How many fiction writers do we have here?

Loved to read this thread, and would also like it to be revived, so:

“The fact that I am allowed to stand by while he is being burnt cost me 80 quid on top. I don’t mind. I don’t want them to toss or swap him around and just end up giving me any old ashes from someone else.”

This is the beginning of a radio drama, that I am currently working on.
Comments are invited. (English is not my first language and the play is not written in English, so please don’t destroy the spelling and grammar, which are usually not the important bit anyway…)

@Chris_Rivan We see the uncomfortable implication – the punch, if you will – between the quote and the opening line. But now I feel like I need a bit more – the next paragraph – to have a real sense of the opening, since the first paragraph was so very short!

I get two kinds of chilling from this opening. First, there is the disturbing chill from the seeming twistedness of the first line – our narrator paying money to watch someone being burned. Second, when our perspective is shifted to the idea that, oh, this is about cremation of remains, we are then struck with the chill of our narrator’s indifference. I think the initial misdirection effectively trumpets the narrator’s disregard for the deceased. So that’s nice. At the same time, the casual tone communicates humorous intent.

Thank you so much, gr!
I hadn’t noticed this first possible interpretation of some really dark turn where someone pays for seeing someone die - ergh, having been all in with the cremation of it all.
The question of tone between the comedic and the more gory aspects of this story is something I will certainly consider more. I liked to listen to Ron Goodwins Miss Marple Film- music during some parts of the writing of the play, which is 70% set in a graveyard. I would love to find a tone where death and catastroph can just as easily be taken lightly in a PG Woodhouse- type way as also sometimes felt deeply by the characters as the stories develop. The way this coin falls could be something unexpected, which would be a real challenge to myself to allow for this duality, also in the directing and the compostion.
Gosh. That was really helpful. I felt a bit stuck, having sent the first draft to my editor yesterday.
As it turn out as a twist at the end of the scene, the crematee is a huge, formerly fierce livestock guardian dog, the narrators late pet, and her detachement and irritability are part of the expression of sorrow of her otherwise dry personality at the beginning of the story.

I used to never write in present tense but have taken to it in recent years, and quite enjoy the posibilities, if I want the story to be told in the past at first and then flip it to the present, where the narrator is plunged into the whole uncertainty that the present brings always. And I massively enjoyed one time when I had all my characters tell their future lives in two sentences at the end of the play in future perfect.
Everything is good, if it’s well done.

there are plenty of perfectly good books written in the present tense. it,s still an unusual choice that will jar with readers. some will recalibrate and be perfectly comfortable with it after a paragraph or two, and some will find it annoying for the whole book. it also has the challenge that it tends to slow pacing down. that,s fine if that works for your narrative, but note that everytime you switch quickly to past tense to accelerate past something you,ll give people that little jar again.

my advice is use it only when you have a good reason to. and even when you have a good reason, don,t is still usually the best advice.


a reminder – i will only comment on your passages if expressly invited. because i,m blunt. oh so very blunt.

Here’s mine:

“Ben! Ben! Ben!” Mason called breathlessly to his friend between giggles, imploring him
to wait as he hurried to catch up. They’d spent the morning together, building, exploring,
and having grand adventures in their virtual Minecraft world.

I guess as a matter of technicality, this is really the first (though it’s still mutable)… I start the book with a teaser:

What makes your typical, average 12-year-old boy, his 10-year-old brother, and
their three best friends commandeer a four-hundred ton, thirty-five megawatt, nuclear-powered
locomotive and race it through the foothills of beautiful West Virginia, on their
way to a secret rendezvous at an undisclosed destination, with his Tutor, two NASA
Astronauts, the Russians, a small cadre of Federal Agents, the Denizens of a
Secret Society, —and his Mother— all in hot pursuit…

  *Great question, it all started…*

I feel very present with this breathless catch-up with laughter – probably on the heels of some moment of boyhood hijinks. I may be unfairly advantaged by having grown up running around with lots of brothers.

In fact, I found myself wanting to be in that moment a bit longer. It’s pretty compressed and so it goes by very quickly. Our boy Mason does five different things in that first sentence (calls, pants, giggles, implores, hurries to catch-up). That’s a lot of action! I’m thinking spreading that out in two or three sentences might be good. I know you want to grab them by the scruff of the neck, but remember, your reader just switched their imagination on a second ago!

I also suspect that letting that nice first image come out a little more will make the reader feel more vividly the teasing act of postponement which is your final sentence there. Because the more we are seeing the two boys in that moment, the more we are wondering what sort of mischief they are hurrying away from. And the more we are wondering about that, the more we feel the ensuing bit of (informative) redirect.

