MARGOT LIVESEY HAS become known for writing the “literary page-turner.” In her novels, character becomes the action that drives a story forward. And the unpredictability of character leads to the twists and turns that keep readers intrigued. But Livesey isn’t all about turning pages. She writes close to the heart, revealing her characters’ tenderness and vulnerability as much as their manipulations and self-pity.

One of her fans is Julia Glass, winner of the National Book Award for Three Junes, who said of Livesey: “For her keen wit and wise heart, for her mingling of the tender with the diabolical–never mind her knack for holding the reader in thrall to a suspenseful story–she is a master, pure and simple.”

Livesey takes on new challenges in each novel–writing about ghosts in Eva Moves the Furniture, for example, or, in The Missing World, about a woman with amnesia as she regains her memory. It is a persistent ambition of hers, Livesey says, “to find new ways to deepen and improve my work.”

On the surface her novels are straightforward, told in dean, succinct sentences in a clear and deliberate voice. But she explores the darker and lighter aspects of the human heart, and as she does so, her stories contain stories.

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The Missing World, for example, is a thwarted love story in which Jonathan tries to win back his former lover Hazel after she’s struck with amnesia and doesn’t remember leaving him. The narrative tension develops as Hazel regains her memory as Jonathan struggles to maintain his lies. Contained in that drama are the stories of Charlotte, a struggling actress with nowhere to turn, Freddie, a laborer with illusions of love, and other assorted characters with stories of their own. This suspenseful tale of one woman’s captivity and confusion becomes a meditation on memory, love and loss.

Banishing Verona similarly offers up a suspenseful story line when Zeke, a 29-year-old London housepainter with a mild autism-like condition, and Verona, single and pregnant, are united in the first chapters only to be separated and left seeking one another throughout the rest of the book. The tension develops as the characters contend with their ambivalent emotions and unexpected life circumstances. This love story between Zeke and Verona explores what it means to be part of a family, and how we reckon with the past so that we can live at peace in the present. Livesey offers up no easy answers, no pat solutions–she lets the characters and action speak for themselves.

Some clues to Livesey’s use of family themes may lie in her unusual childhood in the Scottish Highlands. “My father was 50 years old when I was born, and my mother, Eva, died when I was 2 1/2,” Livesey told fiction writer Carole Burns in an online interview for The Washington Post. “Subsequently my father remarried a woman of his own age, so at the age of 5, I was living with two 55-year-olds who were elderly 55-year-olds. I took refuge with a neighboring family who had four children. I think this early experience of inventing my own family is a major factor in the ongoing preoccupation in my work with what constitutes a family, how we sort out the competing loyalties of family vs. new affections. And I’m aware at this point in the 21st century that many people are in a similar situation of inventing and re-inventing their families.”

Livesey, who is also the author of the novel Homework and the short-story collection Learning by Heart, is everything Julia Glass describes and more: a master storyteller, a teacher and a critically acclaimed author. In a recent chat with her near Boston, where she now lives and is writer-in-residence at Emerson College, we explored how she finds and develops her interesting plots and characters.

Critics often refer to your novels as “literary page-turners.” How do you keep readers turning the pages in a character-driven narrative?
I think of my novels as being in the great 19th-century tradition where plot and character went hand in hand. So while I do aspire to have deep and complex characters, I also aspire to have complicated and intriguing plots.

How does a novel come to you–in an image, a scene or a character?
I’m usually slow to come up with characters. Most of my novels have come as some combination of idea and image. I picture a baby at a bus stop and I think, oh, I’ll write a novel about a banker who finds a baby in a bus station.

Once you have that glimpse into the book, do you draft straight through, or do you take it slow and make each paragraph, page and chapter perfect as you go?
At the moment, I seem to be going back and forth between these two strategies. I write a certain number of pages, then double back to revise, but that may be partly because my writing time is so broken up when I’m teaching.

