It is another Open Mic day! Announce successes, complain about problems, recommend a book, rave about a new recipe … whatever floats your boat.
It is another Open Mic day! Announce successes, complain about problems, recommend a book, rave about a new recipe … whatever floats your boat.
So… I’ve been told repeatedly that nowadays, in MG or YA novels, especially for an unpublished author, your manuscript should get to the “inciting event” that sets your protagonist on their path within the first three pages.
To be sure, I regularly see exceptions to that. Erin Entrada Kelly’s “Lalani of the Distant Sea,” published last year, arguably doesn’t get to the inciting event until nearly 100 pages in. (Admittedly, an extreme example.)
I suspect that this advice may be aimed, more than anything else, at making sure you interest agents enough that they ask for the whole manuscript; and to be sure, Patricia has made it clear in her blogs how rarely any rule should be considered hard and fast. But I’m curious what the rest of you think about this advice, especially for writers who don’t already have an agent and track record.
I think the key to the late inciting incident is to make sure (1) the preceding pages are interesting and necessary, and (2) the incident, when it does comes along, fits smoothly with what’s gone before, and you don’t have a sudden shift of tone or focus or other inconsistency. If I think I’m getting a philosophical thriller and 50 pages in it’s suddenly an action novel, I’m going to be annoyed, even though I generally like action novels. Or if the first 50 pages are about Character A, and then the inciting incident pushed Character B into the lead role, I’ll feel like the author wasted my time even if B is otherwise pretty cool.
‘Course I’m not an agent and don’t have one, so take with the seasoning of your choice.
Late inciting incidents are a problem insofar as you have to interest the reader until the plot gets rolling.
The less history you have as a writer, the less readers will be willing to believe that a slow moving story has actual potential.
You may want some “bridging conflict” — a conflict in the opening that is not the main story. This can be tricky in that it can mislead the reader if not clearly in the opening, though it can provide a motive for later.
Question for our hostess, should she feel inclined to answer.
I’ve been rereading _The Far West_. Why did the adept want to bring the mammoth along?
He was interested in it, and this was going to be his only chance (probably) to interact closely with one. Mammoths have gone extinct elsewhere. Columbian flora and fauna is very different from the Avru-Aphro-Ashian types. Kind of like the Galapagos Islands, only much larger. He’s a scholar at heart.
Interesting. Thanks.
I am new to this. I have neither an agent (after some research, this is for the best), nor a track record (first book goes to the formatter shortly). I have a question similar to Bob’s, which led me to recall a favorite quote about children’s books:
“Authors of the past wrote for readers who had time for background. … [Background] increases the pleasure of a story but the radio and movies have accustomed us to a fast pace in writing. Much of what was valued in a book make modern readers impatient.
“Books that take hold of our affections slowly have a way of becoming life-long friends” (The Book of Knowledge, p.142, 1954).
Being new, and something of a ‘pantster’ (the technical term, I believe), I wrote … and when I had a nearly finished product, started to learn the business. I was astounded by what I came across. The formulation for writing various pitches, blurbs, inquiries and such assumed the story was (what I came to understand as) high concept. You need comps, but only those from within the last five years. The SCBWI regional critique group is helpful, but if I ask for criticism of my writing (word choice, style, etc.) they want to know what my log line is.
So where, exactly, are the kids and parents in all of this?
To say that publishers do not want “quiet” stories should be backed up by data from consumers’ choices. But if there are no new quiet/low concept stories on the shelves, what justifies this claim? And how does it square with the fact that Little House, Anne of Green Gables, The Wind in the Willows continue to sell? Sure, these have episodic plot driven stories within them, but overall they are not plot driven books, they’re character driven. They take hold of our affections slowly.
This is already too long so I’ll stop with the question, what have I missed?
I feel your pain, as my best comps are all 15-20 years old.
But I think the answer to your question comes down to balance. Slow, beautiful prose does often lead to a lifelong love (Jane Austen and Tolkien have my heart…), but things still need to move. (Even I have trouble slogging through the middle of the Two Towers.)
The best example of this balance I read recently was Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus—exquisite writing and an intriguing plot, and it definitely left its mark on my soul.
I think there’s a market for just about everything, it’s just a matter of finding the people who love what you write (your “tribe”). Don’t let the marketing dictate the story you tell.
Thanks for the encouragement. (Sorry you feel my pain!) The characters are a pretty funny lot. Though whether or not they realize this about themselves is another matter! So I’m hoping the little incidences will keep things moving.
Hum. I replied and thank you a day or two ago and now don’t see it. So thanks again for the encouragement.
I see ’em both.
Had some ideas about a story. Thought through a plot problem and decided that, sure, I could revise it.
It started this draft a little under fourteen thousand words. It hit a low at one point of eleven thousand. the draft is now done at twenty-one thousand six hundred words in nine chapters and finally I may be able to kick this one out the door after some sprucing up.
(It’s the story of Sleeping Beauty’s cousin.)
I’d like to thank nct2, who back in June suggested that my crummy 65KW story could be fleshed out by side plots involving the hero’s associates, including a teenager, a robot who’s a lot smarter than anybody knows about, and the Vice President of the Solar Government. They’re finding out about one another over time. There’s also an asteroid miner who was dead before the hero ever met him, but he’s deciphered his journal and found information the Vice President should have known at once (so I have to go back a couple chapters and tell him), and another asteroid minor who’s suddenly returned early with a lot of trouble (what kind of trouble, but it’ll come to me.)
So thank you, nct2, whoever you are.
You’re welcome. 🙂 Glad to be of help.
Cool!
Back in March, I decided that I needed to do a rewrite of my WIP. This is part of my usual process for novels; get one-third to one-half of the way through the first draft, then rewrite from the start and carry on. Sometimes I have to do this more than once.
But this time, I needed to do some serious surgery on the timing of certain events, and it turned into a much bigger slog than I expected. I have a good bit of slogging yet to go, too.
But I’m keeping up my Attend To The Page Every Day resolution, and without that the slog would have become an even slower creep.
I commiserate.
The slog is just the price of doing business. What I want to whine about are the places I have to do a rolling rewrite of my rewrite.
Those are always so fun. (I get hit with them, sometimes, when I lose my nerve about writing onward and so I always am second-guessing myself.)
“A rolling rewrite of my rewrite” is how I habitually work. My “first drafts” look like overlong outlines. And I keep thinking of new things to put on the mantel in Chapter One or Two, or something that $CHARACTER should have known ten chapters back. Et cetera.
I wrote my first novel about twenty years ago, started a sequel, dropped it to write an unrelated novel and its sequel, tried to do a third in that sequence. It didn’t work, so I am now back looking at the sequel to my first novel and trying to figure out how to write the rest of it. One of the things I need is a backstory, a picture of the history implied by the first novel.
Unfortunately, when I wrote that novel, it did not occur to me that I needed anything more than a vague mental picture of events before the story started. I have spent part of a week on an odd sort of historical research, going through the first novel figuring out what the history must have been based on fragments of information: comments by characters, scenes in my protagonist’s memory, ages of characters. Since I didn’t do that back before the book was published when I could still change things, I have to create a consistent story out of sometimes inconsistent materials.
It’s been fun. But I should have done it the first time around.