"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."
Ernest Hemingway
Several years ago, when I was really getting into writing full-time, I crafted a masterpiece opening to a Western. The man in black appearing on the mountain and slowly entering the sleepy little town while being watched by its leading citizens. I showed how they all got to be there and why there was this town in the middle of nowhere Wyoming.
When I submitted the book to my editor the first thing she did was cut the first two chapters, the one’s I had written so well, out of the book and pointing to chapter three said, “Your story starts here.” She might as well have cut my heart out.
I asked what was wrong with those two chapters. The answer was—nothing. She said the writing was top notch, the scene produced a great mental picture, but readers weren’t going to wade through it to get to the story. “You can work all that stuff into the book once you have them hooked.” It broke my heart to have some of the best writing I’d ever done just tossed aside.
I still have those chapters on my storage drive, but they are not in the book. They are sleeping in their coffin waiting for me to come along and pull the stake from their heart. I’ve been considering doing just that by the light of a full moon sometime soon. That is if the man in black agrees to the third incarnation that I have in mind for him.
The really sad part about the whole thing is that she was right. The book is better without the scene. I was asked by a group of writers why I created a likeable character in chapter one only to kill him off at the end of the chapter. The answer seemed simple to me. A murder mystery must begin with a murder. If you must tell me something before you show me the body, tell me how it got from being a person to just a body. Then comes, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story. The backstory is best learned by the reader as they follow the police investigation.
Dump it on them before the action starts and, in all likelihood, they will not be around when the action starts. This is true for me as a horror film watcher. New films seem to begin with 15 minutes of a poorly written info dump. I rarely hear all of it because after 10 minutes, (when I’m feeling generous) I’m gone.
If the back story is that great, think prequel. Or better yet write that story first. And save yourself some bleeding.
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