Story World Matters: Part II

The takeaway from Part 1 of this series was that the world your characters live in is a manifestation of those characters. So, if we create a story world that reveals our characters, does that mean it should rain every time the hero is upset?

Please no.

Characters are complex—meaning they are layered, sometimes contrary, and able to hide truth from themselves. Story world personifies the complexity of your characters over the course of the novel. It’s the ground they stand on, and the wind up their kilt. It’s the dark alley of oppression, and warm house of acceptance. The buildings, weather, land mass, and even the technology inside the story world is organically linked to the characters in such a way that it reveals meaning, themes, and plot.

For example, in my completed manuscript A Girl Named Fish, my hero, Joan, lives on a fictional dystopian island. The story structure is fairy tale, so that means the island is Joan’s kingdom. I emphasize this point by giving Joan and her husband, Leif, an apartment above the chandlery shop they own. This serves as Joan’s ‘high tower’, the place in which she eavesdrops on the world without fully engaging. I crafted a scene near the beginning of the novel in which Joan stands in front of her open window and overhears two women on the street below talking about her. Later, when a girl calling herself Fish enters this rarified space, it is altered. Near the end of the novel, there is another scene where Joan overhears two women talking about her, but the high tower has been transformed.

My island in A Girl Named Fish is fictional, but novels often borrow a real location as their setting. The difference is, when you borrow a real place, let’s say Las Vegas, you make it into your Las Vegas. You craft it’s places and give meaning to it’s buildings, attractions, and streets. It’s motels are as corrupt and gritty as your undercover cop hero, or casinos as glamorous and sparkling as your beauty pageant character, or its neighborhoods as cloistered and manicured as your falsely perfect characters who allow themselves to be blinded by the high fences around their houses that keep truth out.

You take the real place and mold it into a familiar, yet utterly unique place that pulses, shifts, and changes with your characters. You create a world that is a revelation. The city itself reveals a moral truth of humanity. And yes, you do this even with historical fiction. Every place in history has a few nooks and crannies you can realistically use, bend, invent to create the exact story world you need to tell the story.

How?

Remember the adage Fiction is conflict? That isn’t just plot advice. It’s important to crafting all aspects of fiction, including story world. Your story world expresses the conflicts between characters in physical ways.

This means that in order to create an organic story world, you need to understand the web of conflict between characters. In simple stories like romance novels, there is a hero (the POV character) and an opponent (the person the POV character falls in love with), with the rest of the cast of characters there to make tea when the POV character cries. More complex stories are ones that have multiple characters in opposition to the hero and to each other. Every character is a reflection a different way of understanding the hero’s moral issue. Your story world will reflect the conflict.

For example, in The Great Gatsby, there is an initial conflict between the open spaces of the Midwest, and the elegant closed-ness of the city, including its mansions. There is the East Egg (established wealth), and the West Egg (new money). Gatsby is newly rich by illegal means, and his home is gaudy and ill appointed compared to the homes of the less recently rich. Later, the mansions add layers of conflict by introducing the gas station where we find Tom’s mistress. And New York City, by the end, has morphed into a beast, a monster, green and vile. All of these aspects of story world combine to support and diagram the deeper conflict found in the novel. The conflict between people, ideas, systems, and ideologies are all manifest in the story world.

Notice how the physical world in The Great Gatsby not only reflects conflict between characters, but also conflict of values. The values held by your hero (more about that in part 3), and how they are in opposition to the values held by other characters and the systems that entrap each one. Your story world supports and manifests the various conflicts of values found in the story.

In Alice Hoffman’s epic novel The Dovekeepers, the story world is Masada, King Herod’s abandoned desert fortress where 960 Jews chose to die by their own hands rather than be taken hostage by Rome. The novel is a study in conflict. Three women come to Masada from different places (open spaces) and work together in the dovecotes (closed spaces). Masada is a fortress against the gathering Roman army on the desert floor below, and inside Masada there are opulent rooms where leaders reside, and cramped, dark stables where poor families live. And there are hidden places deep within the mountain where magic spells are pronounced and women give birth to illegitimate children in secret. Each space inside Masada highlights the conflict between characters (the cave on the side of the mountain where the Essenes hide away from the “unclean” Jews above, the cistern that runs nearly dry, the dovecotes where a woman and a captured slave are thrown together. All these aspects combine to highlight the shifting alliances and increasingly dangerous conflicts.

