Experiment #1: Let’s Get It Started In Here (and the Bass Keep Running) (Patreon)

Greetings from the Mad Fiction Laboratory! Here in Maine, Eternal Home of Ancient Horrors, it’s still trying to decide whether this whole “spring” idea is really worth committing to since that we’re just going to have to put all the snow back in eight months anyway, and besides, flowers are hard and mud is easy. However, the Increasingly and Alarmingly Sentient Boiler of Doom has had a word or two with the axial tilt of the planet and those words were: “Listen here, you stupid rock, if I don’t get some sort of vacation I am going to start shooting fire out of these people’s faucets—don’t think I can’t do it, plumbing as old and set in its ways and just plain New England as me obeys no law of physics. Think about it. Boilers are the motherfucking paradoxical pocketwatch in a time travel story—we just appear in houses, no one knows who bought us in the first place, and if you do us wrong we’ll rip apart the financial fabric of space and time so chop chop with the warm stuff, you mere planet.”

Before we start, I would like to direct your attention to the hastily-framed, ravioli-stained cross-stitch hanging above the metafictional microwave in the break room on which you will find the Laboratory Rules. Abide by these and we won’t have to worry about any Word Core breaches or fires in the Self-Esteem Server Room. 

RULE THE FIRST: My process may not injure your process, or, through the imagined authority of one author over another, allow your process to come to harm.

RULE THE SECOND: You need not obey any rule set forward by the Laboratory to produce good art, except where this would conflict with the first rule. 

RULE THE THIRD: Trust your own experience and ideas, even if, and perhaps especially if, it conflicts with anything the Laboratory prattles on about, including the first two rules, this rule, and/or the rules anybody else tries to engrave on a stone tablet about the Right Way to Write. 

RULE THE ZEROTH: You cannot injure, upset, wear out, sprain, or otherwise bring shame to literature, your genre of choice, or the august English language, no matter how hard you try, except by inaction, which is to say, by not writing anything in the first place. 

The Laboratory is just me—well, me and a lot of mutant eldritch creatures roaming the place looking for things to devour—sharing what has worked for me, what I can see working for others, what I think is important in life, literature, and everything. That’s all any writing instruction can ever do: share the experience of the instructor. Don’t let any writer convince that what you do is stupid or wrong just because you admire them or they make more money than you or they have more books out than you or win awards or put things in professional-looking bullet lists or acronyms. If your process produces a finished piece of work, then that’s the right process for you. Nothing here is meant to stand on a mountaintop and proclaim FOR MINE IS THE CORRECT WAY TO WRITE, AND MY STORIES ARE THE CORRECT WAY TO STORY, FOR LO I AM A MONOCLE STUCK TO A POWDERED WIG PRETENDING TO BE A PERSON. You don’t want to write like me. You want to write like you. So take anything I say with a Grain of You and don’t be afraid to say “I’m pretty sure that monocle stuck to a powdered wig is full of crap.” Use these experiments to think about your own work and get your hands dirty trying new things—or don’t. Some of the best writing advice I’ve ever had was only the best because it was stupid and I made a point of ignoring it—but in figuring out why I thought it was stupid and how I could ignore it as hard as possible, I found my own voice.

And really, as in Asimov, it’s the Zeroth Rule that’s the kicker. Just try everything and don’t worry about whether it’s going to come out perfect or get you published or bring you everything you want in this world. That way lies madness. Make something. Anything. Even if you think it’s just dreadful—even if it is just dreadful. Remember, people far, far worse than you have written horrendous books you wouldn’t be caught dead putting your name on that got published and even turned into films everyone is embarrassed to watch. Films with sequels. So what the crap do I know? Do you see any sequels around here? No. You see a microwave with marinara sauce all over it. 

WITHOUT FURTHER ADO.

For our very first experiment, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about beginnings. How to start a story off right in the world, with all its vaccinations up to date and an apple in its pocket and a brand new scarf to keep the biting winds of boredom at bay. How to choose between the truly dizzying array Let’s Make a Deal style doors that offer entrance into a world, a character, a moment big enough to deserve being put down in print. How to, as the kids say, get this party started, where “this party” is the bass-dropping, roof-raising, glow in the dark disco floor of all-night-so-right hardcore literary craftsmanship awwww yeah.