As for the teaser paragraph: talk about hijinks! The passage builds in a fun way – first you think the characterization of the train is already your over-the-top, but, no, it keeps piling on. I very much like rounding it out with ‘his Mother’, thereby making her the Biggest Trouble when those boys get caught. I wonder if having the Tutor on the list maybe diminishes that final flourish a bit though – it would be a bigger joke for Mother to be the only thing on the list that is i) personally connected to the boy, and ii) a part of ordinary life.

This may be an artifact of having read the opener before the teaser, but I was thrown a bit by the ‘his’ in ‘his Mother’. There are five characters driving the action in this teaser (train stealers!), two of which have been set out for attention, but somehow I had not cognized that the 12-year-old was the protagonist (which is what saying ‘his’ there does), rather than the two of them. If they are really going to be a pair protagonist, then maybe suppress the three friends info and say ‘their Mother’?

It would not be fair to ask you what does make them commandeer that locomotive, but you definitely left me wanting to know.

with appreciation,
gr

The teaser is very old and hasn’t been revised in quite a while apart from updating a couple of items. I put it
there as a “come-on”, to “cut me some slack” with the reader as I put together a slower buildup into the action. It’s important to me to get it right, so I’ve left it for last, after I have the entire book to consider in getting the right phrasing.

I LOVE your analysis of my opening paragraph. My book isn’t specifically written to be MG or YA, though I suspect many people will put it into one of those two categories since the MC’s are all young people. The protag, my son Mason, is 12 yo, and his brother is 10. The other three MC’s are Mason’s actual real friends, though fictionalized for the story (with their and their parent’s permissions).

EDIT: And the opening line is straight from my memory, on one evening when Mason, Maxwell, and Ben were all playing some game together-- it could have been Minecraft, and the whole house was infused with their laughter.

Mason himself passed away from leukemia in 2019 and the book(s) are “The Further Adventures of Mason”, in which I try to give him adventures he was never able to have. This particular one is titles “Mason and the Atomic Train”. He loved trains, as well as computers, electronics, robotics, astronomy… and he wanted to attend MIT when he graduated… (and he had the grades for it) so all of these are elements, as he and his friends are catapulted into a rollicking adventure.

If you would like a larger sampling, here’s the first couple of pages. The Inciting incident, however, doesn’t occur until chapter two.

Dedication: Dearest Mason, May you always have glorious adventures, and
your gentle, joyous spirit live on forever.

Mason Owen Whitten
(May 14, 2007 - September 18, 2019)

===

“Ben! Ben! Ben!” Mason called breathlessly to his friend between giggles, imploring him
to wait as he hurried to catch up. They’d spent the morning together, building, exploring,
and having grand adventures in their virtual Minecraft world.

Mason brought his character to a halt while Ben’s character tromped a bit further
onward. In the real world, Mason tugged his headset microphone a little closer, turning
to face Ben in the video chat window. “Whatcha doing?”

“Getting us something to eat,” came Ben’s reply. Back in the game, he had his
sword out, having stumbled across some hapless creature, and was now busy chasing it
around while hacking and slashing in a heroic bid to defeat it.

Mason giggled nonstop, unable to conceal his merriment, as he reveled in his
friend’s comical antics.

After several near-misses, Ben was finally in a position to deliver the coup de
grace, and with a single blow, split the beastie into a large pile of delicious steaks. “Hey,
look!” he said, turning to Mason and mugging for the camera, “Pork chops!” He scooped
them up and tossed them into his backpack, eliciting further giggles from Mason and
sending both boys into a fit of serious laughter.

⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅

Mason was a smiling, fun-loving boy kitted-out with a big honkin’ laptop, a flashy,
multicolored light-up keyboard, and a huge set of headphones sporting green-tinted,
kitty-cat ears perched atop his balding head. He sat with his knees drawn up,
scrunched between his bed and roll-around table, and half-buried among the piles of
pillows, books, balloons, get-well cards, teddy bears, Lego kits, and the myriad other
things people give kids cooped-up in hospital rooms.

Next to the bed, dangling from a pole, was a thick mass of tangled tubing snaking
down and back up under his shirt, where it connected to a pair of access ports implanted
in his chest. The tubes delivered fluids, medicines, and whatever else his slender,
twelve-year-old body needed to combat his illness.

Ben was Mason’s best gaming buddy. Though he was a couple of years older and
in-person towered over him ‘like a small tree’—as Mason frequently joked, not that it
mattered much in their online world. The boys had forged an iron bond, conspiring daily
to spend every waking moment playing their rowdy games and hanging out.

⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅

Mason turned from the computer to stretch his arms, his brown eyes blinking at the
bright sunlight streaming in through the enormous, eleventh-floor window. He peered
out across the bustling city streets to the gleaming waters of Baltimore Harbor, which lay
just beyond. The faint odors of bleach and alcohol tickled his nose while he surveyed his
little room, barely big enough for himself and the bed, much less a sink and a bathroom
too. The remaining space contained a minimalistic chair that virtually disappeared
behind a sideways glance, and a blocky, pleather couch for those occasions he did have
actual, real visitors. The chair was currently occupied by his dad, who was busy surfing
the net on his own computer.

His gaze touched briefly on the small sink and mirror directly opposite the foot of
his bed, quite unremarkable apart from it being white—as was the whole room itself—
everything in it was exceedingly white… most excruciatingly white. In fact, the only real
color anywhere was in the orange chair presently propping up his father, the blue couch
by the window, and the silver pole beside the bed. And, of course, the door. Made of
some type of stout wood—probably oak, he decided. It was his own little home away
from home, such as it was.

One feature he did enjoy, was the spiffy strings of colorful Neopixel lights his dad
helped him rig over and around the sink so he could see them from his vantage on the
bed. Some days he passed the time programming in new sequences and patterns to wow
the nurses when they came to do their rounds. Everyone liked his lights.

Looking down, he ran a thumb across the cool, plastic surface of his laptop
computer—his prized possession and gateway to everything he held dear—his friends,
his games, his virtual worlds, plus all of his favorite YouTube channels. Nearly
everything important in his twelve tender years, he accessed through that black plastic,
nondescript box. He continued caressing the smooth, rounded edge until his thumb
finally slipped around to the side.

He turned his attention to the screen once more, where Ben sat patiently waiting
for him to return. His blue eyes lit up when Mason asked, “You wanna play ‘Kerbal
Space Program’?”

Ben grinned. He was partial to action games, in contrast to Mason’s usual fare of
science, simulation, and strategy games, but ‘Kerbal Space Program’ was always a good
compromise as it combined the better elements they both enjoyed.

“Yeah, I’d like to,” said Ben, raising Mason’s hopes, before dashing them again
when he had to decline. “I gotta wait though, for my dad to get home so I can use his
computer. It won’t run on mine.”

“Mmm, okay,” Mason grumbled, slumping down behind his keyboard. He was
disappointed, but it didn’t last long. He brightened up quickly.

Ben changed the subject. “Do you have your tutor today?”

Mason nodded. “Yeah, at two o’clock. I gotta write a report.”

“What about?”

“Sunspots and solar flares.”

Ben snorted. “Better you than me!” He sent his character skipping away.

Mason watched it go for a moment before hollering out, “Hey! Wait for me!”

Ben paused and looked back, motioning for him to hurry up.

2 Likes

To respond to this more directly, the teaser originally only had Mason (ie. “him/his”) but then my mom pointed out that Maxwell might have his feelings hurt if he noticed that he wasn’t getting listed billing in the teaser, so I added him, but haven’t really gone through and finalized (harmonized) it yet with respect to the finished version of the book. His Tutor is one of the actual, real people fictionalized in the book.

EDIT: So to be clear, Mason is the protagonist, and Maxwell, Ben, Kyleigh, and Alexandra are all the MC’s, with Heather (his tutor) a main character that appears in various places in the book. Those are all the “real” people represented. It’s an ensemble story, so they’re all in the adventure together.

1 Like

This is the current iteration of the opening scene of the visual novel I am working on, Realm of the Grand Fabricator:

“Where am I?”

The sea of light is so bright it hurts the eyes. Only the constant hissing outbursts of steam from all directions allow him to just barely make out the outlines of large shapes, some of them clicking, clanking, moving and rotating. Are those cogwheels?

“Do not feel fear, I mean no harm to you.”

A soft and pleasant, even if distinctly mechanical, female voice feels as if it is emanating from the inside of his head.

“Who… Who are you?”

The light and the voice alike start to fade away: “I cannot maintain the Anomaly for long, but I will find you…”

His guts give him the feeling of going down in an elevator rapidly. A long and deafening thud and the universe finally comes to a halt. A wave of cold sends shivers down his spine.

Darkness.

Scrivener is helping me give birth to one of my first novels : “la pendue du pont de la Dranse” (“the girl hanged off the Dranse bridge”).

The first sentence is

“Jeanine Maudet se suicida dans la semaine du 24 juin (2024), l’une des plus chaudes de la saison.”

which, translated should read like

“Jeanine Maudet committed suicide in the week of June 24 (2024), one of the hottest of the season.”

Want to know why ?

not yet. it,s a perfectly good opening sentence, but a good half of the sentence is telling me about the weather. i,m also sad to say that suicide isn’t that uncommon. it,s the 10th highest cause of death in the us. We get nearly 5000 a year here in the uk and france,s suicide rate is significantly higher than the european average.

so like I said, it’s a good enough opening but if you are relying on a shock open to get me engaged you,ll need a lot from the rest of the paragraph to tell me why either i as a reader should be interested, or why your protagonist should.

drop the first couple of paras in here and we,ll take a look.