The spaces in The Dovekeepers reflect the conflict of values found among diverse yet devout people. They highlight the religious, economic, class, and ideological conflicts, and hold them in tension with the terrible deeds that take place in the open (the desert) in the name of survival.

The general rule is the greater the conflict between characters, the smaller the space should be that contains the conflict. Great stories always have their great, final battle take place inside the smallest spaces in the story. This works best when the entire story before the final battle has made structural use of story world to help tell the story. (Don’t be confused by the term “battle” this refers to whatever form major conflict takes, it doesn’t refer exclusively to combat or fighting.)

The take home is that your story world is the physical manifestation of your character’s conflicts.

Thoughts? Also, feel free to ask any questions or for clarification. I’ll do my best to engage with your ideas and ponderings and together, we might come up with something helpful.

Grand Openings

There are as many ways to begin a story as there are stories to begin. But they are tricky things. Where to begin? Where best to focus the reader's attention? What needs to be accomplished? Today's Novel Matters Roundtable is about opening paragraphs. What do we each look for in an opening, and we will each share the openings from our books.
The bonus of this roundtable is that we are holding a mini-contest! In the comments section, post the opening paragraph from ONE of your novels. All six of us will read the comments and offer our thoughts as we are able. One winner will be chosen to receive a Teeth and Bones edit of their first chapter. The winner will be drawn randomly from the comments section. Please ensure you post ONLY the opening PARAGRAPH of your novel.

For me, there are three things I look for in a beginning (things that capture my attention), 1) Story world--you could call this setting. But it's the way the writer was able to plant my feet

inside the place and time where the story takes place. 2) Narrator--Who is telling this story and why does it need to be told now? and 3) Movement and/or promise of plot--I like to see a little something up front that tells me this story is going somewhere, it has movement. I don't read much genre fiction, so I don't need my plot served hot in the first lines, but I do like some inkling of plot near the beginning.

Here are openings from two of my works:

1) Talking to the Dead:

Kevin was dead and the people in my house wouldn't go home. They mingled after the funeral, eating sandwiches, drinking tea, and spoke in muffled tones. I didn't feel grateful for their presence. I felt exactly nothing.

2) A Girl Named Fish (the novel I completed a week ago):

The population of Picture Island, Maine is arranged in a horseshoe configuration around the open grave, one in back of the other four or five deep. It’s raining hard and they’re frozen to the bone under the black awning of umbrellas. Why does it always rain at funerals? It’s spring but the rain is as cold as if the clouds had scooped the freezing ocean waters and dumped it down their backs. The wind howls up the cliffs to where they are gathered—a cemetery on a high cliff overlooking the sea. The rain slants so it drives sideways into their faces. People try to look reverently miserable, as if it’s mortality they’re contemplating and not their warm houses and maybe some buttered toast with tea and the weekly paper by the fireplace.

If you find it striking that both these novels open with a funeral, well, so do I. My approach is to create miniatu

res inside the scenes and paragraphs of the novel, so that each piece tells part of the whole, and also tells a mini-story of it's own that explores a theme found in other places in the novel.

Let's hear from the others:

What I look for in an opening paragraph is A) Voice -- which tells me right off the bat how I'm going to feel about the character. I want to feel an affinity with either the words or thoughts of the speaker; B) Promise -- what the story holds in store for me. I'll invest several hours in reading the book, so I want to know it will be worth my while; and C) Tone -- is this a serious read or will there be some humor weaved in. I love a touch of humor, even in a serious novel.

Here is the opening from my novel, Unraveled, which I hope will be released in November:

I lost my faith at twenty-four. Well, that isn't true. I didn't lose it, I left it. On a mission field in Moldova, amidst the sunflowers. Just took it off like a vesture discarded. Not outgrown. Discarded. It left me feeling exposed, I'll admit, but I figure if God isn't capable of protecting the weakest among us, well I'd just reather work for someone else. Oh sure, he makes it plain as day that pure and undefiled religion is caring for the widows and orphans, as if it's my job and not his. and that was the thing, he let us down in the worst way. So, I tipped my hat and shook the dust off my feet.