I used to find beginnings so easy. In fact, until two or three years ago, nine out of ten times, the first thing that came to me, in terms of a book or a short story a poem, was the beginning. The first line, the first scene, the first image. Now, for the purposes of this experiment, I should note that I write from Point A to Point Z without stopping for a snack or detouring to Point Q so I don’t have to deal with the congestion around Point K. I start at the first line of the story and I go (and go and go) until I reach the last line. Again, this is not how you have to write. I have ADHD—if I skip a chapter, even with every good intention of returning to fill it in later, I would just never, ever write that part, then forget that I ever meant to write it in the first place, and find myself confused as to why my readers don’t understand how the Sugar Plum Fairy turned into a pick-up truck between chapter 5 and chapter 9. If you can skip around—great. Your brain is better than my brain and I congratulate you on that with bitter, bitter envy. But I can’t. Which means that if I don’t know how to start a story, that story isn’t getting written until I figure it out. 

But a couple of years ago, some part of my brain grunted and shifted around in its chair and the seeds of my stories started to be something from the middle, or the end, or just a line of dialogue, or a character’s big dumb face. And all of the sudden I had to start thinking about beginnings in a really direct way, because instead of just jumping into the particular shiny chrome Call Me Ishmael idea-rocket that up and appeared in my kitchen one day and blasting off to Planet Fiction, I had to figure out a path toward that lovely little rocket, a path that didn’t even start at my house anymore, that started across town and under a train trestle inside a tent guarded by the ghosts of all my personal failures, and that would ultimately lead through a forest full of vicious, starving bears generally frustrated by their lot in life and specifically by my abilities as an artist.

And nowadays, that seems to be how it is every goddamned time.

So, 1300 words into an essay about how to begin something efficiently, let’s talk about the Importance of Crushing the First Bit.

I’ve always found it helpful to think about the beginning as a credit system where the reader is the bank and you are the earnest applicant. The reader has already agreed to meet with you because you were well-dressed and scrubbed up and your cover was nice and your title was cool, or because you’ve done a couple of nice things for a family they’re friendly with or a magazine they’ve had over for dinner. But they don’t know you, they don’t know how great you can be a hundred pages or thirty-six months into your business. If it’s the first book or story or poem of yours they’ve ever read, you are basically a fresh-faced eighteen-year-old sailing through the front door asking for a big fat loan on the strength of your smile. They will take any opportunity to turn you down and move on to the next grin down the line, not because they’re mean or dumb or because they hate art and freedom, but because their attention is their capital—the most valuable capital in the world, these days, and there’s a lot of demands on it. Every kind of media and every kind of activity is screaming for a piece of that capital, and it’s far easier not to keep reading than to push on through hoping there’s something better further in. 

So the first line, if it is good enough, earns you enough credit to buy yourself the first paragraph. The first paragraph gets you the first page. The first page earns you, probably, the whole first chapter, and if you can grab and hold onto your reader’s attention through the first chapter, you’ve more than likely got them through half the book, and if you can pull them through to the halfway point, they’ll almost certainly finish it. And if that book or story was good enough to finish, you’ve very likely secured enough credit that they’ll pick up something else of yours. (Of course, credit is easier lost than kept and once lost much harder to regain—readers will stick it out through some clunkers if they really, really loved something else of yours, but if they really, really hated something, you may find the bank no longer has reasonable business hours.)

That’s a lot of pressure on the beginning, and an intense burden for that poor, innocent first line. I know. Believe me, I know. But just like we all want to think everyone is judged by their secret inner soul when we know we all get judged far more brutally on how we look, books get enormously judged on covers and titles and first pages and that’s just reality. You can’t hold back. (This is the great and powerful Law of Ghostpigs about which I have written before) You have to start with your A material. Don’t hide whatever makes your work special under enough coats and layers to survive a Maine winter, because by the time you’ve gotten all that insulation off, there may be no one left to see your rad outfit. 

