Reading

How NOT to Begin a Novel

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We’ve all seen plenty of advice about how to begin a novel, but Chuck Chambuchino has an article on the Writer Un-Boxed website, dated April 22, 2023, in which he lists agents’ advice on how NOT to begin a novel. Most of the advice is quite sensible: some is amusing.
 Chuck Sambuchino is a freelance editor of query letters, synopses, book proposals, and manuscripts. As an editor for Writer’s Digest Books, he edits the Guide to Literary Agents and the Children’s Writer’s & Ilustrator’s Market. His Guide to Literary Agents Blog is one of the largest blogs in publishing. His own books include the bestselling humor book, How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack, which was optioned by Sony Pictures.

Chuck Sambuchino

“No one reads more prospective novel beginnings than literary agents. They’re the ones on the front lines — sifting through inboxes and slush piles. And they’re the ones who can tell us which Chapter 1 approaches are overused and cliche, as well as which techniques just plain don’t work. Below find a smattering of feedback from experienced literary agents on what they hate to see the (in) first pages of a writer’s submission. Avoid these problems and tighten your submission!

FALSE BEGINNINGS

“I don’t like it when the main character dies at the end of Chapter 1. Why did I just spend all this time with this character? I feel cheated.”

– Cricket Freeman, The August Agency

“I dislike opening scenes that you think are real, then the protagonist wakes up. It makes me feel cheated.”
– Laurie McLean, Foreword Literary

IN SCIENCE FICTION

“A sci-fi novel that spends the first two pages describing the strange landscape.”

– Chip MacGregor, MacGregor Literary

PROLOGUES

“I’m not a fan of prologues, preferring to find myself in the midst of a moving plot on page 1 rather than being kept outside of it, or eased into it.”

– Michelle Andelman, Regal Literary

“Most agents hate prologues. Just make the first chapter relevant and well written.”
– Andrea Brown, Andrea Brown Literary Agency

“Prologues are usually a lazy way to give back-story chunks to the reader and can be handled with more finesse throughout the story. Damn the prologue, full speed ahead!”
– Laurie McLean, Foreword Literary

EXPOSITION/DESCRIPTION

“Perhaps my biggest pet peeve with an opening chapter is when an author features too much exposition – when they go beyond what is necessary for simply ‘setting the scene.’ I want to feel as if I’m in the hands of a master storyteller, and starting a story with long, flowery, overly-descriptive sentences (kind of like this one) makes the writer seem amateurish and the story contrived. Of course, an equally jarring beginning can be nearly as off-putting, and I hesitate to read on if I’m feeling disoriented by the fifth page. I enjoy when writers can find a good balance between exposition and mystery. Too much accounting always ruins the mystery of a novel, and the unknown is what propels us to read further.”
– Peter Miller, PMA Literary and Film Management

“I dislike endless ‘laundry list’ character descriptions. For example: ‘She had eyes the color of a summer sky and long blonde hair that fell in ringlets past her shoulders. Her petite nose was the perfect size for her heart-shaped face. Her azure dress—with the empire waist and long, tight sleeves—sported tiny pearl buttons down the bodice. Ivory lace peeked out of the hem in front, blah, blah.’ Who cares! Work it into the story.”
– Laurie McLean, Foreword Literary

STARTING TOO SLOW

“Characters that are moving around doing little things, but essentially nothing. Washing dishes & thinking, staring out the window & thinking, tying shoes, thinking.”

– Dan Lazar, Writers House

“I don’t really like ‘first day of school’ beginnings, ‘from the beginning of time,’ or ‘once upon a time.’ Specifically, I dislike a Chapter 1 in which nothing happens.”

– Jessica Regel, Jean V Naggar Literary Agency

IN CRIME FICTION

“Someone squinting into the sunlight with a hangover in a crime novel. Good grief — been done a million times.”

– Chip MacGregor, MacGregor Literary

IN FANTASY

“Cliché openings in fantasy can include an opening scene set in a battle (and my peeve is that I don’t know any of the characters yet so why should I care about this battle) or with a pastoral scene where the protagonist is gathering herbs (I didn’t realize how common this is).”

– Kristin Nelson, Nelson Literary

VOICE

“I know this may sound obvious, but too much ‘telling’ vs. ‘showing’ in the first chapter is a definite warning sign for me. The first chapter should present a compelling scene, not a road map for the rest of the book. The goal is to make the reader curious about your characters, fill their heads with questions that must be answered, not fill them in on exactly where, when, who and how.”
– Emily Sylvan Kim, Prospect Agency

“I hate reading purple prose – describing something so beautifully that has nothing to do with the actual story.”
– Cherry Weiner, Cherry Weiner Literary

“A cheesy hook drives me nuts. They say ‘Open with a hook!’ to grab the reader. That’s true, but there’s a fine line between an intriguing hook and one that’s just silly. An example of a silly hook would be opening with a line of overtly sexual dialogue.”