In The Missing World, you explore issues of memory and morality in the wake of an accident in which the main character, Hazel Ransome, suffers from amnesia. What interested you in a character with amnesia?
When I first started writing the novel, issues of memory were very much in the news, with debates about, on the one hand, Alzheimer’s, and on the other, repressed memories. These caught my interest in part because living several thousand miles from my native land, I’m always acutely aware of how my life is held together by memory. The idea of a woman who loses part of her memory seemed a wonderful way to explore the degree to which memory and identity are intertwined.

Hazel’s name is interesting in that she’s in a kind of haze as she regains her memory. How do you go about naming your characters, and what is the importance of a name?
As William Gass so memorably says, proper names have a special excitement for a writer because we get to invent their meaning. I spend a good deal of time pondering names for my characters and trying to make sure that they’re neither too odd nor too familiar. In Banishing Verona, I called my heroine after the Italian city where Romeo and Juliet lived and loved. And I called my hero Zeke because the combination of the Z and the K seemed to suggest the way he’s on awkward terms with himself.

Hazel’s extinguished memories leave her vulnerable to her former boyfriend. He is taking advantage of her incapacity. What drew you to this particular moral dilemma?
Initially, I’m not sure that I did think of it as a moral dilemma. I read an article in People magazine about a couple who were getting married after their second engagement. The first had been broken when the woman was in an accident and lost all memory of her fiancé. He talked about the oddity of courting her again and of knowing so much more about her than she knew about him. That was what intrigued me, that lopsided relationship. As I kept writing, however, I did become increasingly interested in the moral dilemmas.

The siblings in your narratives have often wreaked havoc on each other’s lives. Henry in Banishing Verona, for example, drags pregnant Verona, his sister, across the Atlantic to help save him from hoodlums. What draws you to this complicated family terrain?
Having no siblings and no parents, family is always a challenge for me, and I think I’m still figuring out how to invent these strange tribes. Siblings strike me as particularly fruitful terrain because of what they share and how different they can be.

You have also written several characters with disorders such as amnesia and Asperger’s Syndrome. What kind of research do you do?
I first learned about Asperger’s Syndrome a number of years ago when two friends had children who were diagnosed with this condition. Over the years, as I learned more about it, I became increasingly convinced that I and most people I knew had Asperger’s moments and that this condition was a wonderful lens through which to examine the world. As for research, I went to the library and interviewed people with Asperger’s and people who worked with them.

Zeke in Banishing Verona bears a striking resemblance to Freddie in The Missing World in that they are both laborers with extreme sensitivity and social dysfunction.
Yes, there are similarities between Freddie and Zeke, although their origins are very different. I made Freddie a roofer in part to solve the problem I’d created. If Jonathan is keeping Hazel captive, what man can ever reach her? The answer is someone working on the house where she is held prisoner. In Zeke’s case, his profession [housepainting] grew out of his character and what I imagined as being possible for him.

You often write using a shifting point of view. What does the narrative gain from this?
I think the narrative gains considerable tension from having more than one point of view. It enables one to leave gaps, to show the blindness and biases of each character, to move the story along in surprising ways. In the case of Banishing Verona, although I adored writing in Zeke’s point of view, it was also fairly limiting and, for several kinds of reasons, I needed Verona’s more worldly and efficient point of view.

When I interviewed novelist Andrea Barrett, she emphasized the importance of her friendship with you, her reliance on your reading her work and sharing the literary life. How does that literary friendship inform your work?
My process of revision is that I send everything to Andrea and she tells me how to fix it. I try to follow her advice, and then I send the pages to her again and she tells what’s better and what’s worse. This continues for a while. Eventually, other readers, including my agent and editor, weigh in. I feel deeply fortunate to have so much help.

