The LadyKillers

First and Last

Ann Parker here, every other Thursday at the LadyKillers. Often, I don't identify a "favorite first line" until I've read the LAST line in a book. I'm a big fan of beginnings and endings that "resonate," that somehow connect, bringing the story full circle in some way.

Here's a couple pairings that resonate for me.

--- From John Updike's Terrorist:

Opening: Devils, Ahmad thinks. These devils seek to take away my God.

Closing: These devils, Ahmad thinks, have taken away my God.

I think that is probably pretty obvious, but it certainly completes the journey of the book.

---Second, one of my favorite authors of all times, Martin Cruz Smith, from December 6:

Opening: Five Samurai crept forward with a scuffle of sandals, eyes lit like opals by a late setting sun. A bloody haze flooded the alley, turning street banners red, soaking drab wooden shops and houses in a crimson wash.

Closing: Then his hearing cleared and the clamor of the street was overwhelming—the martial delirium of a loudspeaker, the chatter of clogs running after a cascade of lanterns—and in one step Harry was swept along by the bright, irresistible stream.   ~December 6, Martin Cruz Smith

There's the sense of sound: scuffling sandals, chattering clogs... and look at all the words having to do with running water (streams always make me think of the inexorable forward movement of time): flodded, soaking, wash, running, swept along, stream... Absolutely lovely.

I absolutely love it when a writer takes as much care with the finishing words as with the opening words.

Do you have any favorite first/last pairings? If so, please share!

The Last Shall Be First

Camille asks: Is it too far off topic to talk about my favorite last lines?

I think anyone can write a good first line. (Please don't get on my case about my own first lines. I'm talking about "anyone," not necessarily me.)

It's the last line that determines whether I'll call a book satisfying. Too happy an ending and I'll toss the book across the room, no matter how good the first line was.

BRIEF SPOILER 

For example, I had great hopes for The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (Elizabeth Stuckey-French, 2011). What a title (which, is, after all, the first line of the book.) Chapter 1 begins:

"By the time Marylou Ahearn finally moved into the little ranch house in Tallahassee, she'd spent countless hours trying to come up with the best way to kill Wilson Spriggs."

Great promise, and wonderful writing,  but in the end, the story falls flat. There's no revenge! Okay, so there's forgiveness, reconciliation, awakening, etc., etc.. What the first line promised, the last took away. No thanks.

END BRIEF SPOILER

 It's my theory that if you take the first line and the last line of a book and put them together, you have all you need. The rest are just plot points. I use that as an exercise in my classes. Once you have the opening and you know where you want to get to, the rest writes itself.

Here's an example:

 

"Amerigo Bonasera sat in New York Criminal Court Number 3 and waited for justice; vengeance on the men who had so cruelly hurt his daughter, who had tried to dishonor her."

Plot point, plot point, plot point, plot point, yada yada.

"Then with a profound and deeply willed desire to believe, to be heard, as 
she had done every day since the murder of Carlo Rizzi, she said the necessary prayers for the soul of Michael Corleone."

Wow, what else do you need?

 

Favorite First Lines

Although I have several favorite first lines, I’ll keep this medieval by quoting a great one from The Bone Peddler by Sylvian Hamilton:

              " In the crypt of the abbey church at Hallowdene, the monks were boiling their bishop."

Sadly, Ms. Hamilton died after writing only three books, but each is memorable for unique first lines.

 Most of us try to emulate this kind of brilliant eye-catcher. Forced to be honest, I confess I have yet to succeed. But what I have noticed in well-written books with wonderful “firsters” is that the rest of the book matches the “tease”.

Storytelling is not a gimmick, it’s an art. The best first line, or first chapter, means zilch if the rest of the book doesn’t match the promise. As a reader, I’ll forgive an off-book in a series and a bit of a drag in the dreaded middle if the writer consistently gives me clever prose, fascinating characters, and a rollicking good tale. What I won’t forgive is a lovely promise and no follow-through. Sorry, but marketing has limited appeal for me. If the author assumes he/she has done all that is needed to sell the book after a great first line, chapter, or even three chapters, he/she has lost me for good.

