Introductory Information

First off, an announcement: we are going to take another run at the New Improved Updated Blog and Website Format, starting tomorrow. I think we have the majority of bugs worked out this time, but if anybody spots anything, please email me.

One of the other big problems with openings (besides hooks, which I talked a bit about last time) is giving the reader enough information to “get” what is going on. It’s an obvious problem for a lot of fantasy and SF, but it actually can affect pretty much any type of novel you want to name. Every book that’s set in a location likely to be unfamiliar to many or most of its readers (whether that location is northern Canada or downtown Beijing) will have a lot of important setting details to get out on the table. Even if the setting is relatively well-known – present day New York City, for instance – there will still be plenty of readers who have never been there, and who aren’t going to know key plot-important details about the setting.

And that’s just the setting stuff. In most novels, the characters have a lot of pre-existing relationships and/or backstory that are vital to understanding the plot. There are details of culture and custom, technicalities relating to particular occupations, specifics of recent local history (imaginary or real) that the writer knows are Important-with-a-capital-I.

By the time they have finished a book, writers have a firm grasp of the Big Picture, as it relates to the story they’re telling. It is sometimes very difficult to back off enough to realize that the reader doesn’t need to know all of that before they start the story.

What the reader needs to know on Page One is: just enough to have a reasonable understanding of what is going on on Page One…and no more.

But, says the writer, on Page One, Angela and Murgatroyd are having a huge argument, and it won’t make sense if the reader doesn’t know they are half-siblings with a long history of antagonism due to the way Angela’s father favored Murgatroyd because he was trying to make up for divorcing Murgatroyd’s mother.

And no, the reader won’t know all that background on his/her first run through the book. But they don’t actually need to know it in order to understand that Angela and Murgatroyd are having a huge row, which is the only thing that’s really important on Page One. Depending on the characters and viewpoint, the argument may very well be an opportunity to slip some of that information in, or it may only be possible to hint at future revelations. There are even a few authors who can break the argument in the middle for a two-page summary of these two characters’ back history, and make it work.

What rarely, if ever, works is starting with the argument and then breaking away for a complete history of the family, including all of the parents, aunts, uncles, siblings, step-siblings, Murgatroyd’s mother’s new husband and his relationship with Murgatroyd, and Angela’s crush on Murgatroyd’s step-brother. What really doesn’t work is dumping all that family history plus a summary of everyone’s relationships with their bosses, teachers, and the city mayor, along with the history of how all these love affairs and feuds came to be, even if the writer knows that all that stuff is going to be vitally important later.

The key word there is later. Yes, the reader will need to know it, but they don’t need it now, on Page One. (Or two or three or five, which is probably what it would take to give a coherent summary of all that stuff.) What they need to know on Page One is: Angela and Murgatroyd are having a huge fight about some topic. They’re related. Murgatroyd is the viewpoint character. They’re in the middle of the city park, at lunch hour, and they’re making enough fuss for people around them to react. Since it’s the opening of the story, a few hints about what Angela and Murgatroyd look like would be welcome before the scene ends.

That’s probably enough for the reader to understand what is happening in this scene. The dialog, stage business, and physical descriptions of the place and the people are almost certainly going to give the writer plenty of opportunity to get all that in without stopping for a long summary of backstory, even if the city park is in a domed space station in 2517.

There is a tendency for people, whether readers or writers, to think that if they know something that adds to the interest or impact of a scene, then that knowledge is necessary before anyone can understand the scene. But while it is true that knowing more about Angela and Murgatroyd’s preexisting relationship adds deeper layers to their opening fight, that knowledge is not actually necessary for the reader to understand what is going on. It adds to the scene, but the reader will do just fine without it.

Readers are fairly willing to wait for explanations, especially at the start of a book. The bigger and more important the mystery/explanation, the longer they are willing to wait for the payoff. Unnecessary minor details can easily clutter up a scene and slow it down, which is not something most writers want to do in the opening scene of their book. Also, cramming all that background information into the first scene means that a lot of readers will start skimming and/or forget the crucial bits and then get puzzled and annoyed when they get to a scene where they do need to know this stuff.

This is one of the reasons why some writers routinely resort to scaffolding. They write a Chapter One or a Prologue that includes all of that “necessary” information, so they don’t have to worry about readers not getting it. And when the book is finished, they chop off that chapter or prologue, and renumber the following chapters, because really, the only reason it was there was because the writer was feeling insecure about his/her ability to get all that hugely important background information across to the reader in a timely and coherent fashion, not because the reader actually needed it right then and there.

If a particular bit of backstory or information fits nicely into a scene – any scene, but especially the first one – then by all means put it in. If something needs to be planted or foreshadowed for later use, ditto (though the very first scene of a novel is not usually the most effective place to be doing either of these things). Any time you find yourself thinking, “Hmm, have I got too much/enough information in this scene?” the answer is probably yes. The one exception I can think of are the writers who habitually and chronically underwrite, but they are rare and seldom, if ever, have a problem with cramming too much into Scene One.