What do you do when you get stuck?
A) Ask Andrea Barrett. B) Try to figure out why I am stuck. In the case of Criminals, for instance, I originally had only two points of view, those of the brother and sister. Around Chapter 6 I began to feel bogged down. I still thought it was a good idea for a novel–banker finds baby in bus station–but there was something wrong. Eventually I realized that I had been entirely ignoring how the baby ended up at the bus station. Once I started pursuing that line of thought, the novel opened up again.

What would you say to new writers working on their first stories or novel?
Find readers for your work who know you first as a writer rather a friend. Ask, and try to answer, the question of why readers should be interested in your stories. Look at how rich and various the world is. I know my own imagination is very hack-neyed in terms of coming up with details for characters and landscapes, and my work is vastly improved when I actually spend some time observing people.

Write better sentences.

A LIVESEY SAMPLER
BANISHING VERONA is a love story about two people who spend a magical evening together, and then spend the next few weeks trying to locate each other to find out if their relationship is the love they believe it is. Zeke Cafarelli is a mildly autistic housepainter. Verona MacIntyre, who is seven months pregnant, is a radio talk-show host who flips-flops between wanting to rescue her troubled brother and wanting to save herself. Livesey keeps readers on edge wondering after the fate of these two lovers.

In EVA MOVES THE FURNITURE, Eva is accompanied by two ghosts, a girl and a woman, who ore there mainly in a protective role. But, they warn her, they are unable to change the course of her life, only to offer their guidance.

In THE MISSING WORLD, when Hazel is hit by a car and suffers amnesia, her former boyfriend Jonathan uses the opportunity to bring her to his house and convince her that they are still happily together. But friends and other observers are not so convinced, and events conspire to bring the truth to the surface.

CRIMINALS tells the story of a banker, Ewan Munro, who finds a baby in a bathroom while traveling north to spend a weekend with his sister Mollie, who is recovering from a bad divorce. Mollie is desperate for a baby, and this tale narrates how easily two lives can slip into chaos as the child’s parents appear on the scene and events grow more complicated.

HOMEWORK explores a child’s capacity for evil when she is sent to live with her father and his lover, Stephen and Celia. Celia believes that Jenny is trying to get rid of her, but Stephen refuses to hear anything bad about his daughter, so Celia is helpless to stop Jenny’s assault.

THE MARGOT LIVESEY FILE
LIVESEY, WHO WAS reading Dickens’ Great Expectations and Emily Barton’s novel Brookland when interviewed, says her reading life informs her writing life “intimately.” She advises in an essay that one “learn to read as a writer, to search out that hidden machinery, which it is the business of art to conceal and the business of the apprentice to comprehend.”

LEFT MOTHERLESS AS a child, Livesey grew up as an only child and the daughter of a father who taught at a private boys’ school. “Living way out in the country,” she told interviewer Jill Maio, “there were few other reliable entertainments, and I can still remember the bindings (and the smells) of some of the first books I read: Kidnapped, The Little Mermaid, Alice in Wonderland, Wind in the Willows. My father had a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, and as far as I recall I could read whatever I could reach. Most of the lower shelves were filled with authors like Thucydides–he had inherited the Latin and Greek library of his father, who was a minister–but there was also Evelyn Waugh, Colette, D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley.”

“AS A CHILD,” she recalls, “I read a story which claimed that on Christmas Eve animals could talk, and spent several years trying to converse with the family dog, a sweet-natured but mute border terrier.”

“I STARTED WRITING the year after I left the University of York in England,” she says. “I was traveling for a year in Europe and North Africa with my boyfriend, who was writing a book about the philosophy of science. After a while I got tired of visiting cathedrals and markets on my own and started imitating him. Not having a subject –I didn’t know enough to write, for example, a history of the Crusades–I wrote a novel.”

THE FIRST SUMMER she came to the U.S., she remembers, “I read [Jack] Kerouac’s On the Road and hitchhiked from Dayton, Ohio, to Athens, Ga.”

LIVESEY HAS A long-standing interest in megalithic sites–standing stones, circles and cairns. “I find these places mysteriously beautiful,” she says. “My favorite site, so far, is Callanish in the Outer Hebrides.”