– Daniel Lazar, Writers House

“I don’t like an opening line that’s ‘My name is…,’ introducing the narrator to the reader so blatantly. There are far better ways in Chapter 1 to establish an instant connection between narrator and reader.”

– Michelle Andelman, Regal Literary

“Sometimes a reasonably good writer will create an interesting character and describe him in a compelling way, but then he’ll turn out to be some unimportant bit player.”

– Ellen Pepus, Signature Literary Agency

IN ROMANCE

“In romance, I can’t stand this scenario: A woman is awakened to find a strange man in her bedroom—and then automatically finds him attractive. I’m sorry, but if I awoke to a strange man in my bedroom, I’d be reaching for a weapon—not admiring the view.”

– Kristin Nelson, Nelson Literary Agency

CHARACTERS AND BACKSTORY

“I don’t like descriptions of the characters where writers make them too perfect. Heroines (and heroes) who are described physically as being virtually unflawed come across as unrelatable and boring. No ‘flowing, wind-swept golden locks’; no ‘eyes as blue as the sky’; no ‘willowy, perfect figures.’ ”

– Laura Bradford, Bradford Literary Agency

“Many writers express the character’s backstory before they get to the plot. Good writers will go back and cut that stuff out and get right to the plot. The character’s backstory stays with them—it’s in their DNA.”
– Adam Chromy, Movable Type Management

“I’m turned off when a writer feels the need to fill in all the backstory before starting the story; a story that opens on the protagonist’s mental reflection of their situation is a red flag.”

– Stephany Evans, FinePrint Literary Management

“One of the biggest problems is the ‘information dump’ in the first few pages, where the author is trying to tell us everything we supposedly need to know to understand the story. Getting to know characters in a story is like getting to know people in real life. You find out their personality and details of their life over time.”

– Rachelle Gardner, Books & Such Literary

Use of Misdirection

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Robert McCaw has an article dated June 7, 2023 on the Readers Digest site which explores the use of misdirection on plot twists and surprise endings. He has some good advice.

Robert McCaw is the author of Fire and Vengeance, Off the Grid, and Death of a Messenger. McCaw grew up in a military family, traveling the world. He is a graduate of Georgetown University, served as a U.S. Army lieutenant, and earned a law degree from the University of Virginia. He was a partner in a major international law firm in Washington, D.C. and New York City, representing major Wall Street clients in complex civil and criminal cases. Having lived on the Big Island of Hawaii, McCaw imbues his writing of the Islands with his more than 20-year love affair with this Pacific paradise. He now lives in New York City with his wife, Calli.

Robert McCaw

“Misdirection in fiction has a long and hallowed history, from Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex to Shakespeare’s Othello to the revelation of Darth Vader’s identity in Star Wars. J. K. Rowling opined that “misdirection is the key to a good story.” Margaret Atwood refers to misdirection as a “powerful tool.”

As the author of the Koa Kāne Hawaiian Mystery series, I love to incorporate misdirection in my novels. It works like magic to lead the reader to anticipate one scenario only to be surprised when something dramatically different unfolds. But misdirection needs careful crafting and reinforcement to be effective.

Think of two stories involving the same characters and settings—one that progresses step by step to a logical conclusion and a second version that arrives at a diametrically different ending—then subtly mix them together. Let the first version lead the reader down the wrong path while characters expose thoughts and take actions, dropping hints that serve as the fulcrum for the transition to what will be the surprise ending taken from the second story.

Misdirection also requires subtlety. The reader will feel crassly manipulated if the surprise ending arrives without sufficient hints or foreshadowing. Ideally, good misdirection makes the reader look back at various telltale clues peppered throughout the story, hopefully leading them to admire the author’s skill in setting up and obscuring the ultimate surprise.

Primary plot misdirection leads to surprise endings, but the technique can also facilitate twists in the main plot or subplots. Such twists hopefully keep the reader engaged, but like too many intertwined stories or too many characters, too much misdirection can obscure the principal themes and may confuse the reader. So, too much secret sauce can spoil the dish!

Merging the conflicting narratives requires deftly manipulating the tools of misdirection. These include creating characters who pursue false assumptions, are driven by hidden motives and mislead or lie to cover up their faults. These players may also have faulty memories, speak ambiguously, take unexpected actions, and show different faces in different settings. Their common human foibles—such as insecurity, arrogance, greed, selfishness, fear, jealousy, family-relationship secrets, or misplaced loyalty—help hide the ball until the final reveals. Red herrings—clues heading nowhere—can likewise often lead readers astray but must be used wisely.

For example, false assumptions and lies abound in Treachery Times Two, the fourth in the Koa Kāne series. One of the characters has a made-up background, and secret jealousy poisons another’s friendship. All these deceptions are critical to the surprise ending, but all present clues about what is to come.

While character traits are critical in setting up persuasive misdirection, setting, action, ambiguous evidence, conflict, and circumstances create opportunities both to reinforce the impression you want the reader to take away and to provide hints of your future reveal.