OK so I am a curmudgeon. But I do worry when I hear writers, trying to get that first book published, talking about how they spend hours on the first three chapters in order to get the elusive agent. Is the rest of the book just chopped liver? I would never point to my own work as perfection in the craft, but, as a reader, I am allowed to howl, very self-righteously, for books that tell me the author cares just as much about the art as the advance. 

So give me a great first line and a brilliant first chapter, but please also surprise me with some wonderful writing in the middle and a memorable tie-up at the end. Then I promise to buy your books in hardcover and rave about you to everyone who will listen. And I do talk a lot…

From Mary Anna--First, you've got to reach out and grab them...

Writers struggle mightily with beginning their stories.   How do you yank a reader out of reality and plunk him or her down in your reality?

With the opening line of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott dropped readers onto the threadbare rug of a poor family, and she did it with a single line:

"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.

In thirteen words, she shows us a girl sprawled on the rug in a totally unladylike fashion for the Victorian times in which Alcott was writing, and she tells us that this girl will get no Christmas presents.  There are several reasons this might be true, but in most American families, the reason for no gifts on Christmas boils down to a single thing.  There is no money.

The opening sentences of science fiction novels have an extra burden.  The writer's imagined world can be so very different from the reader's real one that the novice author produces pages and pages of descriptive text that explains everything.  This is the dreaded "info-dump," and it bores readers to tears.  It is far better to just take a reader to your world and start the story.  Most people are smart enough to follow along.  In Ringworld, Larry Niven trusts his readers to do just that:

In the nighttime heart of Beirut, in one of a row of general-address transfer booths, Louis Wu flicked into reality.

I don't know exactly what a general-address transfer booth is, but I trust Niven to spell it out for me eventually.  Star Trek and its descendants has given most of us an idea of what that transfer booth might be, but we doesn't know for sure and the details of its operation will be murky until Niven decides it's time for us to know them.  The important part of this sentence is not the transfer booth, anyway.  It's Louis Wu and his appearance into reality.  If you want to know how and why Louis Wu "flicked into reality," then you're going to have to read the book.  When you do, Larry Niven has accomplished his mission.

In my environmental thriller, Wounded Earth, I held the opening sentence to six words.  As it turns out, those six words were my introduction to the literary agent with whom I have now worked for about thirteen years.  (Neither of is sure exactly how long.)  When she met Wounded Earth's villain, a man who has given himself a nicknamed carefully selected to show you just how diabolical he really is, she read right through the 50-page sample I'd sent, then she picked up the phone and asked me to mail her the rest.  In other words, that sentence changed my life.  Here it is:

Babykiller was meticulous in all things.

And, last, my favorite opening sentence of all.  How can you not want to know more about a woman with a personality so powerful that she could convince men she was beautiful when she wasn't?

Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.

That sentence tells us most of what we need to know about Scarlett O'Hara.  She will survive the fall of her civilization, and she'll do it using the only tools that civilization allowed its women:  her willpower, her charm, and the razor-sharp mind that she hides because it isn't ladylike.  She does not survive by being a nice person and it's often hard to like her, but it is impossible to look away.  And frankly, my dear reader, Scarlett O'Hara doesn't give a damn what we think.

Fiddle-dee-dee.

 

 

NEWS and Favorite First Lines

News Flashes!!

• Diana Orgain will speak with Simon Wood, Jeff Carlson and Alan Jacobson at the Walnut Creek library  (Oak View Room), Walnut Creek, California, on Wed., Oct. 19, 6-8pm.
• Penny Warner will be at Castro Valley Library in Castro Valley, California, on Tuesday Oct 18 at 7:00 p.m. with Rhys Bowen.
• Penny will also be at Richmond Library, Richmond, California, on Saturday Oct 22 at 2:00 p.m. for Code Busters Club.
• Penny is also blogging on Killer Hobbies on Monday.
• Ann Parker is relieved to announce a Kirkus Review of MERCURY'S RISE that says (okay, says in part): "Parker remains worth reading for the historical detail and the descriptions of a stunning area of Colorado."

What's YOUR Line?

Your favorite, that is. This coming week, LadyKillers will share lines that strike their fancy.

The Last Last Draft Draft

This is not the first draft of the last draft, it's the last 'last draft' draft, and I have to finish this before my first husband becomes my first ex-husband.

Here goes:

Let the defendant state clearly for the record, I do not ever get to the last draft. Ever.

Are you the last draft? Are you? Are you?