When Zeke met Verona
HERE IS AN excerpt from Margot Livesey’s novel Banishing Verona. The novel is a love story, yet its main characters, Zeke and Verona, are seen together in only a few scenes. This scene is the first passage where the reader is introduced to Zeke, who has a form of autism.

He had replaced five lightbulbs that day and by late afternoon could not help anticipating the soft ping of the filament flying apart whenever he reached for a switch. The third time, the fixture in the hall, the thought zigzagged across his mind that these little explosions were a sign, like the two dogs he had come across in the autumn, greyhound and bulldog, locked together on the grassy slope of the local park. He had given them a wide berth; still, he had felt responsible when on the bus next day a man turned puce and fell to the floor. By the fifth bulb, though, he had relinquished superstition and was blaming London Electricity. Some irregularity in the current, some unexpected surge, was slaughtering the bulbs. He pictured a man at head office filling his idle minutes by pulling a lever. Meanwhile, hour by hour he emptied the upstairs rooms, slipping the bulbs from bedside lights and desk lamps.

He had just replaced the fifth bulb when the doorbell rang. Often, if he were up a ladder, Zeke didn’t bother to answer the knocks and rings of late afternoon; the owners of the house, the Barrows, were away and the callers were never for him. But now the pallor of the sky, the flashes of light and dark, the weariness of working alone, all conspired to make even the prospect of rebuffing a smartly dressed double-glazing salesman, or a disheveled collector for Oxfam, a pleasure. Last Friday, in a similar mood, he had found a boy on the doorstep, thin as a junkie, pretending to be blind. He had the dark glasses, the cane, the fluttery stuff with the hands. You’re a painter, he had said, sniffing slightly. Zeke had given him fifty pence. Later he had looked out of the window and seen the boy sitting on a wall, reading the newspaper.

He set aside the wallpaper steamer and went to open the front door. On the doorstep a woman, minus collecting tin or clipboard, filled his vision. He hadn’t replaced the hall bulb yet, and in the dim light her features took a moment to assemble. He made out abrupt dark eyebrows above a substantial nose and plump, glistening lips–the opposite of pretty.

Briefly, Zeke was baffled. Then he went through the steps he’d learned from the poster he’d been given at the clinic. Eyes wide, a glimpse of teeth, corners of the mouth turning up rather than down–usually these indicated a smile, which could, he knew, mean anger but often meant the opposite. Yes, she was smiling, although not necessarily for him. Her expression had clearly been prepared in advance, but he admired the way she held her face steady at the sight of him, and of his work clothes. His jeans and shirt were so paint-spattered as to be almost a separate entity.

“Good afternoon.” She stretched out a hand and, seeing his, white with plaster, faltered, neither withdrawing nor completing the gesture.

“Hi,” he said, hating the single stupid syllable. She was tall for a woman, his height save for the step, and dimly familiar, though not as herself. As she began to speak, he realized who she reminded him of: the bust of Beethoven on his father’s piano, something about the expansiveness of her features, the way her tawny hair sprang back from her forehead.

“I’m the Barrows’ niece,” she said.

By: Johnson, Sarah Anne, Writer, Oct2006

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WHEN YOUR NOVEL manuscript is complete, you’ll send query letters and a synopsis to literary agents and publishing houses. Agents and editors often want up to three chapters. You’ll review and polish those pages before sending them. But actually your work in creating a compelling first chapter begins when you type your first words on the first pages of your novel. You want to make your early pages so interesting that an agent reading them will respond with those magical words: “Send the full manuscript.”

So here are seven steps for making your first chapter intriguing, gripping and powerful.

1. Plunge into your story. Begin with your strong, empathetic main character involved in a scene. Show your character facing a challenge, decision or course of action on page one–or better, in paragraph one, or even line one. Hit the ground running with activity–not with biography, history or backstory. Here’s how:

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Begin in the middle of an event, in a scene in which the main character is involved in an activity with at least one other person. Write provocative dialogue and show their actions. Start the plot solidly so that later you can keep it rolling forward, fleshing out the main character’s goals, challenges and motivations that will come to full fruition.