For example, in Retribution, the fifth and newest book in the Koa Kāne series, the knife used in an alleyway murder and the rifle used in an attempted assassination carry implications designed to mislead the reader.

In detective stories and police procedurals, bureaucracy often serves as an errand boy for misdirection. Messages get lost, forensic technicians miss clues, competing assignments, and departmental politics—what Michael Connelly labels as “high jingo” in the Harry Bosch novels—add countless opportunities for unexpected twists.

Another of my favorite techniques is the false or penultimate ending. In this case, the narrative comes to a neat close. The protagonist solves the mysteries and identifies the culprit. There are no loose strings. The story is over, except it’s not. Instead, another chapter surprises the reader with a new and different take on the ending, often creating the opportunity to begin a new story, perhaps in another book. And who knows, perhaps now the final ending of Retribution may even surprise you.”

Review: The Marriage Portrait

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I recently bought a copy of The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell, having been attracted by the brief description of a historical novel involving a marriage in XVI century Italy, and by the author’s biography.

Maggie O’Farrell is the author of Hamnet, winner the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020, and the memoir I am, I am, I am, both Sunday Times  no. 1 bestsellers. She was born in Northern Ireland in 1972 and raised in Wales and Scotland. Her novel The Hand that First Held Mine won the 2010 Costa Novel Award, and The Distance between Us won a Somerset Maugham Award. She currently lives in Edinburgh.

Maggie O’Farrell

The Marriage Portrait is set in XVI century Florence and Ferrara, Italy. The protagonist is Lucrezia, the fifth child of the Duke of Tuscany, a somewhat rebellious child, who stroked a captured tiger in the basement of her father’s castle and was thought to have charmed the beast. At the age of thirteen she was betrothed to Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara who was more than ten years her senior. He had previously been betrothed to an older sister who died. Her marriage took place when she was sixteen in Florence and she moved to Ferrara as a young duchess with a maid, Emilia, who is two years older and the daughter of her childhood nanny. There is political intrigue in Ferrara, where Alfonso’s mother has taken up a hostile alliance. One of Alfonso’s two sisters, Elizabetta, is having an affair with the captain of the palace guards, Ercole Contrari, and the other sister, Nunciata, seems hostile to Lucrezia. When Alfonso discovers the love affair between Elizabetta and Ercole, he orders that Ercole be strangled by the brutal Baldassare, the dukes cousin, while Elizabetta is required to watch. It becomes clear to Lucrezia that she is required to produce a male heir for Alfonso. She must perform her marital duty frequently. Her husband sometimes strikes her as cruel and distant and warm and loving at other times. When the couple move to a remote hunting lodge, Lucrezia is convinced that her husband intends to murder her. He refers to a marriage portrait of Lucrezia as “my first duchess”. I won’t give away the ending which is quite satisfactory, but I will say that the real first duchess, on whom Lucrezia is based, was reported to have died of a “putrid fever”, but there were rumors that she was murdered by her husband. The real Alfonso II married twice more; neither duchess produced an heir.

I have only one major criticism of this novel, and that is that it is too long. It is 432 pages long, but it could be trimmed without any significant loss and it would gain urgency. Ms O’Farrell likes to describe her settings in poetic detail which makes them beautifully clear but a bit laborious. The plot of the novel is excellent. One is convinced of being immersed in XVI century Italy with characters who are living like royalty and servants can at best survive. The values and traditions of the times are captured as well. There is a frequent transition between a short chapter which is set in the final hunting lodge and an earlier, longer chapter containing events leading up to the end. This sequencing can be confusing, and I’m not convinced it is necessary to maintain the ‘is he really going to kill me?’ tension.

Use of Crying

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Benjamin Perry has an article on Writer’s Digest dated May 25, 2023 on how crying can shape a story and a character. His analysis strikes me as particularly useful to writers.

Benjamin Perry is a minister at Middle Church and an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in outlets like The Washington Post, Slate, Sojourners, and Bustle. He has a degree in psychology from SUNY Geneseo and an MDiv from Union Theological Seminary.

Mr Perry says, “Why do characters cry? At face value, it’s an easy question: They cry because people cry. Authors want their creations to feel life-like, so just as characters share our laughter and struggle, our hopes and wild dreaming, they must share our weeping, too. But tears, like any action, can feel authentic or forced. When crying is handled poorly it can feel incidental at best and, at worst, a disingenuous attempt to make the reader feel something that the writer has not earned. However, when tears are artfully woven into the narrative, they can provide unparalleled emotional complexity and catharsis for the reader.

“In the two years I spent writing Cry, Baby: Why Our Tears Matter—a nonfiction book about the science and social ethics of crying—I was particularly attuned to how authors portrayed weeping in the fictional books I read. The book devotes an entire chapter to the way tears function in novels, myths, and sacred texts, but here I’ll condense a few of the bigger lessons I learned about how to effectively portray sobbing in a story.

