Tag: C.S. Lewis

Begin your story at the beginning – but when is that?

  By

This decision could be the difference between readers turning the pages and shutting the cover:

Where in the timeline does the “once upon a time” fall?

Here’s a little guide to help you decide.

Beginning at the beginning

Take the Chronicles of Narnia as an example. Lewis first wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (LWW), in which a little girl finds her way into a magical land through a wardrobe.

Huh?

We need a bit more background to give us our bearings. Where is the wardrobe? In a large, mysterious house. Why is the little girl in the house? She traveled there with her brothers and sister to escape theLondonair-raids during the war.

Oh, so the story really starts with “Hitler invaded Poland.” But if you’re going back that far, why not go back to the little girl’s birth, or even to God created the heavens and the earth?

Because it would take forever.

Choose a beginning somewhere in between. Lewis briefly summarizes the children’s reason for being at the house. Dialogue begins on page 2, and we step through the wardrobe by page 5.

The takeaway: start early enough to give your readers a bit of orientation, but don’t start so far back that you have to give whole paragraphs of background exposition.

Beginning at the middle

What’s that? Your story’s more complicated than that? There’s far more background to explain?

Well, LWW is more complicated than it sounds. Where did the magical land come from, and how does an old wardrobe grant access to it? But Lewis doesn’t explain this in this book, and he doesn’t have to. The mystery gets pushed back in the face of more pressing matters. Evil witch. Captive brother. Etc.

Review all the information you think your readers need. Cut out anything they don’t need right away and save it for later in the story. Readers can typically suspend disbelief long enough to enjoy the wonder of the current story by itself—a wardrobe opening up to a snowy wood, a faun in a red scarf carrying an umbrella—without asking too many questions about How It All Got There. They will trust you to answer such things in time (hang a lantern on it if necessary).

Is there anything readers truly need to know right away? Work that in gradually, showing, not telling, like this.

Back to the stuff you set aside for later. Possibly a whole book’s worth of background information. You have two choices:

1. Work it into the current story at intervals (Louis Sachar does this brilliantly in Holes)

2. Write a prequel later—which is what Lewis did with The Magician’s Nephew.

In either sense, you’re starting in the middle of the story. The advantage: When you finally do explain How It All Got There, readers get double the amusement in putting all the pieces together—how the magical world came into being and how the wardrobe is connected to it—as if they’ve just solved a clever riddle. It’s an advantage you lose if you start with The Magician’s Nephew.

The takeaway: don’t let oodles of background force you to start too early. Work it in gradually, or save it for later.

Beginning at the end

There’s an episode of Firefly that opens with the ship’s captain sitting alone in the desert, naked.

“That went well,” he says to himself.

Cut to opening theme.

Meanwhile, we’re all dying to know how he got there.

You probably won’t really be starting at the end—just at the climax. At your hero’s lowest point. Show your readers just enough to make them go “huh?” then before they get confused enough to be frustrated, pause, rewind, and spend the rest of the book showing them how your hero got there.

The takeaway: if you start by showing your readers an intriguing glimpse of the future, you can create enough curiosity to propel them through the rest of the story.

—

What type of beginning makes you keep reading?

—

How to destroy an idea

  By

Last week we discussed how words are tools that make complex ideas portable. And ideas are powerful. Ideas create change. Ideas founded the country I live in. Creating ideas can be dangerous. But destroying ideas can be even more so.

So how do you destroy an idea?

Just kill the word.

George Orwell, Rose Macauley, and C.S. Lewis all wrote about it.

It starts out harmlessly enough. First, change the word from an objective fact into a subjective insult or compliment. For instance, the words villain and gentleman both used to refer to specific positions in society. A villain was a worker of a country estate. A gentleman was a man who lived off the interest of his property. Then people began to use gentleman to mean a person of good breeding or manners. Soon, the signs of verbicide appeared:

“As long as gentleman has a clear meaning, it is enough to say that So-and-so is a gentleman. When we begin saying that he is a ‘real gentleman’ or ‘a true gentleman’ or ‘a gentleman in the truest sense’ we may be sure that the word has not long to live.”  -C.S. Lewis, The Death of Words

A word that becomes nothing but a compliment soon becomes overused and meaningless. Gentleman is now nothing but a polite term for male. Conversely, as soon as a word gains negative connotations, we avoid it. Think of all the harmless, factual descriptors that have become naughty words: Illegitimate. Dog. Excrement. And villain may not be “naughty,” but it certainly isn’t nice.