And this is from my most recently completed novel, The Color of Sorrow Isn't Blue:

Grief, it is said, is a sea that ebbs and flows. Comes in waves that roll over the shore, then recedes in a dizzying, lose-your-footing-in-the-sand sensation, leaving you unsettled but standing. Well. Whoever said that never felt the tsunami effect, the drowing, sucking, tidal wave of grief. I know, because I haven't come up for air in five days short

of a year. A suffocating, black hole of a year, each day collapsing in on itself like sand too long unwatered.

As per my usual, I'm going to cheat. Stylistically, I usually start my novels with a one-sentence paragraph, a grabber. L

ike the others, I'm looking to establish voice and a tone. Here's my first paragraph+ for Like a Watered Garden:

I received a box of flowers from my dead husband.

That's a stretch. They weren't flowers at all but a dozen montbretia bulbs. They looked like

hazelnuts with ponytails. Blooms wouldn't show up until July, I figured, if they showed up at all. The UPS man had hidden the box under the welcome mat. His clumsy attempt at security amused me until I remembered I hadn’t ordered anything from a seed catalog last fall. Far from it. Within a heartbeat, I knew the flowers—because that was what he had intended them to be—were from Scott.

Here's an example of a very different voice from my novel, Seeing Things:

You’re talking to the queen of skepticism right here.

I roll my eyes over newspaper stories where teary-eyed folks report they’ve seen Jesus in a potato chip. That sort of hogwash sends me straight to the comics for a dose of reality. You don’t have to worry about me. I know Alley Oop doesn’t slide through time, but the inhabitants of Moo remind me of my friends in Ouray with their common sense and heave-ho attitudes, something sorely missing among the potato chip crowd. Honestly, someone isn’t rowing

with both oars in the water.

I look for deliciousness - a hard to define quality of voice or mood that tells me I'm going to lovespending time inthe three hundred pages or so to come. Here's my two:

The woman stood atop the cinnamon bluff, her arms stretched to the horizons, her face dry as sandstone, her silver hair blowing like the grass at her feet. "She thinks she's Moses," muttered Data, peering through a gap between drawn blinds.- From To Dance In the Desert

They're just decorations, these candles. You don't need anything to pray. Truly, it is best to come with nothing-only yourself. Just one of the things I've learned.
- From The Feast of Saint Bertie

When I open to the first chapter of a book, I hope to find something fresh - some indication that the story is different than others I've read. I also look for the tone in the first paragraph and for some indication of the plot. But, truthfully, what strikes me as promising can change with how I'm feeling when I pick up a book, whether I'm in the mood for a light, entertaining read or a more engrossing story.

Here is the first paragraph from Tuesday Night at the Blue Moon:
"We weren't strangers to this courtroom. The first time we came, it was to petition to have Ginger's hospital birth records opened. When you lose a child to a genetic disease that doesn't haunt your family, you want to know why."

Here is the first paragraph of an untitled WIP I'm toying around with right now:
"Grover is an ink blot on a Google map - a Rorschach's splatter of asphalt and advertising tucked into a fold of brown hills. At least, from May through September, between the rains. Otherwise, the hills are fuzzy and green as moldy bread."

Maybe because I love mysteries, I want an opening paragraph to create a big question mark in my mind, one that forces me to keep reading.

I've attempted to do that in the following opening to my first attempt at a type of Biblical speculative fiction:
Last night I dreamed the dream again, and for the only time I dreamed it, of all the times I dreamed it, it brought me the least fear last night.

Now it's your turn: All comments are allowed, of course. If you want to enter the Teeth and Bones contest for a chance to have your first chapter read and commented on by one of us, then enter your opening paragraph in the comments section. Otherwise: What kinds of things capture your attention in an opening? Have you flipped open a novel, read the first bit and felt, ahhh THIS is what I'm looking for! Tell us!