Writing Wednesday: In Media Res

Years ago, before I got my first book published, I was at a writing group meeting when an infrequent member appeared. He listened to my first chapter, looked at me and said, You think you're starting in the middle of things, but you've actually started far too late. All of this happens after what should be the climax of your book, after all the interesting changes in the character have been made. You need to go back to the beginning and make this chapter one of the last ones in your book. Or maybe he didn't say that at all, but that's what I remember him saying. As I said, he wasn't one of the normal members of the group and I didn't immediately think that he was brilliant. It was weeks and months later, as I worked through a revision that I realized how incisive he had been and appreciated his willingness to say bluntly what others were likely thinking but trying to think of a nice way to get at.

In fact, that was the novel that was first published of all the attempts that I made. I did the hard thing and rewrote it entirely, starting months back in the storyline, and moving up to the point of the first chapter. The book is The Monster In Me.

The reality is that when I do critiques now as a professional, I end up making this very same critique about half of the time. It especially happens in sf/f. I think that writers are so eager to show off their cool world and all the cool stuff that is going on there that they forget that first and foremost a story is about a character. And not a character in isolation, either. If you think about stories that have done well that have a single character (Castaway, for instance), they are almost always filled with setup about the character's relationships and show why the character wants to get back to those, or they have a fake relationship (with Wilson the soccer ball or a computer of some kind). We audience members need relationships to care about characters. If we don't have them, all the cool stuff in the world falls rather flat.

The advice to start a manuscript "in media res" (in the middle of things) doesn't mean that you should start chapter one with the climax of the book. It means you should start your novel without spending pages and pages explaining everything about the world. Now, I know that in a lot of YA sf/f that has come out lately, the explaining is exactly what the first chapter does. In first person, there is often the temptation to let a strong voice do explaining because it's faster (and easier) than showing. But I urge writers to resist this temptation. Instead of telling the reader from page one about the big bad world out there, try showing how that big bad world affects a relationship the main character is deeply invested in. Show the protagonist's strength or vulnerabilities. Show what matters.

If you must have a rule of thumb, then do not use more than one paragraph at a time of explanation. And keep the jargon down to 5 new words per chapter. Jargon especially turns readers off. I think it is one of the main reasons that YA sf/f is more popular among the wider world than standard sf/f, where writers and readers are more used to the barrage of new jargon in the first 50 pages of a book. It takes mental energy to wade through that and it weighs your manuscript down. The reader wants to read the book and enjoy it, not analyze it for hours before getting to scene two. IMHO, anyway.