1. Crying Isn’t Just About Sadness

“A common pitfall I see is writers only linking tears to sorrow. Obviously, sadness is a significant reason why people cry, but—even when it’s a principal cause—real emotions are usually more layered and multivalent. Often, it’s not just the sadness that makes our eyes well up, it’s frustration with our situation, anger at unjust circumstances, our longing for something different.

“There’s a scene in Torrey Peters’ wonderful novel Detransition, Baby where one of the main characters sits weeping on the floor of her ex-partner’s closet. Certainly, loss from the breakup is part of why she’s crying. But what truly gives the scene its power is how that loss mingles with her fragile hope about the possibility of becoming a mother—and the anger she feels about receiving what she longs for from someone she feels betrayed her. If crying is used as lazy shorthand for “sad,” we lose that emotional richness.

2. Weeping Helps to Cross a Threshold

“Crying is startlingly effective as an action to bring a character into a new place—either physically or in their heart. One of the most famous examples of this are the tears that Alice weeps when entering wonderland. Growing giant, she weeps a sea into which she later becomes literally awash. She must travel through that soggy morass to enter the door to a different world, a striking metaphor for the character’s emotional journey.

3. Link Tears to Transformation

“While tears are often connected to a particular emotion (anger, pride, joy, etc.), they’re also extremely effective to show how a character is changing or has changed. The archetypal example of this, for me, is Ebenezer Scrooge. Throughout A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens punctuates Scrooge’s ghostly visions with frequent tears, to show how the experience is changing him. This all culminates on Christmas morning when Scrooge leaps from his bed, “laughing and crying in the same breath,” upon learning that there is still time for him to choose a different future.

4. Crying Shouldn’t Only Happen Where You Expect

“Because of social forces that shape who is more comfortable crying openly, there are many cultural misconceptions about crying. Men, for example, are far less frequently depicted crying in our stories. (And the absence of those portrayals is likely part of why so many men only feel comfortable crying in private.) There is so much power in subverting these expectations!

“It’s not a book, but one of my favorite recent depictions of masculinity is the titular character in Ted Lasso. The show follows an ebullient soccer coach who motivates his characters through praise and kindness. Part of what makes the character so vibrant, however, is the way he’s shown weeping in private moments—often literally in the dark. It’s the tension between the public joy and quiet sorrow that gives Ted so much pathos.

5. There Are Many Types of Tears

“We cry for so many reasons: Awe at the majesty of a forest; pride at accomplishing something long-awaited; confusion when something happens that we don’t expect; even cunning tears wielded to deceive. Part of the beauty and mystery of tears comes from the way that they refract the fullness of our humanity. So, embrace that complexity!

“The more you’re able to use tears in multifaceted ways, the nearer they will strike reality—and the more your reader will resonate with what’s on the page. Similarly, there are lots of ways we cry: a single glimmering tear, a silent stream, or the howling sorrow of full, body wracking sobs. Matching physical embodiment to the narrative event will cultivate realism, helping your characters come alive.”

Review: Tropic of Cancer

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As you may know, this novel by Henry Miller was banned in the US as obscene for twenty-seven years after it was first published in Paris in 1934. Having never read any of Henry Miller’s work, I decided to start with this one. Now, having read it, I would say that it is not obscene (although it is occasionally explicit and does not shy away from bad language), it is, in my opinion, misogynistic. Henry Miller has little respect for women as equals.

Henry Miller was born in New York in 1891. Surprisingly, he attended City University for only one semester. (He writes with considerable skill and with an astonishing vocabulary.) He worked in personnel at Western Union for ten years before devoting himself entirely to writing. He developed a semi-autobiographical, stream of consciousness style. He lived in Paris during the 1930’s, in Greece briefly and in California until his death in 1980. He was married five times. His major works, aside from Tropic of Cancer, include The Rosy Crucifixion, Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn and The Colossus of Maroussi.

Henry Miller

Tropic of Cancer is set in Bohemian Paris during the 1930’s when Miller was a destitute, struggling writer there, having separated from his second wife, whom he recollects warmly. The book is written in the first person, as Henry Miller, and is a commentary on the human condition from a low-down, devil-may-care perspective. Many of the characters are thinly disguised friends and associates of Miller’s. The narrative is disorderly, sometimes in the present and sometimes a recollection of past events. The subjects are the peculiarities of the characters, their influences on one another, the scarcity of money, various venues and scenes in the city, sexual encounters, writing, philosophy, and employment, all revealed unvarnished and with clarity. Millers’s writing is characterised by an eagerness to reveal all, and he views his desperate financial circumstances and challenging relationships with startling optimism.

Tropic of Cancer is clearly a literary milestone in its construction, style, subject and narrative. Strangely, perhaps, it makes an engaging read. One wants to discover what Henry will discover next. For me, there is no overarching theme or message, and if one tried to construct a philosophy from the events, it would probably be self defeating. For example, Miller seems to view the church disdainfully, but his observations are congruent with Christian theology. The writing is extraordinary its clarity and erudition. While I take strong exception to Miller’s view of the role of women, I have to admire the way he has described his experiences in Bohemian Paris in the 30’s. Is it a great literary treasure? I think not. Is it a book one should read. Yes!

