Instant Gratification: The Current Trend in Introduction

My kids and I were eight chapters into reading To Kill A Mockingbird (so we can see the OSF production of it this spring), when sixth-grade Daney groaned, "What is this book about, anyway? There is no plot, there is no conflict."

She was right.

Harper Lee took her sweet Southern time aquainting her readers with Scout's tiny life in Maycomb County: her admiration for her older brother, Jem; her relationships with summer visitor, Dill; the ladyfolk; the ghostly man-child, Boo Radley; her father.

We get the hot, dry dust, the simple-minded, struggling townspeople.

But it's not until page 85 when conflict rips us from the slow days of Scout's scounting about, and throws us into the political upheaval that becomes the essence of the book.

"This is like Dracula," Dominic (13) agreed. (He's reading the 500-word tome for his spring book report.) "It didn't get good until page 300, when stuff started happening."

"What did Bram Stoker write in the 300 pages of 'nothing?'" I'd asked.

"Setting," Dominic said. "And setting. And setting. He took a long time setting it up."

So right now, my kids are seeped in two worlds: in 1930s Alabama, and 19th Century Transylvania. And though they're finally capitivated, it cost a lot of hearing them complain in getting them here.

We writers could never do this today. We could never "waste" a third of our stories on establishing setting. The present trend is to drop blood, or mystery, or vengance, or some kind of conflict right on page one.

What does that mean?

What are we missing out on?

The Order of Things

When I read high schoolers' senior research papers and college entrance essays, I usually find the biggest hiccup in organization.

Voice is high (high schoolers have no problem telling all about themselves), but the paragraphs, though generally cohesive within themselves, are wonkily ordered, with evasive intros and double, if any, conclusions.

Somehow, after graduation, the organization issue seems to straighten itself out. And while I can't help wondering if sequencing is a product of human development, I have come up with some tricks:

Does the essay really start at the beginning? Or is intro more compelling one sentence, maybe one paragraph in?

A trick for this is to ask how the intro starts--with setting, scene, imagery, question, statement...

Do you already know the conclusion? Because this will lend itself to a strong, focused body.

Is there something in the middle, even in/toward the end, that could be moved way up?

Are transitional phrases used to show the reader You Are Here?

What kind(s) of conclusion(s) are used: summary/revisitation, projection, question, quote, imagery, call-to-action/examination?

And how about title--which must be written last: is it clever, reflective of content?

Hmmm... Lots to think about.

Coming soon: Content.

Dog Days

It's pretty quiet out here in the Blogosphere.

Are you writing? Reading? What else are you doing with the last days of summer?

The kids and I are all packed up for a week-long trip to my dad's near Sacramento, while Dave rakes in the overtime.

During this part of the year, I'm not working, so I'm not paid. And it seems that the kids cost five times more than usual, with pool passes and movies tickets and lost flip flops. And the food -- the food!!! The grocery bill has definitely tripled, easy.

I should be writing.

I know you know that feeling.

But there doesn't seem to be any opportunity to do it.

Did you read Tuck Everlasting? Do you remember the intro, where Winnie's drying up from the "dog days" of summer?

That might be us writers.

But.

September is right around the corner.

When the leaves are turning colors, and the kids go back to school, and there's that buzz in the air, but a lull at the same time. An excellent time to pick up a pen...


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What I'm Learning From Reading -- Part 1

I'm smack in the middle of editing and scoring 60 community college critical thinking papers (hence the bloglessness), that are, for the most part, pretty decent.

The topic isn't an easy one, especially for conservative Medford, Oregon: "How have the events of 9/11 shaped or shifted the U.S. perspective on Muslims?"

Yet, the papers--the first of the term--are sophisticated in sentence structure, with questions, semi-colons, participial phrases.

College-level word choice is used.

Usually content is a problem: putting in what's relevant, and keeping out what's not. Hard to do in 5 pages. But it seems less so this time.

Because it's APA, there's an abstract, and a reference page.

It's all definitely not something a student can whip up in an hour.

Most papers are either B-s or Fs.

Here's what's going well: leading into and away from citations, using transitional phrases, integrating implications and interesting introductions, titling the person quoted.

Militant Islam is distinguished from Islam itself.

Conclusions include calls-to-action of examination, understanding, and education.

The pitfalls are what they usually are: connecting introduction to the body, achieving length, citing properly, tightening conclusions.

I try to head off those issues in class, but they seem hard to overcome.

In all, I learn from these. How to be a better teacher. How to be a better writer. How to be a better person.

Most students will put about 10 hours of work into writing these papers.

Between the planning, the prep, the instruction, the grading, me, I'll put in about 60.

Delivery or Short-Change?

The other day, Dave and I were finishing up "The Boys Are Back," a film about Clive Owen's character trying to survive the death of his wife. This was based on the life and novel The Boys Are Back In Town, by former sportswriter Simon Carr.

It took us a couple days to finish the movie because 1) I had that flu, and 2) the movie was really slow.

I thought about how YA books don't have the luxury of being slow. How they have to please with plot, and right away.

On the other hand, for a film, being visually stimulating is often enough. There might be no dialogue, no narration, for minutes on end, but music and movement and scene still happen.

All that takes pages and pages of scriptwriting (words) to create.This reminds me of an NPR story I heard years ago on the ginormous (6- or 700-page) screenplay of "Brokeback Mountain," in which, besides the famous "I wish I knew how to quit you," had minimal dialogue. But every time a cowboy brushed his hand across a horse, that was probably 10 pages of script right there. So oodles more words were added to the original short story by E. Annie Proulx.

Okay, where is all this going? Well, with the slow films, it's not going anywhere, at least anytime soon.

But with YA literature, this just isn't the case. There's no more allowance for sinking into a story through scene, through description. It's all action, right from The Hook.

Which makes me wonder: what is the fate of The YA Introduction's evolution? Is it reflective of today's young readers? Have authors pinned themselves into a corner by delivering what's demanded? What is lost by having a hook? What is gained? And where, in terms of beginnings, will we be 20 years from now?

The First Words

I'm thinking about introduction. How important those first few lines are. The very first words.

Because in revising, this is where the work starts. How it's set up.

Is there imagery? Action? Character? Conflict?

Last spring at the Western Washington SCBWI Conference, Delacorte editor Krista Marino plugged opening with description. With suspense. And with a third-person narrator in past tense.

On page 1 (of 1074) of his new novel Under the Dome, Stephen King nails all these: in an established setting, a plane crashes at the same time a woodchuck mysteriously explodes. It reminds me of The Grapes of Wrath--how the weather, the mountains, the roads are all significant; and the turtle metaphorically plods along. Even the format is Steinbeck-ian. And yet, something also really reminds me of "The Truman Show."

In crafting a strong intro.--compelling, descriptive--that establishes setting and character, I consulted a running list of kinds of first lines that my students and I are making: dialogue, imagery, sound, setting, foreshadowing, summary, anecdote, question, metaphor, action, conflict,.

In How to Write a Damn Good Novel, The Other (more veritable) James Frey suggests starting with either the character's status quo, or with the opposite of that, which then leads to the status quo.

One of my favorite sections in my Sunday San Francisco Chronicle is a 4" x 4" square called "Grabbers," the first lines of newly released novels. Last Sunday was one of my all time favorites--from The Serialist, by David Gordon--an intro about intros: "The first sentence of a novel is the most important, except for maybe the last, which can stay with you after you've shut the book, the way the echo of a closing door follows you down the hall."

Novel, no?

How does your book begin?