Sophie is editing… can you tell?

This week I have been thinking hard about what I need in that critical first chapter. To that end, I’ve broken off from my own novel every day and started reading other people’s first chapters.

Some have been old friends – in two cases very old friends. Indeed, two are even older than I am, by more than two centuries in one case.

Two others have been new to me. Of the new selection, one is a distinguished prize winner. I’d liked the sound of it, but I only picked it up this week because a friend is reading it for her book club. (Thank you for firing the starting gun, Rosemary.)

Image by carloyuen from Pixabay

Another is a very successful children’s book. A reader of the target age lent me that one (thank you, Bella) with fantastic enthusiasm.

It’s been illuminating but also intriguing. I haven’t found one perfect example yet. Put them all together and you’re overwhelmed by a confusion of brilliance and obscurity.

But I one thing has become clear to me. In Chapter one the reader is all important.

Reading that First Chapter

For most of a novel, a writer can get away with writing for himself. He can trust his reader to catch on and keep up, especially once he’s found a following. But not in that first chapter.

Except that some authors just do. For instance, the miraculous Mary Stewart told an interviewer from Argosy magazine that she never thought about her readers. She must have had a natural ear for cadence and impact. She was certainly justified in her confidence. From her very first novel, Madam Will you Talk, her opening chapers are a miracle of clarity, atmosphere and just enough mystery to keeo you turning the page.

PGW

I suspect that PG Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler did much the same. They had an ingrained sense of style and euphony and they trusted it.

They had both been taught Classics and, in particular, variations of style, at Dulwich College by one Phillip Hope, as  I have written elsewhere.

One of Hope’s pupils remembered “the speed and brilliance with which he gave version after version of the ways in which a sentence or line could be turned into Greek or Latin.” And, presumably, English. Turn it, taste it, twiddle a bit… until you get it right.  And oh boy, those boys get it right, time after time.

Mr Hope went on to teach at the Suffolk crammers where George Orwell spent time after leaving Eton when preparing for exams to enter the Imperial Police Force in Burma. Now there was a man who left a legacy of pure gold!

With these three writers, readers can just start the first page and relax, knowing they are in divinely competent hands.

Reader Meet Chapter One — Chapter One Meet [and Enchant?] Reader

There is a lot of advice for aspiring writers out there about what has to go into a novel’s first chapter. The bare minimum, which the three authors above all seem to bring off naturally, seems to be:

1. Getting your reader into the world of the book
2. Setting up a question the reader wants answered
3. Bringing the main character on stage
4. Setting the mood
5. Delivering the inciting incident which sets off the rest of the plot.

But… OK, it’s a decent enough To Do list. It doesn’t tell you how to enchant the reader, though.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

And there are pitfalls. Only one of the five actually requires action; and all too often that action is described in memory. Nobody does anything on the page.

Getting the reader into the world of the book can result in a huge cast thundering onto the first couple of pages. It can be overwhelming — as Joanna pointed out on this blog, with suggested remedies.

You could tick every one of these boxes and not have a word of conversation on the page, just one big slug of narrative.

No signposts. The poor reader doesn’t know where to turn.

Image by vat loai from Pixabay

My First Chapter — Just Hinting

Image by fotografierende from Pixabay

What I am going to do, I think, is forget the rules for the moment. Even forget the warnings, at least until I get to final edit stage

I don’t want to introduce the book to readers with an info dump, or a history lesson. I wouldn’t expect a new acquaintance to stand silent while I treated them to a monologue, would I?

Instead, I’m going to concentrate on the reader getting to know the book in the same way strangers meet. Unknown to begin with but with secrets to reveal and challenges to meet as we get to know each other. There will be surprises, of course. Why else would anyone read a story?

Image by Vincent Ciro from Pixabay

But the reader, like the stranger going to a party, will want to have a hint of what to expect, at least to begin with.

A closed door at the end of a forest bridge?

Or a club full of the dancing young?

Image by Vishnu R from Pixabay

Romance? Tragedy? Kindness? Danger? A mystery? Gossip? Mischief? Fantasy? Or oven-ready daily life as the reader knows it? Whichever it is, the tone of that First Chapter has to match it.

africa-studio – stock.adobe.com

The key, I think, is that what you tell the reader in the first chapter must have integrity. A character can grow and change. But how the reader first sees them, has to have been true with they first appeared on the page.

An author can, and should, keep things from the reader until it is the right time to reveal them. (Just as in a growing friendship.)

But the author must never lie outright. And in my First Chapter I am not going to mislead anyone either. (Though it may come later.)

Rule-Breaking First Chapter

Now, I can’t resist sharing this because it is a genuine oddity. And, to me at least, very moving. One of the most successful books of the 20th century starts with a first chapter which breaks all those 5 rules.

And also the best-advice-but-not-a-rule that the first chapter shouldn’t be too long.

The book was first published in 1974 and has been adapted for radio (twice), television and film. It released a whole list of professional jargon into the wild which has now become current. It was a world wide phenomenon.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Its first chapter, somewhere around five thousand words long, is virtually a self-contained short story, set in a private prep school. To the first generation of readers, that chapter must have called to mind William Golding’s murderous Lord of the Flies and Kingsley Amis’s angry satire, Lucky Jim, both published in 1954. Yet the book was neither funny nor overtly literary, though the worlds of all are recognisably related.

Those first readers, expecting something quite different from this author and, no doubt, the publisher’s blurb, must have thought WTF? as they raced through that first chapter, trying to get to the meat of the story.

Are you with me yet?

I was one of those readers who got to Chapter Two and read “Unlike Jim Prideaux, Mr George Smiley was not naturally equipped for running in the rain…” and breathed a sigh of relief. Until then I had quite seriously toyed with the idea — preposterous, of course — that the publishers had made a terrible whoopsie and printed Chapter One of quite another book.

It is, of course, Tinker,Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré. And that long strange first chapter is, on re-reading, the perfect introduction to the whole complex, morally conflicted story. Every single theme the chapter introduces is picked up and explored in the book with rigour. And Jim Prideaux, the impoverished disabled locum school master, with his twisted back and his silent executioner skills, is both the start and the end of the story. Though it took me several readings to work that out.

Even the thin, cruel thread of betrayal that weaves through the story of detection and relationships is implicit in that first chapter. For Jim Prideaux, just by being who he is, will betray the kind, stoic and steadfast small pupil, Bill Roach. That still makes me weep.

I think the last paragraph of that first chapter is one of the saddest things I’ve ever read. Sad the first time you read it and getting sadder as you realise, by the end of the book, who that friend was. Saddest of all when you think of little Roach, abandoned for the adult pursuits of power, betrayal and revenge.

“That same term, Jim invented a nickname for Roach. He dropped Bill and called him Jumbo instead. He gave no reason for this and Roach, as is common in the case of christenings, was in no position to object. In return, Roach appointed himself Jim’s guardian; a regent-guardian, was how he thought of the appointment; a stand-in replacing Jim’s departed friend, whoever that friend might be.”

Sophie