Following are the opening paragraphs of Chapter 1 of my novel The Case of Compartment 7. The first paragraphs show John Darnell and his wife about to embark on a journey on the most famous train in the world and reveal that John is there to work on a new case.

April 15,1914,6:00 p.m.

John and Penny Darnell left their cab at the Gare de Lyon train station in Paris and hurried forward toward the massive building. Porters followed with their bags. A drizzle of fine rain greeted them, and the streets were dark and wet on this cool spring night.

“Oh, John, this is so exciting!” Penny looked up at the ancient brick train station that confronted them, the huge archways and the clock tower staring down upon them. “The Orient Express! I can’t believe it.”

“Remember, I’m here to work. This is a case.”

2. Humanize your main character. Show the empathetic nature and attitudes of the character early on through dialogue and actions, and by internalization–by “going into the character’s head.” Readers love characters who seem like real people, and they will read new books featuring characters they like.

To create a lifelike main character, write a biography of the character from birth to date. In the biography, include birthplace, parents, marital status, occupation, love interest, aspirations, good qualities and faults. Inject these qualities and features into the story in the first pages, creating a flesh-and-blood human character–a human being on paper–with personality and attitudes.

You want to show the agent or editor what makes your main character tick, reveal the importance of his or her goals, and arouse interest in the character’s achieving them. “The secret of a story, to me, is a likeable character going through almost overwhelming odds to win a worthwhile goal,: said writer, editor and publisher Marion Zimmer Bradley. Make sure your character and your plot meet this test. A main character must be somewhat larger than life and on the edge of the “bell curve”–that is, more interesting than the average person.

As to names, Elmore Leonard says, “Names are terribly important. I spend forever coming up with names.” For uniqueness and memorability, give your main characters first and last names that fit their natures. Use relatively short names, with a total of two or three syllables for a man or four for a woman.

In Chapter 1 of my first mystery, The Case of Cabin 13, readers are introduced to John Darnell. He is consulted by the Titanic’s Captain Smith and Chairman Bruce Ismay of the White Star Line. Darnell says, “I don’t shake hands–health reasons you know.” He pulls on an oversized Chinese silk robe given him by his servant, Sung. He offers sherry to his visitors and has a glass himself. The reader learns that bachelor Darnell likes his “usual cold supper of beef, cheese and bread.” He reveals a sense of humor. More important, in the first chapter, Darnell accepts the most dangerous case of his career.

3. Don’t forget romance. I character is like “a new human being”–which is what Konstantin Stanislavski, the legendary teacher of method acting, rightly insisted on–there must be a romantic interested in your story. Often that person is introduced in the first chapter, and various alternatives are possible. Your main character might meet someone new during the story, have an ongoing four romantic interest, or be in a relationship that is becoming rocky and could end. The romantic interest of the main character must be as realistic as the main and character, with his or her own biography, point of view, strengths, weaknesses two and challenges.

In Cabin 13, Professor John Darnell begins a romance with Penny Winters aboard ship at the massive Titanic’s rail at Southampton as they watch a near collision with a much smaller ship. Penny shouts, “We’re going to hit that other ship!’” She instinctively grabs Darnell’s arm. When the captain avoids the crash, Penny says, “Who said sailing was dull? I wonder if this was a bad omen.” John laughed. “Only if you’re superstitious, which I’m definitely not.” He invites her: “Would you like some champagne?” And she accepts. Thus, the romance begins in the early pages of the book.

4. For Give your main character a sidekick. A friend, partner or companion–someone the main character can talk and share experiences with–is vital to the story development. Their relationship can produce dialogue, The actions and events to move the story along and reveal their characteristics.