Hi everyone!

 I'm a fairly new user to Scrivener, but so far I am absolutely loving it! It's very well thought out and actually works remarkably well with how especially in regards to how I personally like to write. 

I generally get what seems like a spontaneous burst of ideas about settings, characters and other things. This usually happens after learning something new and exciting or even reading other stories! Once I have an idea, I like to think about how my take on it might be different than other stories like it. After I have come to that conclusion I will start to think about it more and more and then the ideas start to flow fairly quickly. When this happens I have to have sit and just write and write and i usually see it as a form of saving my ideas because I can’t rely on my memory to store it forever.

Having a tool like Scrivener is pretty amazing in that regard, because it’s always there ready to be filled and I really am looking forward to finishing my first science fiction / fantasy novel with it.

First words of my first fiction Novel…new here started this in 2015 but stopped - now being retired I decided to get back into it a month ago…

  Alarm radio wakes me up, slowly I sit up on the edge of the bed reaching over to the window opening the blinds.
    Look out the window, maybe the Sun will show itself for a change. It’s a typical cool cloudy morning in Rockyshore, being a seashore town we get a lot of morning fog.
1 Like

Thank you Floss for your answer. Must say I am still thinking about your remark and how I can improve it… Because I personnaly like this debut, thinking it creates a tension between the nice weather and the cold death.

Maybe I should transform it to “Jeanine Maudet committed suicide in the last week of June 2024, the most delightful days of the season.”

As requested, I would be glad to add a few more sentences to see if it helps you get a better picture. However, these just describe the scene a little bit more. Here they are:

“One of these weeks when the beaches on Lake Geneva are taken by storms of young people leaving high school, as well as families trying to calm their overexcited children.
Her 63 kg were stretching a new mountaineer’s rope. A knot tied her securely to the ladder, 3 meters below the bridge and 10 meters above the river. Around Jeanine’s neck, another knot secured a large loop. Between the two, 7 meters of rope.”

firstly, thanks for coming back with some additional sentences. i have a few observations if i may.

the passage is breaching the basic storytelling principle of show not tell. instead of telling us ,jeanine committed suicide, show us. now, i don,t know how important the suicide is to your story, but you have two main ways of showing rather than telling here… the first is to show the suicide itself and describe the final moments of her life. if it,s important that we have some mystery about the precise details, instead show us through the eyes of the people who found her and their reactions, or the police informing a next of kin.

opening with the weather is a bit of cliche. is the weather relevant. if not, you are in danger of watering down the impact of your opening, or having the narrator come across as heartless. consider what you,d think of a friend who, in telling you about their weekend, noted that it was nice and sunny, and their friend killed herself. if you really like the juxtaposition, again, a much better approach is to show not tell. have the person that finds her sweating through their shirt, shielding their eyes from the glaring sun in order to stare up at the body.

i will say that i thought the detail about the mountaineers rope was excellent. i,d be tempted to go a bit further and say whether it was well used or bought especially for the occasion — assuming we can know such a thing. by all means mention the visual of her body resting 7m below a 10m bridge, but avoid over-sharing or explaining the dimensions as it can start to read like an inappropriately morbid bit of maths homework.

of course, all of this will have to be heavily altered to suit your story — depending, for example, if this is the end of jeanine,s story or the beginning of someone else,s.

and as always, take the opinions of strangers on the internet with a pinch of salt… use what you like; ignore what doesn,t ring true to you.

1 Like
  1. Actually, we are told the rope is new.

  2. It might be useful to get more precise about where the “telling” is. The rope passage definitely paints a macabre picture. It is showing us the scene. The real telling here is being told up front that the character committed suicide. That is definitely extra information and removes immediately from the table one mystery we might naturally have fretted about.

  3. I confess had some trouble picturing the grim scene as described in the rope passage, though too thought the approach to it was nice. The title of the book project leads me to expect that the body will be hanging from the bridge, but somehow what with the introduction of the ladder and being tied to it, the idea that the body is suspended from the bridge disappears from view and so I was left unclear exactly what I should be picturing. A ladder under a bridge is so out of scale to my mind, it is a kind of confounding factor for me. Or maybe the ladder is part of the bridge (access ladder) and not below it? Is the ladder dangling in the air below the body? Maybe I am being extraordinarily obtuse, but I can’t seem to work it out! Am sure the author has a particular image here, but my mind seems to need a little nudge in order to lock in on it.

good point. i guess i just wanted more from the description.