Review: The Maid

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The second novel – a crime novel – that my wife and I listed to during the drive down to Sicily was The Maid by Nita Prose and narrated by Lauren Ambrose. It is certainly an entertaining book, though when we started to listen I wasn’t expecting a crime novel; I was expecting a romance or an adventure. It has sold over a million copies and won a couple of awards.

Ms Prose says, “As for my professional life, I work in the publishing industry. I began years ago as an intern, photocopying edited manuscripts and secretly snooping the fascinating margin conversations between editors and writers. Currently, I’m vice president and editorial director at Simon & Schuster in Toronto, Canada, where I have the privilege of working with an incredible array of authors and publishing colleagues whom I credit with teaching me, manuscript by manuscript, book by book, the wondrous craft of writing.”

Nita Prose

The central character is Molly, who is a maid in the Regency Grand Hotel, a job to which she feels she was born and is obsessively dedicated. She likes nothing more than restoring a filthy, messy room to perfection. She has such an orderly, Polly-Anna-ish mind that I thought she has learning disabilities until I learned that she had completed some university level courses. Molly lived alone with her grandmother, who has a similar character, is full of simple-minded advice, and who dies halfway through the book. The other characters are a supervising maid, who is lazy and apt to purloin tips that have been left for Molly. There was a boyfriend who stole a large nest egg which Molly’s grandma had been saving for them. Molly’s current crush is the hotel bartender, who has suspicious friends and treats her with indifference. The hotel manager is a harried soul who treats Molly with respect, and there is the hotel dishwasher, a conscientious Mexican worker whose immigration papers are not in order. Mr Black, an older, very rich, disagreeable man in doubtful businesses, and his younger, trophy wife are frequent guests at the hotel. Molly strikes up a friendship with the wife, and Molly finds Mr Black dead in his room. It was murder and Molly is the prime suspect according to a zealous police detective. Fortunately, the doorman has a daughter who is a very clever criminal lawyer and who devises a scheme to prove Molly not guilty and to reveal the actual perpetrator. A drugs operation involving the bartender, Mr Black and assorted outside thugs is discovered. Molly knows who actually killed Mr Black, but for personal, sympathetic reasons, she does not reveal the person at the trial.

Certainly it is a clever device to create a character who goes against our reflex notions of a hotel maid: invisible, unmotivated and slap-dash. This strange character wins our sympathy, though perhaps a little reluctantly in my case. For me, Molly is a little too dedicated to her simple-minded perfectionism to be fully credible. Perhaps if Molly had some learning disabilities she would have worked better for me. The writing is lively, though not of literary quality, nor should it be. The scenes and characters are clear. The plot is well conceived, and tension is maintained throughout. For me, Molly’s motivation not to reveal the true killer was not strong enough, and in the real world the killer would have been identified.

Review: The Ghost

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I listened to this novel by Robert Harris on our drive down to Sicily from London.

Harris is a British novelist and journalist born in 1957. He was educate at Cambridge, and began his career at the BBC where he worked in news and current affairs programs. He became the political editor of The Observer at the age of 30. From 1982 to 1990 he wrote five non-fiction books. His first novel, a commercial success, was Fatherland, based on the Nazis having won the Second World War and published in 1992. He has written fourteen further novels. The Ghost was published in 2007 and was made into a film starring Pierce Brosnan.

Robert Harris

The Ghost is told in the first person by an unnamed professional ghostwriter, who is hired by a prominent publisher to complete the memoirs of Adam Lang, an ex-prime minister of the UK, thinly based on Tony Blair. Lang’s original ghostwriter, Mike McAra, a former aid to Lang, had died in strange circumstances, having fallen overboard from the Woods Hole Ferry. Most of the action takes place on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, where the publisher owns a lavish summer home. Lang’s wife is depicted as a scheming manipulator, while Lang is having an affair with his attractive female assistant. Frustrated with having an opaque picture of the real Adam Lang, the ghostwriter gets into McAra’s rented car an allows it to follow a previously set destination. This takes him to a Professor Paul Emmett, who went to Cambridge with Lang, was an associate of Lang’s wife and was a CIA agent. Lang’s former Foreign Secretary, Richard Rycart, loosely based on Robin Cook, is now working at the UN and has produced documentation that Lang had four terror suspects arrested in Pakistan by the SAS, and turned over to the CIA for interrogation. Potentially, Lang would be charged with was crimes. The ghostwriter finds Rycart’s phone number in McAra’s files, and arranges to meet Rycart in New York, where Rycart confirms that he and McAra had concluded that Emmett had recruited Lang into the CIA. Lang is assassinated by a protester. The ghostwriter finishes the book, but does not reveal Lang’s secret, because he does not confirm it before he is killed.