Through contrasting features, create airman a sidekick who is different from the protagonist. If the main character is male, give him a female sidekick; if older, provide a younger sidekick; if seasoned, give him or her a raw recruit or trainee as a partner. And consider a bicultural relationship. Darnell’s sidekick in the first book is his valet, Sung, who travels with him on the Titanic. Authors have added depth to their stories with such fictional sidekicks as Sherlock Holmes’ comrade, Dr. Watson; Lord Peter Wimsey’s butler, Bunter; and Robinson Crusoe’s man Friday.

A main character’s wife or husband may fill the roles of both romantic interest and sidekick. In Partners in Crime, Agatha Christie wrote of the adventures of Tommy and Tuppence, who had a partnership relationship as well as a romantic one. In my novels, John and Penny Darnell, following their marriage, share adventures in the mysteries he encounters. Making a comparison to Dashiell Hammett’s characters in The Thin Man, one book reviewer said of John, “His wife, Penny, whom he met on the Titanic and who often assists in his investigations, gives the books a �Nick and Nora Charles’ feel, which adds to the human interest–as does Darnell’s valet and general factotum, Sung.”

5. Create a strong antagonist. An antagonist is the opponent and obstructionist, someone strong and forceful who creates problems and sometimes dangers for the main character, and is the important source of the principal conflicts in your novel. A reader of mystery and intrigue will quickly think of Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis, the powerful and dreaded Professor Moriarty, and James Bond’s criminal adversaries in Spectre, headed by the dangerous “Number One.”

When the main character defeats a strong antagonist who is nearly as tough and clever as he, that then becomes a major event. In Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, the antagonist opposes the intellectual and aesthetic principles of a dedicated architect. In some books, even in nonfiction titles like The Perfect Storm, Mother Nature is a dangerous antagonist stirring up a violent sea, volcanic eruption, tidal wave or earthquake. Conflict may also lie in a main character’s internal struggles, with an addiction, for example, or with other personal faults or decisions. The antagonist is the character’s inner self.

An evil character in my novel The Case of the 2nd Seance, the deadly Baldrik, is a cold-blooded killer. He had worked in morgues, and grim rumors had detailed his sadistic habits with knife and hatchet, earning him the nickname and reputation of “the mutilator.” Yet Baldrik’s superior was an even more dangerous and powerful antagonist, a mysterious man who orders the kidnapping of the prime minister’s daughter in a conspiracy to force the political leader to pull England out of World War I.

6. Build emotion into your plot. Emphasize emotions to show that characters are lifelike, with feelings, so that readers will care more about them as they try to reach their goals and so that agents and editors are drawn into the story quickly. Do this by developing character relationships in scenes with strong dialogue, action and internalization. Remember how poet Robert Frost admonished writers: “No tears in the writer–no tears in the reader.” A reader will lose interest in a story that is too simple, lacking conflict and emotion. Begin a subplot with a personal problem of the main character, and foreshadow future events in early pages.

Emotions come from powerful scenes and dialogue, and they run a wide gamut, perhaps involving love, hate, fear, amazement, sorrow or rage. And they are not confined to the main character. In my mystery The Case of the Ripper’s Revenge, the story begins shortly before John Darnell is brought into the case, in a scene that sets the stage with characters who have continuing roles in the story:

London, Thursday night, August 30, 1917.

The woman gasped, grabbed her friend’s arm, and pointed at the dark, caped figure faintly visible through the fog at the end of the street. “It’s the ghost again, Bessie!” she shrieked. “Second time I seen �im. My Gawd!” She looked sidelong at the woman standing beside her, who was staring where she had gestured. She released her arm, but urged, “See?”

“I don’t see nothin’, Sadie. Where?”

“There! Oh, e’s gone.” She leaned against the lamppost, shuddered, and fanned her face with her hand. “We got to find the constable.”

The thrust of the story is clear, with the appearance of an eerie figure that people in the story and readers will soon realize resembles Jack the Ripper, and the book is off and running.

