Beginnings middles and e.., p.1
Beginnings, Middles and Ends, page 1
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nancy Kress is the author of over a dozen books of fiction, including Beggars in Spain, which won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards. She is a regular columnist for Writer's Digest magazine and her short fiction frequently appears in Omni. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.
BEGINNINGS,
MIDDLES
AND ENDS
BY
NANCY KRESS
Excerpt from the short story “Lily Red” by Karen Joy Fowler used with permission of the author.
Beginnings, Middles and Ends. Copyright © 1993 by Nancy Kress. Printed and bound in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published by Writer's Digest Books, an imprint of F + W Publications, Inc., 4700 East Galbraith Road, Cincinnati, Ohio 45236; (800) 289-0963. First paperback edition 1999.
Portions of this book have previously appeared in Nancy Kress's “Fiction” column in Writer's Digest magazine.
Other fine Writer's Digest Books are available from your local bookstore or direct from the publisher.
Visit our Web site at www.writersdigest.com for information on more resources for writers.
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10 12
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kress, Nancy.
Beginnings, middles and ends / by Nancy Kress.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 13: 978-0-89879-905-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 10: 0-89879-905-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Fiction—Technique. I. Title.
PN335.K73 1993
808.3—dc20 92-29822
CIP
Edited by Tack Heffron
For Miriam,
Nick, Mark, and
all the other writers
I've been privileged to work with
as students
“A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes part of the experience of the person who reads it.”
—Ernest Hemingway
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Story in Your Head
PART I: BEGINNINGS
1. The Very Beginning: Your Opening Scene
2. The Later Beginning: Your Second Scene
3. Help for Beginnings: Early Revision
PART II: MIDDLES
4. The Middle: Staying on Track
5. Under Development: Your Characters at Midstory
6. Help for Middles: Getting Unstuck
PART III: ENDINGS
7. Satisfying Endings: Delivering on the Promise
8. The Very End: Last Scene, Last Paragraph, Last Sentence
9. Help for Endings: The Last Hurrah
INTRODUCTION
THE STORY
IN YOUR HEAD
There's a story in your head—or maybe just the start of a story. Characters are walking around in there, talking to each other, doing things to the furniture, gesturing and shouting and laughing. You can see it all so clearly, like a movie rolling in your mind. It's going to be terrific. Excited, you sit down to write.
But something happens. The story that comes out on the page isn't the same as the story in your head. The dialogue is flatter, the action doesn't read right, the feel just isn't the same. There's a gap between the story you can visualize and the one you know how to write. And at the moment, that gap resembles the Mariana Trench—deep, scary and uncrossable.
If you've ever felt this way about your writing, you're not alone. The truth is that there's always a gap between the story as you imagined it—compelling, insightful, rich with subtle nuance—and what actually ends up in the manuscript. This is because stories must be written, and read, one word at a time, with information accumulating in the reader's mind to create the full picture. This slow, linear accretion of impressions can't ever quite equal that perfect flash of inspiration in which all the parts of the story—action, meaning, nuances, insights, all of it—burst into the brain all at once. Words, unlike movies, are not a multisensory event. Words are symbols, and symbols don't work directly on the human senses. They work secondhand, through suggestions to the reader's imagination, through words describing what you saw in your imagination.
No wonder there's always a gap between the story in the writer's head and the one she puts into the reader's head.
For professional writers, that gap may be small. A professional learns what information to present—and in what order—to make the words convey her original vision as closely as possible. The beginning writer must learn this, too. One way to do that is to write a lot—some people say a million words—until you get better through trial and error. Another is to receive reliable criticism on which parts of your story are conveying your vision and which are not. A good writing class can do this for you. A third way is to read books like this to learn how good writers present information to their reader's imagination.
That “third way” isn't really sufficient by itself, of course. Learning about writing won't help you write better unless you actually apply what you learn to a story in progress—just as learning about the ideal golf swing won't improve your score unless you actually practice on the links. There's no substitute for practice. The Mariana Trench doesn't get crossed by discussing it.
Nor will this book help you improve the quality of the story in your head. That vision comes from everything about you: your experiences, your imagination, your beliefs about the world, your powers of perception, your interests, your sophistication, your previous reading, your soul. Vision, sometimes called talent, is not a teachable attribute.
What is teachable, and what this book can help you with, is craft. Craft is the process of getting the story in your head onto the page in a form that readers can follow, and remain interested in, and enjoy. Finding that form means making literally hundreds of decisions in the course of a short story: What do I show first? How much background should I tell here? What scene should I put next? This plot development or that one? This noun, or that one? This ending, or something else I haven't thought of yet? Help!