Like Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai, I keep taking shots at it:

• First draft, that's super painful, like pulling teeth, and only a quarter of the book ends up on the page, plus another quarter of foul dreck that'll have to be excised. And quickly, before it stinks up the good stuff. If there was any good stuff.
• Second draft, I'm still not fooling myself. Usually I have to pull out at least one major character, try to imagine scenes more exciting than going somewhere to talk, and face the fact that yet again, I am not Dennis Lehane or Cornell Woolrich nor will I ever be.
• Third draft, I start to remember that my goal is to be the best me I can, and the sting of not being Dennis Lehane begins to fade. With terrifying and entirely misplaced self-confidence, I think up too many new plot twists, forget to track eye color and last names in my spreadsheet, and generaly make a huge old mess. Messy McMesserton. I do also usually write two or three scenes that aren't entirely horrible.
• Fourth draft, I can't remember why I ever thought writing was a good idea. There's a lot of swearing over this draft, as I find structural...anomalies akin to the architectural issues of the Winchester Mystery House. And have no idea how to fix them.
• Fifth draft leaves me feeling like a fake. Who writes five drafts? But there's so much time invested, and there are about five scenes that aren't perfectly terrible. And so I go on and on and on. (Hah, this is just the kind of cliche I would have cut out, if this weren't the last draft!)

At this point, my friends forbid me to mention "that stupid book." My husband tries to decide if he could start over with someone who has hobbies instead of obsessions. Who could blame them?

Once I'm convinced I can't make any more major changes without doing more harm than good, then the checklist work starts. Sure, Amy Tan can keep all those people and all that history in her head, but it turns out I'm not Amy Tan either. She was probably a better technical writer than I am, too.

Here's just a few items from the checklists:

• Are there cliche scenes, character traits, phrases?
• How many senses have I exercised in each scene? Enough of them?
• Dialog differentiation. If I cover up the context, can I tell who's talking just from the dialog?
• Emotional tone map--does every scene start in one emotional place and end in another?
• Does each scene ask a question, provide some kind of answer, and sew the seed for the next question? (Hey, how did I miss another cliche?)
• Gestures: does everybody sigh quietly? Roll their eyes? Or is there variety of physical movement? One day I'm going to have a character who makes noise with their armpit, just to round out the gestures.
• Are the stakes higher in each sequence, if not scenes?

And those are just the easy ones.

My point is, I'm never done. I don't ever pat the computer and think, "Ah, that's perfect." Only "Oh, I guess this won't embarass me, and there's no time to do better before it's due." Even the short story that's going to be published next year, on real paper, if they're still doing that next year. It wasn't done, it was just out of time.

My fellow LadyKillers clearly have mastered the art of the draft. Maybe one day I'll learn it. Until then, like poor Rita H., I'll have to just keep shooting.

Trying to Get to the Last Draft

By Margaret Lucke

She's gone. Vanished. Disappeared without a trace.

Sitting alone in my office, I drum my fingers on the desktop. I sort papers from one stack into another and back again. I stare at the blank page on my computer screen.

Where could she be?

Finally I type two words: Chapter Twenty. At least the page isn't blank anymore.

What if she never comes back? What will I do then?

Just as I'm about to file a missing person report, my Muse comes strolling in, wearing a flower lei and drinking something pink and frothy out of a glass topped with a paper umbrella.

"What?" she says when she notices that I'm glaring at her.

I say, "Where the heck have you been?" or words to that effect.

"Such language," she says, turning away. "Just for that, I'm not going to give you a sip." She starts to walk out of the room again.

"Wait!" I jump up and run to the door, blocking her exit. "Don't leave. I need you."

"You don't have to get all excited. I just went out for a little walk."

"Looks more like you took a swim. All the way to Hawaii."

She swirls her hips in a hula move. "I need to recharge my batteries sometimes, just like you do."

 "You were gone for days. Weeks. No goodbye. No postcard."

"What's the big deal, anyway?" To my relief my Muse walks to my desk and sets down her glass. I'm so glad she's back that I want to hug her, but that might just drive her away again. She's nothing if not temperamental and capricious.

I sit back down in the desk chair. "I'm trying to get to the last draft of my novel. You know that."