In To Die, or Not to Die, my sixth historical mystery novel set in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1919, John Barrymore, the world-famous actor and a real-life character in the novel, acts in Shakespeare plays while Professor John Darnell investigates murders. Barrymore is attracted to a flirtatious young English actress who teases him on his age, in the romantic interlude that follows:

John Barrymore closed the hall door of his suite behind him with his heel and, in one motion, swept Felicia Baron into his arms, kissing her passionately. He was pleased to feel the warmth in her response. “I’ve wanted to do that since I met you this morning,” he said. “I know,” Felicia breathed. “I could feel your eyes on me all day.”

Later he asked: “Why are you here in this quaint village instead of on a big city stage?” She responded: “Like London? I do have ambitions, John. But you have to start somewhere. You should remember that, even at your age.” Barrymore grimaced. “I’m not that ancient. Mid-thirties.” She laughed. “Mid, going on forty. But I’m only twenty-six, John.”

7. Put it all together. Your writing style–that is, how you use the language–can grip the reader. Write scenes in an active voice with meaningful dialogue. Show the main character’s thoughts, feelings, emotions and conflicts. Add complication, foreshadowing and subplots in your first pages to suggest that the remainder of the story will be even more interesting.

Within the first chapter, the desires and determination of the main character to succeed, and the problems caused by the schemes of the antagonist, can point toward a powerful but as yet undetermined climax.

Using these steps will help you make your first chapter one that leaves the editors or agents wanting more. Then, they may ask to see your entire novel, which could lead to its publication.

* writermag.com
For examples of how Sam McCarver uses the elements he describes in this article in his openers, go to The Writer Web site and click on Online Extra.

BEFORE AND AFTER
Put your main character in action
Problem
You may feel you should begin your novel with background, history, biography or descriptions of settings–but doing so will delay the start of your real story. Here’s an example of a background opening that proceeds too slowly into the story’s action:

Detroit was suffering from 100-degree heat and humidity of 90, making tempers equally high. The shootings had occurred several nights earlier, and police were looking for several suspects, two of whom were seen in the neighborhood and had been known to have strong disputes with the victim. Reactions to the shootings, which resulted in the deaths of two teenage boys, had not yet exploded into riot form, but now that 24 hours had passed without comment by the police, officials expected a backlash and were drafting an announcement to be delivered by the mayor at the site of the crime. The mayor’s safety was a concern, and a police squad had been assigned to protect him.

Mayor Brad Donovan, who had worked his way up in the police department, becoming police chief and then running for mayor a year ago, was looked on as a reformer. Expectations were high for his performance, but he had not produced results.

Solution
Editors reading early pages like this might ask: “When does this story start?”–meaning, “When will we see some action and dialogue in a scene?” So why not start with your character in action in a scene, instead of narrative backstory. Then, later on, supply any foundational narration or biography in smaller, more appropriate chunks.

For a more effective opening, then, grab your reader’s interest with your first sentence and first paragraph, showing your main character in action with dialogue, and create conflict that reveals characters’ emotions:

Mayor Brad Donovan shouted into the microphone, “If you’ll let me speak, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do.” The crowd noise abated only slightly and he repeated, “Let me speak!”

The residents of the neighborhood where police had shot two teenagers the day before quieted down just enough for Donovan to go on.

“I know you’re upset. I am, too. I’ll get to the bottom of this, I assure you. I’ll speak on this every day and tell you exactly what’s happening. Is that fair?”

A gray-haired woman at the front of the crowd shouted, “He was my grandson. Can you bring my Robbie back? That would be fair.” She seemed about to fall, and two women took her arms to hold the woman upright.

Donovan jumped down from the platform and strode forward to the woman. He put his arm around her and spoke to her alone, in a soft voice. “I can’t do that. I can’t bring him back. But I can bring justice to you. And to this town.”

