How to Start a Chain Reaction

Apr 13, 2024

An update on the book I’ve been working on, which has nicely settled into the title THAT MURDER FEELING. The most recent feedback has been that the story remains confusing in the opening pages and so I’ve been re-writing the early chapters, all of which has me thinking about beginnings.

There's a lot riding on opening sentences. They need to grab attention, establish the setting, hint at what's to come. It’s the front door, ajar. Come on in, it says.

I tend to write the whole thing, start to finish, then edit away until the ending’s just right, the middle’s not saggy, the unnecessary stuff has been trimmed away — BUT the first couple of chapters, they’re the last to fall into place. Maybe they’re too wordy, written before I settled into the character’s voice. Or there are threads set in motion that turned out to be unneeded by the time I typed THE END.

Mainly, though, it’s something else. When you write speculative fiction, the reader needs a sense as to what kind of unordinary world lies beyond that front door. The setting, the rules, the stakes. Best delivered not in a wordy information dump, but with a drip-drip of detail that moves things along while leaving some (hopefully intriguing) questions unanswered.

It’s a bit of a balancing act.

The Rube Goldberg Machine

A novel is a chain reaction, a Rube Goldberg machine, a marble run, one thing leading to another.

For example, not a story:

Jane followed the hooded figure into the woods. And then she caught up with it. And then the suspect confessed to being the thief and handed over the jewels in his pocket. And then Jane escorted him to jail.

Story:

Jane followed the hooded figure into the dark woods, treading softly. BUT, distracted by the argument she’d just had with her mother, she forgot to mute her cell phone and a loud ring broke the night silence. And SO, as she fumbled at her pocket to get to the phone, the thief fled off into the maze of trees. Yup, it was her mother, calling again. This was the kind of thing they didn’t teach you in private investigator courses; she’d just finished hers not two weeks ago.
Jane looked up and realized that the thief wasn’t the only one who’d heard the ring. “Mom,” she whispered into the phone, the wolf’s growl raising the hairs on the back of her neck, “I’m going to have to call you back.”

Links that add up to story: But. However. So. Therefore.

(Not and then.)

The next link in the chain? Maybe a nice park ranger who’s good with wolves — call him Rick — makes an appearance to chide Jane for disturbing his animals, and we’re off on a romantic subplot.

The Push

If a story/plot is a chain reaction, made up of but and therefore links, what starts that chain reaction? Put simply, a complication in an initial set-up. In the Rube Goldberg machine, it’s the initial push of the button, the tipping of a lever, whatever it is that says GO before gravity and momentum take over. Jane’s out there following a thief in her first official case and things go wrong: The phone goes off, she fails to catch up with her quarry, there’s a wolf, and she meets Rick.

The later stages of the Rube Goldberg machine have an incoming direction, a natural entrance point, a degree less of freedom. A commitment has already been made, momentum is happening, the story is going over there - catch it and keep going.

But that initial stage of the contraption, the first page, the opening scene, the possibilities are all still there.

In a sense, there’s too much choice. I can do this, or that, oh and other, well, that could work too to get the ball rolling.

The solution, I’ve realized, is to think of the opening scene as not the first stage but some n-th stage, with already moving gears. After all, Jane up there has a life before those woods — for one, there’s that ongoing argument with her mother — even if that’s where we join her story, author and reader alike.

The ball, pushed along by the gears, rolls in from somewhere out of sight of the Rube Goldberg, encounters a sudden gap in its conveyor belt — and drops, engaging the machine.