Great beginnings

I’ve been thinking a lot about beginnings lately. (Coincidentally, there was a great blog about this not too long ago at Murder She Writes).

I’m about to start the new book, and I want to give the beginning more thought this time. Usually, my beginnings would just sort of come to me. Sometimes, partway through the book, I’d rethink my beginning. Sometimes I’d have to put something before the beginning, to set the tone for the book.

All authors have their strengths. I think the best first chapter guy in the business is Harlan Coben. So yesterday, on a perfect fall Arizona day, the deep blue sky throbbing overhead, the bougainvillea lush and deep pink, the pool glittering like an acquamarine, I sat on the chaise in my “office” (read, back terrace), batted at a few mosquitos, and read some Harlan Coben beginnings.

I honestly don’t think you could beat the beginning of JUST ONE LOOK.

Here is what he does in the first twenty pages or so of JUST ONE LOOK.

He knows his people and the situation cold. The suburban lifestyle, the love of one’s kids.
He makes that situation normal, and the character expects that normalcy to always be there.
He puts tension in every scene — there is always conflict. Conflict with another mother (small), conflict with the Photomat guy - nothing is easy.

He foreshadows trouble in the first sentence.
He goes forward in the scene but drops in a little thing from the past, sometimes one sentence, like “her leg still ached at times”. From what? we wonder.

We’re getting close to something important, and then he interrupts it with a phone call, something else to think about. And the tension builds again because we’re no closer to where we want to be.

He finally gets to the big thing, the thing we have been waiting for, and he slows it down with description. In this case, it is about a packet of photographs, and we know something is wrong and he describes the packet, and the photographic paper, and the this and the that until we’re ready to chew the scenery - WAIT for it - and then we finally find out what it’s about.

And that brings up more questions. Who put the other photo in with the rest? Why? How did they do it? Who’s in the photo?

The main character wants to know, too, so she marches down to the Photomat, and we see her character in action. She is smart, she won’t take any bullshit, she thinks on her feet, she WILL find out, if not now, later.

She needs answers and only her husband can give them, so she gets ready to talk to him, for some relief, for everything to be the way it always has been in their marriage, one day after another, and–

He takes off. She hears him drive out. This is not the way life is supposed to be.

How can you not turn the page? JUST ONE LOOK is an object lesson for a great opening chapter.

I think I’m a strong writer in most respects, but particularly with standalones, it’s good to get out of the gate fast. You need tactical speed.

One of the great stories in horseracing is about how Seabiscuit’s trainer Tom Smith prepared Seabiscuit to face off with War Admiral in the big match race. War Admiral always broke fast and that early speed would make it impossible for a horse to catch up with him. Seabiscuit just left the gate the normal way. But the wiley trainer decide to take War Admiral out of his game by getting Seabiscuit to outbreak him. He did this by using a bell and having the jock really get into him—and he did this in secret sessions. Every time the horse heard the bell, he’d take off like hell was on his heels.

Seabiscuit did outbreak War Admiral, and it did take War Admiral out of his game. All complacence gone, War Admiral’s jockey had to make it up as he went along. Suddenly War Admiral was playing catch-up. That maneuver resulted in a four-length win by Seabiscuit.

So it can be done. You can train yourself to do things better. In my police procedurals, my beginnings were just fine. But now I’ve got to break faster, and put up faster times at every pole.

Without changing things so dramatically that I lose all sense of self.