Today I sat down to begin writing the new, still untitled, book. The first thing I noticed was this: I didn’t know how to begin.
I didn’t have a way into the story. I knew it had to be fast — because it’s that kind of story — but finding speedy ways into a narrative has always been something I had to work at. And even so, in a couple of my books the first chapter is a bit less direct than it could be. In one of them, Christendom, I want to scream at myself through a wormhole in spacetime to Just. Hurry. The. Fuck. Up.
Since then, I’ve learned to establish people, place and plot much more nimbly — in part because I’ve learned that a reader needs to be told much less than you might think about a character before they start caring what’s going to happen to them.
I’m not suggesting that I employ any despotic, Save the Cat! story-by-structure-by-numbers technique here. It’s far simpler than that. I think our willing inclination to care about fictional characters is like our proclivity to see faces in clouds and in patterns on the curtain. When a fictional character behaves in a way we recognise as human, we start to think of them as human…which means we begin to care about them. We can’t help ourselves. It’s a wonderful trait. It’s in our nature. We want to care about people. All the writer has to do is let us.
This was something I always knew better as a reader than a writer. After all, one of my lifelong affairs began with these words:
It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him. Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice.
That was enough to make me fall heavily for Yossarian and buy Catch-22, long before I knew who the hell Yossarian was, or why it fell just short of jaundice or even what this novel was about. (At that point, I knew so little that I assumed the book had been named after the cliche, rather than vice versa.)
So I was agonising about the way into my novel when I remembered that in her wonderfully caustic and not entirely truthful Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, Patricia Highsmith advised the thriller writer always to begin with movement.
This is advice I’ve deliberately observed since my novel Always the Sun, which begins like this: “Sam steered the dirty white hire van to the kerb and killed the engine”.
I still like how those very simple words drop us into the middle of a story, although we don’t yet know what story. Although many very fine novels begin otherwise I remain partial to such direct openings, whether sensational or ostensibly pedestrian:
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
(Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway)
It was the day my grandmother exploded.
(Iain Banks, The Crow Road)
So I knew I needed to find some movement to begin, some way of parachuting into my own story. But I still didn’t know what.
In an attempt to distract myself from this temporary agony — feeling like a marathon runner waiting for the starting pistol — I pootled round with fonts, established a few character names.
Then I happened to read an old Paris Review interview with Kurt Vonnegut in which he said:
I would tell my students to make their characters want something right away — even if it’s only a glass of water.
Now, it’s axiomatic that, in order to make a story compelling, characters should be made to want something — and we need to understand what they want, and usually why. And it’s equally true that it’s helpful to give each scene its own little three-act structure, its own beginning and middle and end.
But it never really occurred to me to apply that microcosmic approach to the very first sentence. So I thought what the hell and — as a nod to the admirable Mr Vonnegut — my new book begins with the main character, still temporarily called Tom Barnaby, desperate to get himself a glass of water.