The last draft is my favorite. Writing the first draft is hard work. It means figuring out who these people are whom the Muse has set running, or sometimes slinking, around inside my head, and then cajoling her into explaining what they're up to. For the next draft--and the next, and sometimes another--I have to take the huge mess that we created in the first go-round and turn it into something logical and coherent. Not to mention suspenseful and compelling. But the last draft is easy; it's polishing the diamond you squeezed out of that big lump of coal.

"You're already up to the last draft? Good for you." The Muse claps her hands. "See, you don't really need me." She leans over my shoulder and stares at the computer screen as she reads the words aloud. " 'Chapter Twenty.' Really? That's it? All you've written is those two words?"

"Well, I'm still working out the details of the scene in my head … "

"Last draft!" She snorts. "When I left you had just finished chapter nineteen. You haven't done a thing."

"I've been busy," I say in my defense. "And you were AWOL."

"If there's one rule about writing I've tried to drum into your thick skull it's this one: There's no way to write the last draft until you've written the first one."

"I didn't say I was there yet," I mutter. "I said I'm trying to get there."

My Muse heaves a sigh of exasperation. "Get out of the way," she orders as she pushes me out of the chair. She sits down and begins to type: The detective's heart pounded as she crept into the creepy old house. Could the killer be hiding inside?

"That's terrible," I point out helpfully.

"Of course it is," my Muse says. "It's first draft stuff. We'll fix it later." She takes off the flower lei and puts it around my neck. "Here. This is getting in my way. You might as well finish my drink, too."

"Thanks," I say. "I mean, for coming back." The sweet scent of jasmine and plumeria fills the air. In my next novel, maybe I should send my detective off to a tropical island.

"I never really left. I was hanging out in your imagination the whole time, just like I always do. That place could use a good dusting, by the way."

My Muse scoots over in the chair, making room for me. She pats the seat. "Sit down," she says. "Now let's get to work."

Getting to the Last Draft - Guest Post by Stephen Brayton

Hello all - please help me in welcome guest author Stephen Brayton today - if you want to know what I'm up to - please check on me at www.dianaorgain.com

By Stephen Brayton:

When I agreed to write this post, my first thought was, “How do begin? How far back do I go and how much detail do I include?” For me, the last draft of the manuscript was the published book. This was preceded by a finished copy ready for my okay to be sent to the genies who magically manipulated it into a form people can download. Directly before this was the ARC, which in my case, was a pdf file sent to me by my publisher asking me to read it line by line and noting on a separate document any grammar, punctuation, and misspelling revisions. 

However, I spent years getting to these final three stages, and this is my dilemma. How far back do I go? Do I discuss how Mallory Petersen originally was a guy named Sam P. Petersen, a detective in the Quad Cities? Maybe I could list the other projects I started while Sam went on hiatus. 

Probably the best place to pick up the story is early in 1990, when I started attending taekwondo classes. At the time I had been doing community theatre but when I saw the local studio offering two weeks of free classes, I decided to give it a try. I never looked back. I earned my black belt in just under two years, opened my first club in 1996, my second in 2003, and reached my current rank of Fifth Degree Black Belt in 2007.

 Somewhere in those early taekwondo years, the writing bug started scratching at me again. Living only an hour away from Des Moines, I became familiar with the area. My detective Sam still resided in the Quad Cities and had been included in the introductory trilogy for a superhero comic book. Not totally dismissing the idea it might someday go somewhere, I decided I’d change my leading private investigator to a woman named Mallory, age her to the late twenties, and instantly promote her to the rank of Fourth Degree with her own martial arts school and private investigator business.

Her first adventure was entitled “Alpha” which I tell people I later realized was a 40,000 word piece of crap. The plot had her tracking down the murderer of her boyfriend, getting involved with gang drug dealers, all the while wondering to what event mysterious RSVP cards signed by other fictional detectives pertained. (It has since been resurrected and rewritten.)

Since my memory can’t remember last week’s dinner, I don’t recall when I started attending a writing critique group. 2000, or thereabouts? Anyway, I was hooked and started to serious learn and improve my craft. I also learned “Alpha” contained a plethora of problems so for awhile I stuck to short stories.

From some unknown source, the idea for “Beta” rose to the surface. This new story took hold and I decided to include area businesses, have my heroine make a short side trip to Oskaloosa, where I live, then off to my old stomping grounds of the Quad Cities. Because I already had established the main character, I didn’t need much in the way of a profile.