In that first page, you have to give the reader something, a little candy to convince them to eat their exposition vegetables. LET’S COMMIT TO A METAPHOR LIKE A 40-YEAR MARRIAGE, SHALL WE? Generally speaking, that candy can be (but is not limited to):

1. The Pop Rocks of Stylistic Fun Times. Simply the unique and interesting way you put words together. It won’t fill you up on its own, you don’t have to use it every time, and too much of it might make you feel a little queasy, but it’s fun as hell to eat because the texture is unusual and nothing like the normal food you eat all day. The famous opening of Neuromancer (The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel) is a great example of this—it’s an image you’ve never seen used before, it’s arresting, it tells you something about the genre of book you’re reading, the time period, the perspective, and the mood of what’s to come, all by using an image unusual enough to knock your head a little sideways and out of your patterns of receiving information. Nice work if you can get it. It doesn’t even have to be words—How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe starts with a diagram of a time travel paradox so charming I’d have read anything that followed. Hot style convinces readers to hop on board on the promise of more sideways head-knocking goodness.

2. The High-Quality C & H (Conflict & Hero, naturally) Pure Cane Sugar of Plot. The workhorse of the confectionary world, used in almost every recipe—you can’t do much without it, though it’s a little boring on its own without other ingredients. This is why so many murder mysteries (and other genres as well) begin with a dead body. It’s immediately interesting, begs a number of questions that will presumably be answered by a protagonist with a genius IQ but no social skills, and arouses sympathy. Which is not to say that the Dead Body Cold Open isn’t pretty tiresome and cliche, but things get tiresome and cliche because they work. Making something unusual happen right out of the gate convinces readers to keep going on the promise of delving into that thing and getting to the bottom of it.

3. The Tootsie Roll Center of a Tootsie Pop, Character. It’s just a lump of chocolate on a stick without the sugary coating of plot and fruit flavor of style, but hey, chocolate on a stick isn’t really bad. There’s plenty of stories that are mainly character studies with a thin coating of plot and plenty that are mainly plot with a bland but functional character moving through it, but really everybody likes to crunch through and get both chocolate and lollipop in every bite. Give the reader a protagonist they care about and they’ll follow you anywhere. One of my favorite beginnings to any novel is from Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.

You can tell so much about the way Mary Katherine Blackwood thinks by these few lines, that she is weird as fuck and maybe not all there, that something terrible probably went down, that she may have had something to do with it, that she can’t be trusted at all, and that you really want to hear more about this bizarre not-a-werewolf’s perspective on the world. You absolutely have to read on. And it’s all done with easy declarative sentences, as straight forward as a book report. Technically, it’s exposition, (by the names you can tell that this is probably set in our world, and maybe not contemporary, but not too far in the past, that werewolves may exist but most likely not, who the protagonist is and their family situation), but all the necessary information is bundled up with strangeness, and the one pays for the other. 

4. The Tasty Nuts and Nougat of the Macguffin. Without anything to hold it all together, delicious, crunchy, but messy and without a unifying delivery mechanism like chocolate or caramel. (We’ve gone too far, delved too deep, I have no idea what the chocolate and caramel would be…let’s say…um…the chocolate is worldbuilding and the caramel is action. Yeah, that’s the ticket! I may just be hungry.) This is especially helpful in a short story or novel, because you don’t have the time or space to bring readers in too slowly. You want to dazzle them with the exciting fillings of your story right out of the gate. Another of my favorite openings is Shirley Jackson again, this time, The Haunting of Hill House:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

And look, don’t feel bad. you’re not gonna do better than that, I’m not going to, nobody is, it’s one of the finest openings in the English language—eat it, Melville. But Hill House is the Weird Thing What Goes Bump in the Book, and it’s centered right away, so that you know, whatever else happens, it’s that house you’ll be grooving on for the next two hundred pages, and it’s not right, and it might eat you.