So, when a word becomes a synonym for good or bad, its original meaning fades.

As Mr. Lewis puts it:

“The vocabulary of flattery and insult is continually enlarged at the expense of the vocabulary of definition. …so words in their last decay go to swell the enormous list of synonyms for good and bad. And as long as most people are more anxious to express their likes and dislikes than to describe facts, this must remain a universal truth about language.”

Here’s the scary part.

Now, the first time I read the essay quoted above, it got me thinking. But then I read 1984, and it freaked me out. Because Orwell talked about good and bad synonyms, too. Listen in on this conversation about Newspeak (Big Brother’s idea of a language):

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good’, for instance. If you have a word like ‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good’, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning; or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still…In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words—in reality, only one word.”

And the punchline:

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.”

Mr. Lewis sums it up:

“…when, however reverently, you have killed a word you have also, as far as in you lay, blotted from the human mind the thing that word originally stood for. Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.”

…

Now let that sink in.

…

When words die, ideas die. We are not only the creators of words and ideas; we are their caretakers. Our job is about more than using proper grammar. It’s about fighting for meaning.

What words do you see dying?

—

A Defense of Happy Endings

  By

Let’s get down to it. What’s better: a happy ending or a sad one – and why?

First, let’s define “happy” and “sad” endings. It’s not as simple as whether or not the hero survives; Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Lewis’s The Last Battle both end with everyone dying, but one leaves you in despair and the other brings you incredible joy.

I think it’s more accurately measured by the presence of two things: meaning and victory. Compare Sydney Carton’s death in A Tale of Two Cities to any Nicholas Sparks book. Everything that happens in Two Cities leads up to, even contributes to, Carton’s death, and he dies nobly (meaningfully), to save a friend (victory). Whereas Sparks’s M.O. is for two people to find love, only to lose it again (defeat) when one of them unexpectedly (senselessly) dies in a car wreck, in a shipwreck, or of Leukemia. We cry an awful lot at Sparks (at least the movies; I never deemed the books worthy of my time) as well as at Dickens, but one leaves us sad and the other, satisfied. Dickens’s ending is meaningful; Sparks’s is a parlor trick.

Sparksstirs up emotion, sure – but tears are cheap. It’s easy to get our characters into scrapes, to beat them bloody, to take away everything they care about; it’s harder to get them out of trouble, heal them, and give them their hearts’ desires while making it meaningful and believable instead of nauseatingly cheesy. But the fact is – and Dickens proves it – it can be done.

Happy endings sometimes seem cheesy because they are unrealistically glossy – like nothing bad ever happened again. These are either simplified to reinforce the style of the story (perhaps for younger readers), or are just badly written. But some people lump all happy endings into the same “Unrealistic” category. They call themselves realists, preferring books that speak the “hard truth.” They scorn stories that end with weddings, saying the marriage would never last in real life. But that’s not realism. Realism is acknowledging that some marriages end in divorce; cynicism is assuming they all do.

And the funny thing about cynicism? It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. How much of what’s wrong in real life, failed marriages included, is that way just because people have given up fighting? If you write about a “realistic” failed marriage, what good is it? You’re not revealing anything your readers haven’t seen already. You’re only reinforcing hopelessness. Why not write about a struggling couple that fights to save their marriage? You can empower your readers to hope and to fight without being cheesy or unrealistic.

Don’t be silly, you might say; everyone knows it’s just a story. Readers don’t take it to heart.

That’s a lie. Even the cynical marketing world I work in acknowledges that the story is one of the most powerful forces on earth. A well-crafted story doesn’t just claim that a bad situation can turn out well—it shows how a bad situation can turn out well. Stories can make people see new possibilities. Stories can change people’s minds. Stories can inspire or discourage.

What will your stories do?

How to write plot

  By ,

“I have a great book idea, but I have no plot.”

I hear this pretty frequently. Most new writers seem to think that plot lines are supposed to spring into their heads fully formed. Then they feel deficient when they come up dry. But plotlines rarely appear out of the blue – and never fully formed. More often an idea is nothing but a world, a character, a single scene, or a mere image. We must take these fragments and grow them into stories.

