Some time ago, I read an article about opening scenes that summed up, for me at least, the perfect beginning to a novel. It summarized the requirements:
- Introduce the story-worthy problem
- Hook the readers
- Establish the rules of the story
- Forecast the ending of the story.
I still think that those are worthy goals. They’re not, however, rules. Beginning writers are often desperate for rules, for something that will tell them What To Do.
Once, in another lifetime, I was community relations manager at a Barnes & Noble bookshop. My friend Rachel kept calling me, eager to be informed as soon as the new big white Emily Post manners book arrived (this was in the days before the internet, when one couldn’t pre-order from Amazon, as most simply do today).
I was curious about her interest in the book, since Rachel had never particularly struck me as caring all that much about manners. But she loved her Emily Post white book. “The answers are all there,” she breathed reverently. “Isn’t it nice to know that, somewhere in the world, definitive answers to What To Do are available in one place?”
A lot of us are like Rachel: wanting to have the definitive book, be it about manners, grammar, how to raise a child, or getting forward in one’s career. And it’s a truism that part of becoming an adult is accepting that there aren’t any perfect answers to life’s myriad problems and challenges. Yet beginning writers, I find, cling to that hope as tenaciously as Ahab ever set his sights on the great white whale: somewhere, they believe, there’s a set of definitive rules that will enable them to write Pulitzer-Prize-winning material. There’s a final answer to what story structure works and what does not. There’s a usage guide that will faithfully tell them where to place commas.
And I’m here to say that there isn’t. The opening story structure at the beginning of this article is splendid, but how many good novels eschew it? How many great ones do?
I’m not saying that there aren’t some rules, and woe to the writer who decides to ignore them: rules need to be learned and studied and incorporated before anyone has the experience necessary to decide to go against them. But the perfect rules for the perfect book? No matter what earnest writer’s publications tell you, the essence of great writing is precisely that it isn’t formulaic.
Still, I’ll confess that I have a copy of the Emily Post white book in my bookcase, too, and from time to time I glance up at it or run my finger over its spine, grateful that in one place, at least, there’s a repository of rules telling me What To Do. The world seems a little safer place that way.
Learn the rules but don’t become their slave, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