You can mix and match, obviously. There’s a Broadway musical called Pierre and Natasha and the Great Comet of 1812 (I know, that title!) that solved this problem in high style—and a big problem it was for them, as it’s a musical drawn from 60 pages of War and Peace, a novel few people these days have actually read, and they needed to bring everyone up to speed quickly. So the first song, sung by the whole cast in astonishingly amazing punk/early 19th c Russian costumes with frenetic energy, goes (roughly):

There’s a war going on out there somewhere and Andrey isn’t here

And this is all in your program, you are at the opera

Gonna have to study up a little bit if you wanna keep up with the plot

Cuz it’s a complicated Russian novel, everyone’s got nine different names

So look it up in your program, we appreciate it thanks a lot…

Balaga is fun

Bolonsky is crazy

Mary is plain

Dolokhov is fierce

Helene is a slut

Anatole is hot

Marya is old-school

Sonya is good

Natasha is young

And Andrey isn’t here

I instantly thought that I needed to just open all my books like this, because it’s amazing. It’s all candy upfront, no meat, no veg. You’ve got the style (immediately letting you know this won’t be a dry version of War and Peace and you’re in a metafictional semi-comedic splash zone), the characters boiled down to exactly what you need to know and nothing more, the absence of Andrey is the Macguffin (yes, realist novels have Macguffins!), and essentially a summary of the plot. And you know, the rest of the musical actually has huge problems and doesn’t totally hang together, the characters are a little wobbly and it isn’t quite there—but the awesomeness of that opening number is such that I would happily sit through any amount of not-great to get it. And the second act starts with an equally great song along the same lines because this is how you do it.

If only we could get thirty gorgeous people in amazing costumes to sing the first chapter of everything we write, we’d have it made.

But of course, it’s more than just “make the beginning good.” HA HA CAT SO GLAD WE’VE DECIDED TO LISTEN TO YOUR GREAT WISDOM. It’s where to start. The point of entrance. The on-ramp to the terrifying superhighway of life-threatening machines all running around and cutting each other off at high speed. That’s what I’ve struggled with lately. When you have this Thing in your head and you haven’t fucked it up yet by actually putting any words on a page, what is the best way to get it out? Through the nose, the mouth, the tear ducts, the ears? Do you enter the world first, or the protagonist, or the conflict, a prologue, or begin with the ending? How long before the heat-death of the universe do you start this story? The Big Bang? Or somewhere in the middle? How many planets do you need to name before you annihilate them in a sea of cleansing interstellar fire? Is the perspective best kept tight so you can bering the reader’s emotions in close and never let it go, or broad so that you can jump all over the place, bringing in anything you need at a moment’s notice? Who is telling this story, and does it have to be the hero?

It’s all about where to put the camera. Is it a tight close-up or a long establishing shot or a tracking action sequence without a cut? Interior or exterior? Night or day or day for night? And, believe it or not, you have to make these decisions for every single goddamn book, it’s a disgrace, I tell ya. 

This shit is why there’s three beginnings to Radiance. Because I couldn’t figure it out, and my only solution was to just flat-out write about how hard beginnings are and the purposes they serve. Umberto Eco said that you spend the first fifty pages of a book teaching your reader how to read the rest of it, and for Radiance, that metafictional approach was the way in. It took nine different fully-written first chapters to settle on the right one for The Glass Town Game because I kept trying to start it at the Big Bang, I was afraid of taking my time to get to the magic, because I had always jumped right into it with the Fairyland books. I was actually afraid to just start a book with four children in a house without any flying leopards at all. But that was the right way to start that book. And that’s the crap of it all—a lot of beginnings (and middles, and ends) can be good, even great, but only one is right, and sometimes it takes a lot of playing the field to find Mr. Right.

Sometimes, the particular candy you choose from our little metaphorical candy shop up there can flavor the other choices. If you’re all in on character, a tight POV, even first person, probably works best. If you’re going for big, bombastic style, something more omniscient, with a wider zoom, may give you more freedom to go wild. If the plot’s the thing, you may want to stick with a more traditional 3rd person subjective. If you’re all about the Macguffin at the end of this book, then centering that makes some decisions for you. But not necessarily. It’s like the world’s most complicated flowchart. You’ve been eaten by an if-then proposition, would you like to play again?

