The Beginning

It's been awhile since my last post, and I hate that. My intention was to make a post at least every other week, but life's been giving me a rough time lately and I just haven't found the time. But, to be fair, I've tried more than once in the past month to sit down and write about something, but with my job leaving me so drained and stressed, I usually end up even more frustrated and push my computer away.

So, now that we have that out of the way, let's dive into today's subject: Storytelling.
I know that seems kind of vague, but what I'm going to be covering here are the right and wrong (as well as the subjective right and wrong) ways to go about telling a story.

Now, we'll start where all good stories start: The Beginning. This is where you hook your reader (or viewer if we're talking cinema) and proceed to drag them along for the ride. It's incredibly important that you get your claws into the audience here, at the very start of the story, or you might not get them at all. Today's society is a lot more fast paced than when I was growing up. Back then, people were reading Tolkien, and no one really questioned the painfully slow start to his stories; it was just what you had to go through to get to the meat of the story, and that was fine for the time, but if Tolkien were starting out in today's literary world, his books would most likely bomb. A lot of modern readers have been drawn into books from watching the movies they're based on (like Harry Potter, and a certain sparkling mess we won't mention.) Now, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that the type of storytelling that sells had evolved, because if you're coming from a movie diet into a book diet, then Lord of the Rings is a shock to the system.

Now, you could argue that the book sales of Harry Potter and the like was the reason the movies were successful, not the other way around, and that's somewhat true, or at least it was in the beginning. That said, a good half of my friends started with the movies because of all the hype, and it drew them to the books. So, I'd say it turned out to be a fairly equal marriage by the end of it all. And even if you don't agree, the current and last generations have grown up with so much more stimulation, specifically from TV and movies, than any generation before us. Like it or not, by the time we get to books, our idea of successful storytelling has already been altered from the old school mentality.

So what does this mean for the future of storytelling? Well, for one, if you're writing books, you'll have to start getting your hooks in the reader a lot sooner than, say, Tolkien did. I love The Fellowship of the Ring, but the first few chapters are tough to get through, with far too much exposition that could very easily be trimmed down. Back then, Tolkien was inventing a genre, and the expectations of literary stories were far different from today, so he got away with it. Now though, instead of the dull, drawn out opening Fellowship had, you'd need something with a little more flair to sell it to a modern audience. I personally think the way Peter Jackson handled the opening in the film was great; he set us up with a nice opening monologue from Galadriel, and we got to see an exciting fight scene. I disagree with a lot of the changes Jackson made, but this one made perfect sense to me.

I'll move past Tolkien for a minute and give you a more modern example. In Elantris by Brandon Sanderson, one of the main characters, Raoden "awoke early that morning, completely unaware that he'd been damned for all eternity." Now that's a hook! The very first line of the book, and I already want to know what the heck's going on. Elantris came out in 2005, and to this day I don't think I've read anything with a more in-your-face, inviting opener for a novel.

After reading that, I listened to a podcast where Sanderson was talking about successful opening lines for books, and how important they were in today's world. He cited that opening as one of his proudest moments, and rightfully so. But even after listening to the podcast, I still wanted to go deeper; I wanted to find the perfect formula for a good opening line. Did I ever find it? Maybe. I thought long and hard about it, and this is what I came up with: A good opening line, is an answer that makes you ask questions. Going back to the opening of Elantris, the fact that we know Raoden has been damned for all eternity if interesting, but why has he been damned? Who damned him? Is he going to die? (I think you get my point.)

After that, I started going back through some of my favorite books to see if they met this new criteria, and most of them did. The prologue to The Eye of the World certainly did, along with Dan Wells' I Am Not A Serial Killer. Is it indisputable? No, not at all. There are books even now that don't follow the rule and find great success, but a good number of those (at least in fiction) tend to be from authors who have already proven themselves and have a dedicated fanbase, like Stephen King or James Patterson. In my opinion though, for a writer starting out today, slaving over a killer opening line is one of the most important choices you can make. Do you have any idea how many people today will walk into a bookstore, pick up a book and decide whether or not they're going to buy it after the first line? I see it happening more and more. Even I've gotten to that point. With so many books out there that I'd like to read, I have to narrow things down somehow, and that's one of the quickest, easiest ways to do it.

You might be wondering if this is the definitive future of writing, and I doubt it. Just look at how far it's come since Tolkien's day. The most important thing for anyone looking to get their book published is to keep in touch with the times, and not fall into the Pit of Yesteryear, so to speak. Stay Current. Now, I'm not saying you should pick up the latest Stephen King or Dean Koontz novel and do exactly what they're doing, but you can probably pick up a few useful techniques from them to make your work more attractive to a wider audience. Pay attention to the way they kick their books off and how they set and maintain the pace. Despite their massive followings, most bestselling writers don't maintain the exact style from book to book, and if the big guys feel the need to keep things fresh, it should be a lesson to everyone else; don't let your work get stale.

Is following this advice going to magically get you published tomorrow? Well, if you're lucky, maybe, but either way it's a good way to catch the eye of an editor. So, the next time you sit down to write a story, hover over the beginning for a minute. You might be surprised what comes to you with a little patience.