The book is brilliantly read by Michael Jayston who uses a distinctive voice for each major character. The plot unfolds beautifully and with constant tension until it seems likely that Lang was a CIA agent. This seems far fetched and renders a satisfactory conclusion to the book nearly impossible. The writing is captivating, though it occasionally wanders into unnecessary detail. The characters are well draw and credible. Two events struck me as lacking substantiation: the fling between the ghostwriter and Lang’s wife and the beach scene at night where McAra’s body washed up.

Perhaps Mr Harris permitted his disenchantment with Tony Blair to overrule his literary craft.

Characterisation

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In his email of 10 March, Harry Bingham, of Jericho Writers, wrote about the problem of making characters memorable to the reader.

He said, “I’m reading a book at the moment that came recommended, a psychological thriller about a small, close group of friends.

I’ve started the book. I’m seventy pages in. I already know I won’t finish it.

The problem, a terribly common one, is that I haven’t bonded with the characters. They don’t feel like real people. If I’m honest, I can’t tell one from another.

Now, quite likely, part of the problem is me. I’m TERRIBLE with names and faces. Always have been, always will be. I forget character names in my own books. I fail to recognise people I know and have chatted with extensively. My uselessness in real life probably carries over into books too.

But good characterisation should still overcome reader idiocy. Perhaps I might be slow to assemble the characters in my head, but I should still get there in the end, no? I shouldn’t be fifty pages in and still have no meaningful idea of who these people are.

Also – alarmingly – this book has avoided all the common pitfalls. So, the author has:

  • Been sure to give the characters distinctive names. They’re not all Amy, Anna, Alice and Andy.
  • Given them distinct physical characteristics. We have (inevitably) the pretty sexy one, the hunk, the dark scowling one, and so on.
  • Put a bit of zing in their dialogue
  • Endowed them with plenty of interpersonal history, likes and dislikes, divergent backgrounds and so on.

It looks like the author has done all the things she’s meant to have done – all the things that the writing books suggest. All the things that, erm, helpful weekly emails on writing advice are likely to suggest.

So what’s the problem? Why do some books never quite ground themselves? Why do some characters end the book still feeling two-dimensional and unreal?

The short answer – I’m not sure.

The longer answer is threefold.

First, I’m confident that you can’t just introduce your characters in a rush. When you’re at a party, that “Harry, meet Amy, Baz, Charlie, Dino and Esmerelda” thing doesn’t really give you a chance to remember who everyone is. But if you get five or ten minutes chatting with Amy before you get to meet Baz, and so on, you’re likely to win this game. Amy is no longer just a face and a name. She’s now someone who comes stored with her own little fact-file. When you meet Baz, you have enough data on Amy that she can safely be put into storage as you meet Baz.

I think the same rule applies in books. Slower introductions are better. And if, for example, your book just does have a group of characters turning up in a cluster – a group of friends meeting up for a long weekend – you can still split them apart. Amy and Baz can hike to the house from the rural train station. Dino and Charlie can score a cheeky snog in the kitchen. Esmerelda can just be late (she’s always late) and arrive in a flurry at the end of chapter two.

And then too, I think you need to look away from, not directly at, the issue.

What I mean here is that you don’t solve the problem of character identification by aiming to provide a torrent of quick data. “Hey, reader, you haven’t met Charlie before, so here’s a quick summary of what you need to know. She’s the tall, blonde, pretty one, OK? Gifted at university (studied English), but wasted in a sort of glam-but-dead-endy PR job. Blah blah blah.”

That kind of introduction, especially if it comes amongst a spatter of other such introductions, is likely to wash over and through the reader. I think they just don’t work.

Instead, just show your characters in action. Then it’s simple: just tell the reader what the reader needs to know to make sense of the action. So let’s say that two or three friends have gone out to dinner. Leaving the restaurant, Charlie breaks a heel. You now have a perfectly sensible opportunity to describe her clothes. You might well use the chance to describe her appearance more generally. (“I could see passers-by looking over at us. A woman, blonde and pretty, in a silver sequinned dress, lying on the pavement. You can tell they thought she was drunk, and perhaps she was a bit …”)

You’re still conveying data to the reader, but you’re not doing so by presenting an index-card of facts. You’re doing so by telling a story. The reader doesn’t feel engaged by the index-card approach (it feels like work), but they do feel engaged by story (it’s why they’re reading.)

The third trick, I think, is that you can do much less than you think. It’s easy to think that you need to do it all: How tall is our pretty Charlie? What’s her eye colour? What do her mum and dad do for a living? Can she ride? (I bet she can ride.) Was she academically strong? Is she lazy? Does she love kids?

The more facts you shove at the reader, the more the reader is likely to resist.

And – it doesn’t matter.

Your mantra can be simply this: tell the reader what’s necessary for the story. Not more, not less.

That way, you’re not asking the reader to keep track of data that they don’t need. You’re giving them only what they do need, when they need it, in a way that slots logically into your story. Right at the end of the PSes, I’ve put a chunk of text from early in a novel – a group of five people going out to dinner.