Ok, let’s put some of that into practice. SCIENCE IS NO FUN IF YOU DON’T GET TO JUMP INTO A VAT OF THE STUFF WITH ALL YOUR CLOTHES ON.

Every Experiment needs a test subject, so I thought that I’d come up with a book—one that is absolutely not real and which I have emphatically not written nor do I intend to write, let’s call that one the Fairyland Statute of Limitations, shall we?— that we can mess with in the Lab of the course of the next many months. It’ll be called Red Leather, Yellow Leather after the classic vocal warm-up exercise. That way we can dissect it, abuse it, electrocute it, put it back together with the head on wrong, and see all the different ways we might go about getting results out of the same hunk of dubious fur and flesh. (This is where I’ll be using some of those Tuckerizations and cameos you lovely folks have signed up for.) I will now determine the basic facts of this pretend novel using the Official Mad Fiction Laboratory D20 of Ultimate Probabilistic Fate because it doesn’t really matter what it’s about, it’s just for practice, NOBODY GET ATTACHED TO THIS THING, I MEAN IT. It doesn’t matter so much that we’re not even going to decide what genre it is this time around.

So! Red Leather, Yellow Leather is about a (roll for male/female/other) man who works in a (roll for: robot factory/lighthouse/Home Depot/farm/pub/magic school/zombie care facility/octopus ranch/19th century whaling ship/nail salon/General Administrative Adventuring/Borgesian library/10 Downing Street/50s diner/Michelin-starred restaurant/exterminator out-call services/clone farm/bakery/artists’ collective/bodega) lighthouse and one day discovers that his (wife/husband/child/washing machine/dog/television/self/collection of pulp SF magazines from the 40s/couch/typewriter/grandfather/wristwatch/local humpback whale/postman/wine cellar/umbrella/cranial implant/sexbot/shrubbery/bedside lamp) couch is inhabited by (roll for: gnomes/nanocomputers/regret/the unbearable lightness of being/daisies/original sin/the spirit of Eleanor of Aquitaine/all those angels that can fit on the head of a pin/sentient termites/time-traveling wine stains/a panel of concerned wizards/eldritch horrors/several toddlers not belonging to him/the concept of schadenfreude/the personification of the month of April/trickle down economics/ghostpigs/a paint salesman/aliens from the planet Ungunt/God) the spirit of Eleanor of Aquitaine. 

I think that’s enough to go on. And can I say how pleased I am that, having already thrown the title Red Leather, Yellow Leather at the wall, the thing turned out to involve a couch? This is how you know D20s are divine beings descended to live among we unworthy mortals. It’s also perfect for not deciding our genre yet. If you’re confused about genre, you can always ask yourself: why is my couch talking to me? If it’s haunted, it’s probably a horrorcouch, if it has achieved sentience, you’ve got science fiction, if it’s enchanted, you’re cooking with fantasy, if your grandmother owned that couch and you really miss her, you’re grinding on literary fiction, if your girlfriend broke up with you and she’s about to come pick it up, you might be a romance book, and if your couch is talking to you because of the war, well, that’s magical realism for you.

Could go any of these ways and more.

So let’s start this tale of couches and lighthouses in a couple of different ways and varying the places where we put the camera. 

Cotton Candy:

The sky above the lighthouse was the color of a dead queen’s bones. The ocean heaved and fell in surges of profound self-loathing, taking out all its ancient, bitter grudges on the salt-tigered walls of a lighthouse, rising from a thin whip of seastone, a pale finger lifted in query. The dregs of last night’s storm passed across the windows, throwing shadows into the rooms within like black wedding rice. The lighthousekeeper had not yet woken. Everything yet to come still waited for him, a miasma of space, time, causality, and human need covered in a truly hideous mustard-yellow 1970s afghan blanket.

Pure Cane Sugar:

It was a Tuesday in April and Nicholas Tschida woke in the small, monkishly furnished room at the top of an ancient and rather unreliable staircase. He rose slowly, as was his habit, and washed his face in the old-fashioned washbasin contributed by some previous keeper of the Hareshead Lighthouse.  Tschida was satisfied with his choices in life, his washbasin, his locally-milled soap, his golden lamp looking out to sea. He creaked and groaned his way down the stairs while visions of smoked bacon danced in his head, only to find that the storm had blown over his mailbox and flooded his herb garden, his cat Roxane had gone missing, and his couch was possessed by the spirit of Eleanor of Aquitaine. 

