I recently came across the following list on Amazon: “100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books to Read in a Lifetime.”
As a fantasy writer myself, I decided to spend the next few years reading every book on this list and record the lessons I learned from each volume on how to be a great writer.
PLOT: “Out of this wild night, a strange visitor comes to the Murry house and beckons Meg, her brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O’Keefe on a most dangerous and extraordinary adventure – one that will threaten their lives and our universe. – goodreads
LESSONS LEARNED: One of the best pieces of advice I have ever received in regards to writing is to go to the library, find other novels that are like your own and read the first two pages, studying how the story opens and what information is given. How does the author hook us?
A Wrinkle In Time, the first book in Madeleine L’Engles Time Quintet has a near-perfect opening. If one were to go through it, paragraph by paragraph, they’d find an excellent guide for how to introduce a story, setting, characters and plot.
The book’s opening sentence is “It was a dark and stormy night.” a line that has since then become beyond cliche, in part because of Snoopy.
However, keep in mind that Madeleine L’Engle wrote this opening line back in the late 50’s / early 60’s, when it wasn’t nearly so trite. In that situation it works magically. It sets the time as well as the mood. We are in a storm. It is nighttime. Something is clearly about to happen.
So the first sentence gives us the “when,” the next sentence gives us the “where” and “who.”
“In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind.”
Along with introducing us to our hero, this sentence intensifies the mood. Not only is there a storm going on but the protagonist is in an attic and feeling extremely vulnerable. The sense we get from “Margaret” (later referred to as Meg) would be very different if she were standing at her open window glaring at the rain and lightning.
The book’s third and fourth paragraphs are each only a single sentence long and display actions and the character’s reaction.
“The house shook.”
“Wrapped in her quilt, Meg shook.“
While I wouldn’t use such short paragraphs too often, they can sometimes be effective, especially if they create a pattern, as they do here. One paragraph gives us a catalyst. The next gives us what the catalyst causes.
We learn more about our hero at the start of the fifth paragraph. “She wasn’t usually afraid of weather.” So the take away is that Meg is usually brave, but she’s scared now. Things must really be bad.
The fifth paragraph continues: “It’s not just the weather, she thought. – It’s the weather on top of everything esle. On top of me. On top of Meg Murry doing everything wrong.” So we get a bit of her life outside the attic and the storm.
“School. School was all wrong. She’d been dropped down to the lowest section in her grade. That morning one of her teachers had said crossly, “Really, Meg, I don’t understand how a child with parents as brilliant as yours are supposed to be can be such a poor student. If you don’t manage to do a little better you’ll have to stay back next year.”
And here we get what is at stake. A Wrinkle in Time is a weird, surreal sci-fi novel but before we get into the weird, surreal, sci-fi stuff we are given a character with problems we can relate to. Even if we don’t have genius parents or have never been held back in school, most of us have been in situations where we got in trouble with a teacher or didn’t feel as smart as we should have.
I’m going to pick up the pace here. The next few paragraphs show us different snapshots of moments during the day before the storm. A classmate criticizes her in the cafeteria, Meg gets into a fight on her way home from school and she gets even more grief from two of her brothers when she gets home.
The fight is extra significant.
“…One of the boys had said something about her ‘dumb baby brother.’ At this she’d thrown the books on the side of the road and tackled him with every ounce of strength she had…”
This quote more or less sums up Meg’s life before the events of the novel. She’s a rebel who fiercely loves her family and is willing to fight for them even after a draining day at school.
The novel’s first two pages end with Meg thinking of herself as a delinquent and then of what her father would say about the situation. This leads in to the biggest reveal yet, her father has mysteriously disappeared and no one knows where he is.
One of the elements that makes this opening chapter so effective is the author knows exactly how much backstory to give us. Instead of dumping a ton of information on our heads, she creates a dramatic scene and while that scene unfolds, she sprinkles fragments of the backstory throughout so we get an understanding the character and their world. On top of this, she provides details (Meg not normally being scared of the weather) that clues us in to what type of character our hero is.
We learn all this just for the first two pages of the book. By taking novels that are similar to our own (or at least ones with powerful openings) and focusing on the first few pages, we can learn how to effectively bring readers into the worlds we have created so they are eager for the rest of the story.