But how? Yes, some of it still has to be inspiration, and I can’t teach you how to be inspired, but here are some methods that will help:

Image – have nothing but a picture in your head? Don’t fret. C.S. Lewis started out with nothing but a mental picture of a faun carrying an umbrella, and got the seven-book Chronicles of Narnia out of it. Let yourself daydream about the image for a while. Once it has grown into a scene, read below.

Scene – Markus Zusak got the idea for I Am the Messenger when he noticed a 15-minute parking zone outside a bank and wondered what it would be like to be stuck lying on the floor of the bank during a robbery, worrying about a parking fine. So start by writing down everything you know about that scene. Is it a beginning scene, a middle scene, or the climax? Who is there? How did they get there? What will be the result of their actions ?

World – maybe your idea centers on a world that has some interesting little difference from ours (like it’s full of mutant humans with magical powers). How did the world get that way? (Are they mutating due to a nuclear explosion, or are they doing it to themselves intentionally?) What are the social, political, religious ramifications? (Are they suing a power plant? Are they fighting laws against genetic manipulation?) What are the real-life ramifications for an individual person? (Is the psychic teenager ostracized by his parents? Is the housewife fighting crime at night?)

Character – maybe you’ve invented Sherlock Holmes, Sydney Carton, or Margo Roth Spiegelman and this person is begging to have a story written about them. Again, write down everything you know. Pretty, plain, strong, smart, cowardly, kind, mean, funny? What is the most important thing in the world to this character? Maybe it’s his wife, maybe her son, maybe it’s getting into Harvard or on Broadway, or escaping prison. Then, threaten this thing. Take it away and make them rescue it. Endanger it and make them protect it. Entice them to pursue it, and throw obstacles in their path.

Moral – Stop. Rewind. I forbid you from writing a book based on a moral alone. It will come off as salesy, preachy or both. Come up with some other idea, follow the directions above, and if a moral happens to grow naturally out of the story you are already writing, more power to you.

Backpacks across the galaxy: how to personalize the epic

  By ,

Epic-ness is all well and good, but without a personal touch, it can fall flat. We wouldn’t care whether or not Middle Earth fell to Sauron if we didn’t get to know Frodo and Sam along the way. It’s the little, everyday details that make us care; that show us the relevance of the big picture by connecting it to a close-up of the character(s).

This concept really threw me the first time I read Out of the Silent Planet. A man is on a walking tour in England, when he loses his backpack and is kidnapped by two men who take him to an alien planet. He escapes, and spends the next several chapters living among the locals, learning their language and discovering fascinating things about the universe. Then, on page 96, he gets a chance to look through a telescope at a planet the locals call Thulcandra:

He wondered for a moment if it was Mars he was looking at; then, as his eyes took in the markings better, he recognized what they were—Northern Europe and a piece of North America. They were upside down with the North Pole at the bottom of the picture and this somehow shocked him. But it was Earth he was seeing—even, perhaps, England, though the picture shook a little and his eyes were quickly getting tired, and he could not be certain that he was not imagining it. It was all there in that little disk—London, Athens, Jerusalem, Shakespeare. There everyone had lived and everything had happened; and there, presumably, his pack was still lying in the porch of an empty house near Sterk.

This last sentence is so amazing it makes me dizzy. From the alienness of another planet, the hugeness of the universe, the awe of seeing Earth from space, the vastness of human history—to the ordinariness of a backpack left on a porch. This is why C.S. Lewis is my favorite writer; he turns my brain inside out.

Douglas Adams does something similar (but much more humorous) in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, when Arthur Dent is falling to his death and suddenly remembers he has a bottle of olive oil in his knapsack—possibly the last piece of the Earth left in the entire universe (this realization enabled him to learn how to fly…but that’s another post).

And I experienced something similar when I was driving home from visiting my grandparents last Christmas. We stopped at a Denny’s, and I happened to notice that the walls at this Denny’s had the exact same texture as the walls at home. And although I hadn’t been gone long enough to miss home, I suddenly got a lump in my stomach and felt homesick.

Moral of the post: the details make it meaningful. The next time you are writing a “big picture” scene, consider making your character notice or remember something that gives you a “close up.”