What I did need was research. Lots of traveling to various locales, talking with office managers, jotting descriptions of buildings and parks, and overcoming obstacles of unhelpful people and a few problems with my outline.

I spent a few years polishing the manuscript while working on other projects. By 2006, I’d been attending my third critique group. We heard about the Love Is Murder conference in Chicago the next February. Agents from several publishing houses were going to be accepting story pitches. Katherine Hinkson and I were the only two who had completed manuscripts and gobs of rejections under our belts. Off to Chicago we went with the result being more rejections after all the agents said to submit our material. By summer, the critique group had dissolved and I was left floating in the wind again.

Katherine and I stayed in touch and in 2009, she informed me of the Killer Nashville conference. Again, editors and agents were present to accept pitches. At the conference, Mary Welk from Echelon Press introduced herself in one of the seminars and Sunday became an impromptu ‘pitchee’.

 October rolls around and Echelon’s senior editor at the time sent me an acceptance notice for two of my books. “Night Shadows” and “Beta.”

You can guess what the next stage was. Editing, editing, editing, and finally, more editing. A few delays in release dates and “Night Shadows” was released in February of this year and “Beta” on October 1.

The road has been long, frustrating, and except for a few “Grr!” moments, fun. I’ve learned a lot, matured, improved my writing immensely, and best of all, made new friends and contacts.

I hope you enjoy “Beta.” If you don’t, tell me. (Be tactful, I bruise easily.) If you do like it, tell me, then tell a friend.

Thank you.  

 

 

Ten Ways to Tell You've Finished the Last Draft...

By Penny Warner

You’ve been working on your book for weeks, months, even years, and it feels like it might be done…but you’re not absolutely sure. Maybe it needs another read-through? Another draft? Another polish? So how do you really know when it’s time to let your baby go face the cold cruel world of publishing? Well, here are ten ways to help you recognize it’s time to step away from the manuscript.

1.     You’ve read your book so many times, you have it memorized and have recited it verbatim to your long-suffering family.

2.    You family has moved out of the house and you didn’t notice they were gone.

3.    Your hands are numb, you have no fingerprints left, and you’ve worn away the letters on your computer keyboard.

4.    You’ve included your grocery list, your college thesis, and your will within the body of the manuscript.

5.    Every time you rewrite the manuscript, you add another 90,000 words.

6.    Your editor has passed on and the publishing house has closed.

7.    Your agent has forgotten you name and has asked you to stop calling her, whoever you are, or she’ll get a restraining order.

8.    You’re starting to wonder if you should add recipes to your story.

9.    You can’t remember what you’ve written and don’t care anymore.

 

10.    You’ve run out of alcoholic beverages.

"Final?"

-from Susan the procrastinator

The Final Draft

I stand in awe of Penny Warner, Camille Minichino, and my fellow LadyKillers who march through their manuscripts in what seems to me double time, meet tough deadlines, get their plots and characters right, and build loyal audiences who can count on them to produce another terrific book in nine months, like a brand new bouncing baby.

How do they do it? I’m the wrong person to ask. If I had an ounce less discipline than the six ounces I have, I’d never be ready to pronounce a manuscript finished. I have a tendency to circle back to the beginning to nip and tuck a plot issue, sharpen or better conceal an early clue, or make some other vitally important (to me at least) change again and again. It drives me crazy. My agent is a patient woman, but I fear I test her elegant manners and strong support.

I want to be done, but I don’t want to send something that isn’t my best. And that’s a moving target, one that can never be met, really. It is also a way to avoid tackling that one troublesome scene somewhere after the middle of the manuscript, the part that really isn’t anywhere near my best, the one that at this minute I’m fighting with. So I go back to chapter one and tinker with it, or to chapter four…and so avoid chapter fifteen, which is, simply put, a mess.

That’s where I’m headed today, honestly. No more fooling around with the beginning or the name of a minor character or the uneven lengths of chapters. I tell myself, no one cares about those. They will care about the characters bumping into walls in chapter fifteen, and so I’m summoning my small reserves of self-discipline and wading in to fight the good fight.

Getting to the final draft? I am the wrong person to ask. Stay tuned this week for the real experts!