What’s interesting to me, reading that chunk back in the light of this email, is how brusque I am. Two of my five characters aren’t relevant longer term, so I essentially discard them. I tell the reader next to nothing about them.

The other three do have longer term relevance, but even here I present virtually no character-data unless and until it becomes relevant to the moment in question. So one of the characters – David ‘Buzz’ Brydon – is a fit, intelligent, capable, courageous police officer. He’s not introduced like that, until it becomes relevant. Then, when the story needs him to run, Fiona says simply, “Buzz, who’s superfit …” That data slots so naturally into the story, that the reader just absorbs it with the story. There’s no sense anywhere of an index-card being presented.

With Buzz’s colleague, Jon Breakell, it’s the same thing to start with: appearances don’t matter. Then Fiona asks him to stay with the two women and he “puffs out his not-very-mighty chest and indicates his willingness to protect the women from all perils and dangers of this night.” That’s still hardly a complete physical description, but you already have something about him that’s memorable and presented in a way wholly congruent with the story-task at hand.

Buzz and Jon Breakell start to take shape as the story takes shape. The reader’s expected knowledge of those two keeps exact pace with the story itself.

You can do the same. Go slow. Stick with story. Do less than you think you ought to.”

And here is Harry’s text about the five characters:

“Pizza. Puddings. The works. A nice enough evening, except that it’s got to the point where everyone wants to go home.

So we troop up the Hayes, beneath a soft night sky and the first hints of oncoming rain. We’re talking of nothing much, when Buzz’s phone bleeps a text. He looks at the phone and says ‘Crime report. Up here.’

His finger points us up the Hayes, where it forks off into Victoria Place. He starts walking faster. I can see he wants to run, except he doesn’t want to abandon his Intended.

I say, ‘Jon, can you stay with Penny and Jade? We’ll meet you up by the castle.’

Jon nods. Puffs out his not-very-mighty chest and indicates his willingness to protect the women from all perils and dangers of this night. [As soon as Jon becomes relevant to the story, he starts to take shape. Fiona is characteristically colourful in the way she speaks about him, and we still don’t know hair colour or family background or that kind of thing, but we start to feel Jon because we see and feel him in the setting of a story.] Buzz and I jog, then outright run, up Victoria Place, then down Church Street.

Buzz, who’s superfit, says, ‘Double assault. Ambulance on the way. Uniforms present. Sounds nasty.’ [Now we start to get more data about Buzz – he’s fit, he’s efficient in a police-y sort of way – but again, we only get data relevant to the situation.]

I don’t comment, just run. The truth is, if the scene is already being attended by police and ambulance services, our services aren’t really required. Buzz isn’t even a detective these days. He now runs a Data Intelligence Team which helps the force direct its resources to where they’re most needed.

But still. Buzz is the kind of man whose boots run towards disasters, not away from them. My own, more elegant, boots share that same basic mentality. [More data in these two paras. Again, directly relevant to the matter at hand.]”

What Readers Hate

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There is an interesting article on the Washington Post website dated 8 February 2023 by the Book Critic, Ron Charles, about what book readers hate.

Since the article is quite long, I have posted excerpts below:

“A few weeks ago, I asked readers of our Book Club newsletter to describe the things that most annoy them in books.

The responses were a tsunami of bile. Apparently, book lovers have been storing up their pet peeves in the cellar for years, just waiting for someone to ask. Hundreds and hundreds of people responded, exceeding my wildest dreams.

Dreams, in fact, are a primary irritation for a number of readers. Such reverie might have worked for Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” or Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” but no more, thank you very much. “I absolutely hate dream sequences,” writes Michael Ream. “They are always SO LITERAL,” Jennifer Gaffney adds, “usually an example of lazy writing.”

Laziness may be the underlying cause of several other major irritants.

Sharp-eyed readers are particularly exasperated by typos and grammatical errors. Patricia Tannian, a retired copy editor, writes, “It seems that few authors can spell ‘minuscule’ or know the difference between ‘flout’ and ‘flaunt.’” Katherine A. Powers, Book World’s audiobook reviewer, laments that so many “authors don’t know the difference between ‘lie’ and ‘lay.’”

“If those who write and publish the book won’t make the effort to get it right,” says Jane Ratteree, “the book doesn’t deserve my time and attention.”

A few words need to be retired or at least sent to the corner of the page for a timeout. Andrew Shaffer — a novelist himself — says no one should use “the word ‘lubricious’ more than once in a book (looking at you, James Hynes).” And don’t get that confused with “lugubrious,” which Wanda Daoust is equally tired of. Meanwhile, Cali Bellini finds that the word “preternatural” is “overused, abused and never necessary.”

While we’re at it, let’s avoid “bemused.” “It doesn’t mean what you think it means,” says Paula Willey.

If these responses suggest anything, it’s that readers don’t want to waste their time.

Excessive length was a frequent complaint. Jean Murray says, “First books by best-selling authors are reasonable in length; then they start believing that every word they write is golden and shouldn’t be cut.” She notes that Elizabeth George’s first novel, “A Great Deliverance” was 432 pages. Her most recent, “Something to Hide” is more than 700.

