The First Five Page, Ad Infinitum
Key thing learned from Noah Lukeman’s book? That every paragraph, every page, every chapter should be treated like the first five pages. Show, don’t tell; ensure the style fits the tone of the piece; use setting as character, take advantage of how sentence structures ‘sound’, keep the pacing and progression intense and on course. His guide “To Staying Out of the Rejection Pile” delves into the rewrite process of the entire manuscript, not just those very first pages.
Good advice, especially from a literary agent, but I’ve read it all before. With one exception (Lukeman’s chapter on HOOKS - see more below), I’ve read this all before. In fact, I’d have to say that SELF EDITING FOR FICTION WRITERS (see my comments) does a better job of laying out the realities of constructing a strong piece of prose because of the detailed before and after examples used to support each and every issue. And Lukeman never, ever, mentions RUE: Refuse the Urge to Explain -- perhaps one of the most important lessons I’ve learned in the past year.
Ironically enough, the one chapter in Lukeman’s book that deals with those First Five Pages is Chapter 14 -- The Hook. I found it particularly illuminating that he considers books with subdued openings to have the most potential. Less of a chance of being disappointed versus an opening line (or paragraph) that demonstrates an initial intensity because it sets a heighten expectation for the remainder of the book. I see where he’s coming from but he’s an agent, I’m an unpublished author, and I have a gut feeling that if I don’t grab the reader (be it agent or editor) immediately, they’re never going to get past that first sentence or paragraph. My ‘jury’ is still out on this and I hope to poll other writers in the SHU program as well as my current and former mentors once I get to PA in June.
All in all, I wouldn’t say that this book was useless, just redundant. I’ll certainly pull it out in late June when I make my ‘list’ of steps I need to take once in rewrite phase. But more as a backup check to Self-Editing Still, I would have very much liked to see more discussion on techniques tried and true for grabbing the reader in those First Five Pages.
SIDEBAR: Found a good interview with Lukeman where he discusses the business of running an agency and the challenges for the new author to get published. There’s some discussion regarding Women’s Literature (aka Chick Lit) in the piece as well but nothing on speculative fiction.
Where setting and plot are character
Clarke/Baxter’s Time’s Eye was a big disappointment.
There was a time when you couldn’t pull a Clarke book out of my hand.
At my golden age of 10, I was always glomming on to one gem of his or another’s and in between my discoveries of his works, I’d go back to reread either
Against the Fall of Night or the revised version,
City & the Stars, again and again and again.
There’s a definite sense of wonder in Clarke’s work.
Charlemagne, the alien of Night/Stars, pulled thousands of years of humanity’s trials and errors into perspective for me, a wee lass at the time.
The explorers of the
Rama series looked beyond the failed qualities of humanity to explore what’s next. And now, with this new series,
A Time Odyssey - yep, that’s right,
Time’s Eye is just book one in a series - Clarke and Baxter use a historical melting pot of humanity’s key eras to explore the absurdity of Homo sapiens and war through a battle between Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great.
And oddly, or rather not so oddly, I am left cold and bored.
I know that Clarke had very little to do with writing this book due to health reasons, so while he may have provided Baxter some direction for his efforts, the ‘wonder’ I’m used to experiencing when reading something of Arthur’s is gone. This tome is stale, predictable and anything but wonderous. I’m not familiar with Baxter’s work so I have no way of really telling who contributed what, but I can take a stab at guessing that other than the broad points of the story, the inner workings are all Baxter’s.
Instead, we’re taken on a long winded history lesson of Alexander’s reign, Khan’s barbaric plunder, 19th century British troops ramrod India, 21st century Middle Eastern politics and Russia’s efforts to keep the outdated Soyuz flying even as the Americans can’t get their own shuttle back in the air. All to lay some sort of groundwork with the reader as to what is good versus what is bad about humanity.
I can’t help but think of that line from the West Wing episode We Killed Yamamoto (referring to the US covert operation to kill Yamamoto after Pearl Harbor)...
Leo: We spent millions of dollars developing a pen for the astronauts that would work in zero gravity. Know what the Russians did?
Toby: Used a pencil?
So yes, Alexander was a philosopher-king. And Khan was a brutal rapist pig. And the Russians make a better pencil. But who cares? We, or at least most of us, know these things already.
I might have cared. I might have gotten caught up in this story IF the characters had. But they didn’t. They walked through the stories, POV jumping all over the place (there is no way a new author would get away with this!), and we are never allowed inside. We’re never allowed to care about them. They’re just cardboard cut outs that walk through the story.
Time’s Eye is predominately done in an omniscient POV - case in point, the scenes with Seeker, an Australopithecus, an ancestor of man. We’re supposed to be in her POV but there’s this heavy history lesson about the millions and millions of years it took for the Earth to form and become a viable planet.
The entire book is like this. You’ll get a few lines of dialogue, then it’ll go into a history lesson, then a few lines of dialogue, then more history.
If the characters knew this stuff and we got into their motives and attitudes about it, I’d be happy. But the writer(s)’s stamp is all over this book and well, quite frankly, I learned this stuff over 20 years ago -- I didn’t need another round of it here.
Heavy on setting (and some it IS wonderful - their description of ancient Babylon is fascinating), light on character, this book is antithetical to what I’m attempting to do with Critical Past. Though I know I need to beef up my settings in rewrite, my ‘mission’ is to show how the past was important to our future through the characters. The ancients and the moderns. I want Jon, Kate, Burke, etc (and therefore the readers!) to feel the implications of each step taken in history and how it will echo through the halls of time.
SIDEBAR: A few side notes of frustration
There are a few minor similarities between Time’s Eye and Critical Past that I need to mention. Nothing huge, just little things:
+Heron is mentioned, using Hero with the N at the end. It’s just one paragraph discussing an invention of his that they cobble together.
+The 19th century Brits teach Alexander’s troops how to use stirrups - something I planned on delving into in more detail in my rewrite (i.e. the Jon and Cadeyrn scene on the road to the Iceni)
+After the “Discontinuity” = which Clarke/Baxter’s name for the change (I just use “the accident” - I wonder if I need to come up with something more ‘poetic’), one of the Cosmonauts looks down on Earth from space in a manner similar to when Jon looks at the moon and its missing colony. But I wrote this scene months and months ago - I ain’t changing it! In fact, in rewrite, I intend to do more with the holo image experience he has.
Am I glad I read Time’s Eye - yes. But here’s the acid test: Will I reread it? No, thank you.
