BEGINNING
Or: Bob's Event Horizon
The comments: "This is backstory." or "This
is where I stopped reading." Or "Cut these first 2 paragraphs/ 2
pages/ 2 thousand words/ 2 chapters. They're boring/ really boring/
eye-gougingly boring."
What the comments can mean: You've started your story waaaay
before anything significant to the plot actually happens.
If you're saying "Nu-uh. I totes started my awesome
epic tome on the night Bob the Grandmaster mage was born." Cool. Is the
story about his early childhood? His formative years? "Nah, it's totes
about how an evil mage takes over his village and kills his parents and he has
to avenge them, thirty years later. Oh wait, should I start when his parents
die?" Uh… "Or, should I start with a five-chapter description of how
he trains to become uber powerful?"
The short answer is no. Did George R. R. Martin's series
start with Ned Stark's birth? Or his marriage to Catelyn? Did the Harry Potter
books start with the day he was born? Did Hamlet's story start with two scenes
showing his father's murder? (The answer to all four is no.)
Stories start the moment the main character's life changes –
as it pertains to *what* the main story is about.
Quick fix:
When you first decided to write the full story – I'm not
talking about how you imagined Bob would look like, or describing Bob learning
his first spell – I'm talking about that a-ha moment, that epiphany, that
heart-quickening, mouth-watering, head-banging-on-desk moment when you shook
your fist at the sky – what was the story about? What the f*ck went through
your head when you saw Bob's world – not his parents' world, not the village's
world, Bob's world – turn bat poop cray cray? Usually, it's the moment when
*drumroll* nothing will ever be the same again. Seriously, it's the event
horizon of your plot, the moment when there is no turning back, no regaining
equilibrium, no return to your world's normalcy. Because up til Ned agrees to
leave Winterfell, his world could have returned to normal. Up til Harry meets
Hagrid, he could have stayed with his aunt. Up til Frodo decides to leave the
shire, he could have stayed comfortable in his hole. Events in their respective
worlds would have unfolded, but without these characters. The stories would be
about someone else, eh?
Find your character's point of no return. That is the first scene of your story.
Let's put our serious pants on:
Maybe you're sure, beyond all doubt, that you've begun your
story at the absolute perfect point. You might still get those comments because
your message – the beginning of the story – is unclear. Sure, you may have
skipped Bob's birth, childhood, and training years, but did you describe them? Did
you include a mini-handbook on how magic works in Bob's world? Did you devote
pages and pages to flashbacks describing what his parents used to look like or the
topography of his village before and after the massacre and the paragraphs look
like "Bob remembered his mother's blood-curdling scream as the black-robed
nefarious Archmage of the Twelve Hells, Rizzo, flooded the village with streams
of orange and red balls of fiery flaming spheres"?
Or, did you literally drop Bob in the middle of a fight
scene that looks like "Bob ducked as a fireball whizzed overhead. It
struck a gomba, consuming it in magical purple flames. Bob brushed a tear away,
sad for the gomba, and vowed to avenge it as he'd vowed to avenge his parents.
Lord Rizzo would suffer in the ninth level of the twelve hells, because the
ninth level is where humans go, unless they died between the ages of nineteen
and thirty-five. Then they go to the eleventh level. Except for Lord Momo. He got
his own level, according to Sir Beemo's treatise on The Levels of Hell for Dummies. But Bob didn't believe in any of
that stuff, really. He only wanted… what was it? Oh yeah, vengeance."
Then you kind of started at the beginning, and kind of
didn't. The story got buried. Try cutting everything that the reader doesn't
need to know *at that moment* in order to understand the scene. Take advantage
of a reader's suspension of disbelief and abeyance to move your story forward,
always forward (even when using a flashback!). The caveat is there's a time
limit. If the comment was "This is all backstory," and your reaction
is "No it's not, it's significant later on," then you have missed the
cutoff point for the reader's abeyance. In other words, you've either waited
too long to reveal the connection, or the connection is not clear enough. And
unless you have a magic spell, miracle whole-body lube, or steam-powered giant
hamster ball that allows you to slip between the laws of physics, you won't be
behind every reader, whispering "Keep reading – it gets better. I
swear!" That part you want them to get to? That's probably the start of
your story.
