When the reader opens a file or picks up a hard copy of your book, they are entering into a tacit contract with you.
Their part of the contract is to put their life on hold. They’re not going to worry about how much of the afternoon is going to be taken up with a visit to see their mother-in-law in the hospital. They will not worry about whether they have to pay that parking ticket today. They will not worry about whether a check they wrote yesterday actually bounced. They are going to put all. of that in abeyance to take time to look at your book. That’s really quite a sacrifice on the reader’s part, given the pressures and frustrations of daily life.
What they expect from you as part of their contract is that you will give them an absorbing, positive emotional experience. That you will lift them out of their life into something distracting, fulfilling, and illuminating. That you will instill in them a new perspective on things. This is what they are looking for. There are only two things I know that do this−music and books.
So how as an author will you fulfill your part of this contract. We’ve discussed in other blogs how to enliven dialogue, letting it be both an entry path for narrative and the generator of emotion. This was not always true for novels, but is true now. The challenge for the author is to make sure that each scene produce and is alive emotion. Every scene doesn’t have to be overwhelmed with dialogue, but every scene should be a compelling read.
The way I’ve come to operationalize this is to think of every chapter like it’s the first chapter. The power and emotion of the first chapter have to be conveyed in every chapter. This is a clear way to describe the task, but it offers a tremendous challenge to us because so many times as novel authors the first chapter is time consumptive. We spend a good deal of effort focusing on the first chapter, making sure that it’s absolutely right and that it satisfies the literary agents, the acquisition editors and the reader. But the tacit assumption is that once the author gets the first chapter right, then the following chapters are not nearly so engaging. Yet the challenge to the modern day novel writer is to make every chapter engaging. I did not realize that for my first novel, Saving Grace, but I did realize that for the Catching Cold series There, after I completed a chapter, with which I was fairly satisfied. I would go back and then ask myself “if this were the first chapter would I write it this way?” And if I wouldn’t, then I make the changes I would need to have this chapter stand as a first chapter, that its hooks were sharp, latching onto and compelling the reader. So the reader is engaged not by what they read in the first chapter, but what they read in this most recent chapter. And this takes them through the book. It can be exhausting and if overdone, a little bumpy, but when the reader is done, they have had a consuming emotional experience with the book.
Write every chapter like it’s your first. The following excerpts are each from the beginning of a chapter of Catching Cold-Breakthrough.
Scientists, alone on their isolating islands of intellect, blunder alone through the blinding fog of sex, affection, and acceptance. On Monday, December 27, 2015, Dr. Jon DeLeon leapt into this haze for his Alora.
Jon? Jon? What’s going on?” The scientist’s head snapped up to see Pastor Phil staring from across the hall. Dressed in jeans, a white turtleneck, and a heavy black sweater open in the front, the short, fat man looked like a giant penguin, holding open the side door to the sanctuary for them both. “What just happened to you? Are you OK?”
At 7:03 a.m., the early January wind tore at Breanna Vaughn, whipping her hair into a small anger-tornado that lashed her own face.
An hour later, the wind-buffeted Toyota shimmied, and Breanna lifted her foot from the gas. The Corolla moved for a sickening two-second slide to the left, the tires finally yielding to gravity and dropping into the hard ice rut made by the long row of cars in front of her as she inched along Route 26 heading west toward West Lafayette.
To her left was an Asian woman about an inch taller than Breanna, with black hair cut just below her ears. “Yes, I am Breanna Vaughn,” she said. The woman, wearing a white coat that extended down and beyond her knees walked closer to her, then closer still. The accountant was ready to step backward when suddenly the Asian woman stopped, looked Breanna squarely in her face, then after a slight bow of her head, held her right hand out.
Jon whooshed through the CiliCold entrance, pushed by a stomach on acidic overdrive. “Who was that, Robbie?” he asked, hustling by the desk of his exec sec while pointing to the two women in the small living room to the left. What she had heard? How could she have heard? Jon’s pulse picked up. Of course.
“We didn’t have to meet for lunch, Jon. It would have been OK for us to meet at the office,” Rayiko said, fighting to keep her face neutral. She really did enjoy this restaurant. It was quiet, open, and the minimal overhead incandescence didn’t intrude on the natural light streaming in through the tall windows. It left nothing to shadow, illuminating all in silvers and grays. “I can do, uh, 8:30 a.m. Would that be all right?” Jon held his breath after his question. So much of the future rode on this. Without secondhand equipment, CiliCold had no chance of meeting its goals.
“Dale, Luiz,” Jon called down to the basement as he and Robbie placed the equipment on the kitchen table ninety minutes later. A moment later, the two scientists trudged up from the basement in dead silence. No banter. Trouble was brewing. Jon blinked, fighting sleep’s imperative to keep his eyes closed.
Next morning, Breanna peered through the cigarette smoke, eyes wide open, hands on her hips. “Did you hear me, Ethan?” She heard a sneeze, saw his arm move up, pause, then elbow swing back and forth across his body. She didn’t have to see to know what her husband had done: picked his nose, studied the dig, then wiped it on his T-shirt.
Two hours later, Breanna stood up from her desk at CiliCold, ceaselessly rubbing at the hard knot in her neck. One week at this job and she was pissed off already.
“Home again, sailor?” Jon asked. “Home from the seas?” Bill had heard more oomph from a dead South Carolina dog than from his friend’s voice. “The one and only.” WB had just entered his friend’s office. No lights. The only illumination available came through the windows, the gray hues lighting his troubled friend’s left side.
By 12:50 p.m., Jon knew he should eat lunch but wasn’t hungry. Hunger had walked out on him, he thought, like a lover who was past anger and had simply given up.
One can see the various levels of success and failure I have had with trying to start each chapter with a. phrase that would hook the reader and still keep the book’s continuity. This was difficult to do. And for some of these, I think I failed. However, the exercise was magnificent practice for writing the first chapter, because if I try to write every chapter like it’s the first chapter, then come back to the first chapter and edit it, this initial chapter benefits from the experience I have received from writing the other chapters.
I don’t recommend this exercise for your first draft. The purpose for a first draft, at least for me, is to get the entire story out so that a reader understands the fact set assumed by the novel. Try this technique to add thrust to the book so that you may satisfy your contract with the reader.
