with the utmost hypocrisy because I’m terrible at titles. My agent came up with the title for Brand-New Emily, and my editor at Tricycle suggested the title for my second novel, Jump (November 2010). But it’s something I’m working on, and you can, too. A novel or short story with an interesting title begs to be read. Some of my favorites include “I’m a Fool” by Sherwood Anderson (why is this guy admitting this? what’s foolish about him?); “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (a what?); “Big Foot Stole My Wife” by Ron Carlson (if you can top that, hats off); “Any Minute Mom Should Come Blasting Through the Door” by David Ordan (why? what’d you do?); and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (Best. Title. Ever.).
Next, write a killer first sentence. For my own part, I like to throw readers into the middle of a tense situation from the get-go. In Brand-New Emily, my first line is an all-capped EMILY SUCKS BIG TIME. Harsh, disturbing, unsettling…but, I hope, not boring.
Take a look at two of my all-time favorite first lines from fiction:
- “In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits.” -- John Updike, “A&P”
- “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.” -- Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
I’ve taught Updike’s short story in various high school and college classes, and I’ve never encountered a male student who didn’t want to read on. I mean, three girls in bathing suits in the first line! Genius. Similarly, what woman could resist the first line of Gone with the Wind? Mitchell promises to reveal a character who isn’t beautiful but can trick men into thinking she is. Isn’t this what women’s magazines and cosmetics companies have been promising for years, over and over again? Perfect bait for snagging a female reader.
Beyond the title and first line, you must decide where is the best place to begin your story. Generally, that’s in the middle of things—and that’s advice I’m stealing straight from Aristotle. Someone once described plot creation as dropping a mouse into a maze and seeing how it finds its way out. Drop your main character into a situation that will make your reader wonder how he/she gets out. YA and MG lit are all about the gimmick. Come up with an irresistible one and you’re halfway to print—all you have to do is write well enough to live up to your really cool premise.
Once you’ve got a reader’s attention, though, you have to deliver on the promise. Each chapter must move the story forward. That’s not as easy as it sounds. When editing your work, you have to constantly ask yourself whether your words are working toward this goal. If you are describing something, is that description serving a purpose that goes hand in hand with your plot? Does that descriptive passage reveal necessary information about a character or in some way set the mood for what’s happening?
Keep in mind that when an agent requests a partial, you have roughly thirty pages to captivate him/her with your story. If you bore the agent in the first few pages, he/she is under no obligation to continue reading, nor to send you feedback on why it’s a pass. Sometimes it’s difficult to kill those darlings. For me, my favorite chapter in Brand-New Emily was chapter two, a short description of a dream Emily has about her mother. I landed my agent without it, though, because a YA novelist I admired had expressed concern that it would slow down the pacing too much. Once I signed with my agent, I sent her the omitted passage to see whether she thought it should go in the draft she sent out to editors. She agreed with my novelist friend. It wasn’t until the book was sold to Tricycle that I sent the beloved chapter to my editor, who felt that a version of it would be necessary to the story. However, that version was about half as long as the original. Since it was outside the main narrative, we kept the interlude short so we could get back to the action quickly.
The lesson here is that, when editing your work, cut ruthlessly, but save those cuts in another file. You can always put them back in later, but see if your pacing improves without them.
If you can do all this, my last piece of advice would be to make sure your book includes enough material to support a sequel, because you might just leave your readers wanting more. We should all be so lucky.
Ginger Rue's expert advice continues here, with Part Two of "Punched in the Face While Reading."