Craft can be helped. Craft can be taught. Craft can help you narrow—if not completely eliminate—the gap between the story in your head and the story on the page. Craft is a set of navigation tools for crossing the Mariana Trench.
THREE PATTERNS FOR STORIES THAT AREN'T WORKING
In my years of teaching, I've noticed three distinct patterns in student stories, which are often also habitual patterns for the stories' writers. One kind of story starts very slowly. Events drag, characters seem confused, and even the prose is a bit clumsy. Then, somewhere around page five for a short story or chapter three for a novel, the writer suddenly hits his stride or finds his voice. The story picks up, and from that point on it becomes more and more interesting.
This writer needs help with beginnings.
A second type of story starts well, with a strong hook and a sure tone. The first scene presents intriguing characters and raises interesting questions. Sometimes even the second scene works well. After that, however, the story flounders. It's as if the writer didn't know how to answer the intriguing questions, or develop the characters and their situation. In desperation he plunges ahead anyway, and the story winds down into confusion or dragginess or boredom.
This writer needs help with middles.
Finally, there is the story that sustains interest right to the last scene. The reader is racing along, dying to know how it all comes out or what it all means. But she never does. Instead she finds a resolution that leaves major plotlines hanging, or is out of character, or doesn't seem to add up to anything meaningful, or trails off into pseudosymbolism that doesn't seem connected to the events of the story. The reader feels cheated. The writer gets rejected—but often not right away. Many such stories earn editorial requests for a rewrite, since the editor doesn't want to believe that such promising fireworks have to fizzle out. The request spotlights the problem but doesn't solve it.
This writer needs help with endings.
To some extent, of course, these are artificial divisions. What you write in the beginning of your story is intimately connected with the middle, which in turn gives birth to the end. A well-written story is a living whole. But by examining beginnings, middles and ends one at a time, we can identify some of the problems associated with each. By looking at solutions, we can address some of the issues of craft that move a story from the writer's head to the page.
Even the Mariana Trench, after all, has been conquered. On January 23, 1960, the bathyscaphe Trieste settled 35,800 feet below the surface of the Pacific, shining light for the first time on the murky depths of the Trench.
Bon voyage!
PART 1
BEGINNINGS
CHAPTER 1
THE VERY
BEGINNING: YOUR
OPENING SCENE
YOU ARE AN EDITOR. You have in front of you a large pile of unsolicited short stories, or an even larger pile of first novels. You also have an editorial meeting in two hours, three phone calls to return this morning, and a problem with the art department that you wish would go away by itself but which probably won't. You pick up the first manuscript in the pile and start reading it. How far do you get before you decide to finish it or to put it back in its self-addressed stamped envelope with a form rejection slip?
Before we answer that question, let's look at the other end of this fictional communication. That's you, the writer of this story. You've worked hard on it. You have hopes for it—if not fame and fortune (at least, not right off), then certainly publication. This manuscript is important to you. In an ideal world, the editor would give this story the same attention you did, reading it without distraction (perhaps sitting in a wing chair in a cozy, book-lined study), with care, all the way through.
But this is not an ideal world. The truth is, you have about three paragraphs in a short story, three pages in a novel, to capture that editor's attention enough for her to finish your story. With busy editors, the biblical prophecy is, alas, too often true: “The first shall be last.”
Does this discourage you? It shouldn't. It's just a fact of literary life, like overdue royalty statements and inept reviewers. And unlike those regrettable phenomena, this can work to your advantage. Once you know that you have just three paragraphs to create a good first impression, you can spend your time rewriting and polishing that opening until it convinces an editor to keep reading.
You can deliberately incorporate the qualities that make an opening interesting and original: character, conflict, specificity and credibility. These are, of course, elements that are present throughout the entire length of successful stories and novels. However, for beginnings they have particular applications and forms. But before we consider these four elements, we must consider something even more basic to the success of any story's beginning—and its middle and its end. This crucial concept is the implicit promise.
THE IMPLICIT PROMISE:
FRAMEWORK FOR THE WHOLE
Every story makes a promise to the reader. Actually, two promises, one emotional and one intellectual, since the function of stories is to make us both feel and think.
The emotional promise goes: Read this and you'll be entertained, or thrilled, or scared, or titillated, or saddened, or nostalgic, or uplifted—but always absorbed.
There are three versions of the intellectual promise. The story can promise (1) Read this and you'll see this world from a different perspective; (2) Read this and you'll have confirmed what you already want to believe about this world; or (3) Read this and you'll learn of a different, more interesting world than this. The last promise, it should be noted, can exist on its own or coexist with either of the first two.