“By the wrath of God,” said the well-worn cushions, “I am queen of England.”

Tootsie Roll Center:

When my brothers and sisters were asked by well-meaning, well-dressed, well-rounded adults what they wanted to be once they grew up, they answered the usual things. The correct things. Astronaut, fireman, cowboy, painter, President. But even when I was small, covered in more jam than sense, I told them I wanted to be the man in the lighthouse. My father took me to Maine when I was four, just before he left my mother for an ad executive and moved to New York where he ended up smeared across Fifth Avenue by a limousine with bad brakes, and when I wanted to know who made the light on the big white tower go round and round, he told me: a man in a blue knit cap keeps the light lit every minute of the day from the first to the last to the first again, so that all the ships and all the sailors and all the foghorns and all the whales stay safe as a boy in his own bed. And I said: that’s me, Daddy, he’s me, he’s me!

But somehow, the world tricked me into being a medievalist for years before I found a single lighthouse in search of a mate.

Nuts and Nougat:

The long, deep red leather Chesterfield was made in 1899 by a spinster upholsterer on Cape Cod known as Maudlin Maeve. She used to wander the streets of her village, her hair a fright, her gaze as glazed as a windowpane, weeping as though all the world were come to an end. Maeve put so much of herself into each piece of furniture she built that there was simply nothing left over for the usual things of life—hobbies, husbands, holidays, hairbrushes, happiness. Her work was in much demand at the end of the century, her bank account kept plump and healthy by checks bearing shockingly famous names.

But the Chesterfield was her masterpiece. The height of her quiet, unappreciated art.

It was purchased by a spiritualist named Madame Jacques and kept in her famous front parlor, covered in velvet pillows and hopeful widows. And it stayed there, through everything, through grief and children and the war and the seance that changed the course of history, for the next fifty years, when, after the tragic and violent bludgeoning of Madame Jacques by a Quebecois archaeologist stymied in his search for the deep and unspeakable secrets of ancient Egypt, it was sold at an estate sale to a modest lighthousekeeper for the sum of thirty-five dollars.

Great Candy Comet:

Listen, darlings! Gather in, have some wine, hunker close! Listen to the hundred girls dressed as punk rock Plantagenets, sequined blue whales, and the frozen Atlantic as we all come flooding in around you, playing hurdy-gurdys and hunting for applause, and all of us sing as though only just to you:

It’s a complicated postmodern novel 

About the human condition and the uncanny power of home furnishings 

You’ve already sat down to read it so you might as well pay attention

Hold tight, Richard the Lionheart’s Mum’s going to turn up pretty quick

If you don’t know who that is, you could always look it up, we appreciate it thanks a lot…

Nick keeps a lighthouse

Roxane is his tabby, she’ll be important later

He kind of hates his family

And Eleanor’s a couch

The kicker is that none of these are necessarily the wrong way to start the thing. None of them are necessarily the right way, either, but the way we choose fundamentally shapes the rest of the story in ways we can barely imagine when we start out. Every story is a massive cross-hatch of possibilities, and with every word you put down, every choice you make, you begin to collapse the waveform, to solidify reality, to define a path. A reader starts out floating in empty space—boom—a lighthouse appears. Where is the lighthouse? Who occupies it? Is it working? Who is inside? Just that one detail opens a whole Choose Your Own Adventure trove of options. That first page is about managing the reader, leading them by the hand, like a baby you’re just starting to teach about the world. Give it enough bells and whistles and bright lights and colors and the kid will remember every word you say.

Please feel free to try out starting this thing variously in the comments yourself—Red Leather, Yellow Leather belongs to all of us. Even if we might not want it and it’s kind of weird-looking and it smells funny. How very like a couch. What’s the weirdest way in to this story you can come up with? What’s the most straightforward? Most importantly, which one would keep you reading no matter what came next?

That’s the power of a beginning.