Oct 28 2008
Novel Writing Secret Formula - Ch. 1: Menace!
In today’s episode of 12 Chapters to A Finished Novel, we begin with Chapter One: Menace!
Today, you begin typing your story. Today you begin your novel with The Kick in the Pants to Adventure.
Wait! What about establishing Regular Joe World? “Don’t I need to tell my reader exactly what my character does for a living, and what her apartment looks like, and how annoying her mother is?”
Do not. The clock’s ticking, Buckaroo, and someone is about to phone your reader and ask him if he wants to go out for a ultramegagrande sugarbomb latte. He’ll say, “Yes,” to his friend if he knows your main character’s fine. Your main character needs to be unfine from sentence number one.
In mythic structure, this is called The Call to Adventure. I call it The Kick in the Pants. The Bludgeon About the Head. The Point at Which Fate Rips Off Her Arm and Beats Her with the Soggy End. But not literally. That would really turn readers off.
Here’s your story in a nutshell: Something is really screwed up in the world. I mean seriously screwed up, and your main character sees it in sentence number one. She may not see it clearly. It may just be something out of place… but it should have some sort of menace.
To some extent, the Kick in the Pants is going to be determined by the genre you picked a couple of days ago:
1. Romance: the hero and heroine have to meet (or there has to be mention of the love interest by the main character) on the first page. The two of them are going to be thrown together by the Kick…, or Bludgeon…, or Soggy End…, or whatever you want to call it.
2. In noir and thrillers, the Kick is more subtle. It’s more of the femme fatale making a proposition. You (and everyone else) just know it’s not going to end well.
3. In horror, and sometimes thrillers, the Kick scares the begeepers out of the main character and they have to be scared, and scared, and scared a few more times before they finally decide they have to deal with it.
However you do it, try to make the main character’s goal as clear as possible from the beginning. If the reader knows what she’s after, he’s likely to say, “No,” to his friend with the latte and keep reading. Most importantly, your main character absolutely cannot return to Regular Joe World, again. There has to be no way back. Your hero is in The Wild World of Adventure, now. Woo-hoo!
Still here? Go type!
Stumble It!4 Days until NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month.