Thus, a romance promises to entertain and titillate us, to confirm our belief that “Love can conquer all,” and to transport us to a more glamorous world than this one, where the heroine (and by vicarious identification, the reader) is beautiful, well-dressed and ultimately beloved. A mystery novel promises an entertaining intellectual challenge (Whodunit?), confirmation that the human mind can understand events, the satisfaction of justice, and—sometimes—insights into how human nature operates under pressure. A literary novel such as Toni Morrison's Beloved, about slavery and its aftermath, delivers emotions of anger, horror, guilt or recoil—not pleasant emotions, but strong ones. Intellectually it may unsettle our view of the world. “Real art,” writes critic Susan Sontag, “has the capacity to make us nervous.”
As a writer, you must know what promise your story or novel makes. Your reader will know. She may buy your book because it belongs to a genre that promises certain things (romance, science fiction, horror, political thriller). Or she may come to your story without preconceptions, in which case she'll form them pretty quickly from your characters, tone, plot and style.
By the time she's read your opening, your reader knows what you've implicitly promised. A satisfying middle is one that develops that promise with specificity and interest. A satisfying ending is one that delivers on the promise, providing new insight or comfortable confirmation or vicarious happiness. Even when it's surprising in some way, the ending feels inevitable, because it fulfills the promise of the story. And—this is important—the ending feels satisfying only because the beginning set up the implicit promise in the first place.
Consider an example, Daniel Keyes's much-anthologized story “Flowers For Algernon,” which was made into the movie Charley. “Flowers For Algernon” is about Charlie Gordon (the transition from page to screen apparently affects spelling), a retarded adult who is the butt of cruel jokes by his co-workers at a bakery. Charlie undergoes an untested operation to radically raise his I.Q. The story is told through Charlie's diary entries. They start out short, misspelled and simple, and become increasingly complex as Charlie surpasses in intellectual ability all the doctors conducting the experiment. Charlie's relationships with them, with co-workers and with women change drastically—although not necessarily for the better.
From the beginning, Charlie is portrayed as likeable; the world is portrayed as logical if not always kind; injustice is inherent in Charlie's initial situation—why should somebody so good be treated so badly? The promise is made that whatever happens to Charlie, it will follow the laws of science, will keep us on his side, and may not be fair, since the universe isn't fair. The middle of the story elaborates on these conditions, pitting Charlie's intense desire to be smarter against our society's distrust of the man who “gets above himself.” The ending fulfills the promise. The effects of the operation turn out to be only temporary. Charlie slides back down the I.Q. scale; he has trouble even remembering what happened to him; he's once more at the bottom of the social heap but kept from unhappiness by his own indomitable, sweet nature. The ending delivers on the promise of the first two-thirds of the story.
Suppose, however, that Keyes had ended the story differently. Suppose Charlie had been hit by a bus and killed. Or suppose he had become a killer himself, enraged by all the injustices done him, and the story had turned into a bloodbath. Or suppose the operation had been permanent and Charlie had become as arrogant and unfeeling as the doctors. Or suppose the operation had been permanent and Charlie ended up happy.
None of these endings would have been satisfying. Being hit by a bus, a random death, wouldn't have delivered on the promise of logic implied by all the science. Charlie's becoming either a killer or a bastard wouldn't have delivered on the implicit promise that here was somebody we can like, somebody to root for. The happy ending wouldn't have delivered on the injustices of the world so carefully set up in the early scenes of a good man victimized by circumstances.
Note that this analysis implies that you must know from the beginning what implicit promise your story makes. Actually, this is both true and not true. The final draft must contain the same promise to the reader throughout, with the promise made in the beginning, developed in the middle, and fulfilled at the end. But writing a story isn't as mechanical as building a house. There are no blueprints. Sometimes a writer doesn't know what promise she's really making until it emerges sometime during the first draft. That's all right. We'll explore the development of the implicit promise, and its implications for revision, throughout this book. What's important to remember as you write your beginning is that you are making a promise to the reader, even though at this point you may not be sure just what it is.
In your first scene, however, your main goal is to keep your reader interested. You do that through focusing not on overall meaning but on the four elements that make a first scene compelling: character, conflict, specificity and credibility.
CHARACTER: WHO GOES THERE?
Your opening should give the reader a person to focus on. In a short story, this person should turn up almost immediately; he should be integral to the story's main action; he should be an individual, not just a type. In a novel, the main character may take longer to appear: Anna Karenina doesn't show up in her own novel until chapter eighteen. However, somebody interesting should appear very early. In Anna Karenina, it's Anna's brother Stepan, who is both integral to the plot and very much an individual.