But it’s not just the books that are too long. Everything in them is too long, too. Readers complained about interminable prologues, introductions, expositions, chapters, explanations, descriptions, paragraphs, sentences, conversations, sex scenes, fistfights and italicized passages.

In fact, McCarthy may be the source of another frequent irritant: the evaporation of quotation marks. If it’s meant to seem sophisticated or streamlined, it’s not working. Speaking of Amor Towles’s “Lincoln Highway” Nancy George says the lack of “quotation marks for dialogue is just distracting.”

When authors don’t use quotation marks, “sometimes you have to reread a passage to determine who is speaking,” writes Linda Hahn.

It’s like a film director shooting in black-and-white to signal seriousness of purpose, writes Michael Bourne. Mostly, though, it just makes it hard to tell when the characters are talking. See?

Such confusion is akin to a larger objection: Readers have had quite enough of what Susan Mackay Smith calls “gratuitously confusing timelines.”

“Everything doesn’t have to be a linear timeline,” concedes Kate Stevens, “but often authors seem to employ a structure that makes the book unreadable (or at least very difficult to follow). There seems to be no reason why this is done other than to show off how clever they are.”

But clever authors are still preferable to preternaturally unrealistically clever children or talking animals, who are deeply irksome in novels — along with disabled characters who exist only to provide treacly inspiration.

And how discouraging at this late date to find so many “women who always need rescuing,” as Deborah Gravel puts it. The old sexist tropes are still shambling along in too many novels. Even when female characters are given modern-day responsibilities and occupations, they’re often pictured through the same old gauzy lens. “Nothing makes me put down a book faster,” writes Heather Martin-Detka, “than overly sexy descriptions of women in unsexy situations, e.g. a scientist at work in the lab.”

NJ Baker is done with “stupid women who start out with intelligence, then turn into blithering idiots over men who aren’t worth their shoe leather.” She admits, “Sure, it worked for Jane Austen (think ‘Pride and Prejudice’), but if you’re stuck in that type of story arc, you are not Austen.”

Of course, the classic objections that have dogged novels since they began are still current. Many readers are disgusted with explicit sex scenes (including references to “his member”) and gratuitous violence, especially against animals, children and women. “I love detective fiction of all sorts,” writes Margaret Crick, “but graphic descriptions that go on for pages, no.”

Surely, somewhere some cynical, market-driven AI scientist is working on a novel-writing program that can accommodate all these complaints for maximum marketability. Trouble is, the things we hate in books demonstrate not only infinite variety but infinite specificity.

And with that, we have come to the end.

Book writers, you’ve been warned.”

Review: The Beginning of Spring

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I bought this book because it was listed by the Guardian as one of the best one hundred novels written in English, and I had never heard of it.

The author, Penelope Fitzgerald was born in London in 1915, and was one of the first women to graduate from Oxford. For a time in the 1960s she co-edited a literary magazine with her husband, an alcoholic, who was barred as a lawyer. This led to a decade of poverty during which the Fitzgeralds lived in subsidized housing. Mrs Fitzgerald taught theatre and at school until she was 70. Her writing career began at 58. She wrote nine novels, three of which, including this novel, were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 1979 she won the Booker Prize for a fourth novel, Offshore. She died in April 2000.

Penelope Fitzgerald

The Beginning of Spring is set largely in Moscow in 1913. The principal character is Frank Reid, an Englishman who was born in Moscow and has a printing business there. Without any notice, his wife Nellie leaves to go back to England with the three children, but while they are still in Russia, the children are sent back to their father. Frank contacts his wife’s brother, Charlie, but he does not know where she is.

Frank seeks a nanny to take care of the children. He rejects an older, professional nanny, who for reasons unknown has been dismissed from her position, and he hires a beautiful, young salesgirl, Lisa, from adepartment store. Lisa is quiet and serene; the children admire her. Frank falls in love with her, he makes advances and she reciprocates. A student who breaks into Frank’s printing business is apparently Lisa’s ex-lover. Selwyn Crane, Frank’s chief accountant confesses that he had planned to run away with Nellie, but he decided against it. Nellie went to live in a Tolstoyan community in England, but she decided she does not like the communal life, and suddenly returns to Moscow. Meanwhile, Lisa leaves Russia illegally.

This is a gentle, almost passive novel, which nonetheless holds one’s attention through the uncertainties of the intentions of the characters. Moreover, the descriptions of the settings, the characters and the events are of sufficient clarity that one feels comfortable with them, but one cannot predict the direction of travel. In fact, the novel ends without answering some of the lingering questions. Ms Fitzgerald’s descriptions of the culture, the people and the settings of Moscow a century ago, are startling in their unique accuracy. She studied Russian in he 1960’s and visited Moscow in 1975.

What makes this novel unique is its Moscow setting and its simultaneous clarity and uncertainty. The story is also quite captivating.