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–Sam McCarver

WORKOUT

IN A TYPICAL NOVEL, your four primary characters will be: The Main Character (protagonist), main character’s Sidekick, the main character’s Romantic Interest, and the Antagonist. For each of these write a narrative biography of two or three paragraphs, describing briefly their lifestyles, physical appearances, internal attitudes and external relationships.

RESOURCES
IN WRITING YOUR novel manuscript, draw upon the experiences, ideas, advice and perspectives of other authors and writing instructors by referring to the following books:

• The Art and Craft of Novel Writing by Oakley Hall. The author discusses elements of fiction and the writing process, and provides examples.

• The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri. Originally written for writers of stage-play drama, it applies just as forcefully to concepts important in the writing of novels.

• The Career Novelist by Donald Maass. A renowned literary agent offers his unique and practical insights and strategies for success in writing novels.

• Dare to Be a Great Writer: 329 Keys to Powerful Fiction by Leonard Bishop. The major novel components, organized by topic, are discussed interestingly in a few paragraphs.

By: McCarver, Sam, Writer, Sep2006

ABOVE FRANZ KAFKA’S desk was a sign that said, “Wait.” It was his way of telling himself not to be too hasty in finishing a story. Lately I’ve discovered that Kafka was really right, and that we writers should all put a similar sign above our desks. My fiction, I have found, is much better if I put the first drafts away for a couple months before I try to “finish” them and send them out.

Why is waiting before editing and sending a story out important?

1 The job won’t be rushed. A writer call catch more mistakes in a piece if he’s not in a big hurry. Grammar can be perfected. Useless words can be eliminated. Needless repetition can be caught. Dialogue can be tightened. Generally, the more time a writer has to spend on perfecting a piece, the better it will be. (To a point, anyway: Spend too much time on a piece and you can become obsessed with it, which might cloud your vision.)

Case in point: I’ve often sent a story out quickly, and then, of course, it comes back. Sometimes a kind editor will have circled my grammar mistakes or misspellings. What humiliation! All of this grief could have been spared if I’d just taken my time with proofreading, if I would have waited a bit.

2 The job won’t be clouded by emotional attachment. After writing a first draft, the writer is very connected to his “baby.” He feels it is, perhaps, wonderful, perfect in its entirety. He has created the Great American Story. He is inclined to leave the prose as is. But if the writer puts the story away for a time and comes back to it, he is less emotionally attached to the story. He can see more clearly what’s there and what’s not there. In short, he; a better editor.

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Case in point: I was writing a story about a woman who’s fascinated with another woman–not sexually fascinated, just fascinated. As I was creating this fascinated woman, her fascination seeped into me, the creator. My mind became cloudy with emotional attachment. It was not until I read the draft to some students I was teaching that I heard how crazy the woman sounded. Because I allowed for a little time to pass between drafts, I could accurately see the character’s personality.

3 The job will be enhanced by the power of forgetting. Creativity experts will tell you that it’s easier to solve a problem if you leave it alone for a while, ignore it, forget it and allow the mind to relax–to stop working. Then, in this relaxed state, answers come. If a writer puts a story away for a couple months, he forgets it. In this state, so the theory goes, his mind is actively working on the problem, but the writer isn’t consciously aware of it. So in forgetting, a write,” can actually “finish” a story unconsciously.

Case in point: If I can’t think of what comes next in a text, sometimes I get up and dance around. I forget my work, my problems in the prose, and then, miraculously, when I sit down, sometimes answers come. Magnify, the time it takes to do a little dance by a couple mouths. The results can be astonishing.

4 The job will be completed by a writer who is perhaps in a better mood. A writer’s mood is important while writing. Generally, if a writer is in an upbeat or good mood, the story will be better. Now, people will argue with me about this. But I think this rule is true for most people. You do not have to be ecstatic, but at least neutral. If you’re in a bad mood, it can be harder to get the prose out. Strive for a neutral to good mood for the most productive writing sessions.

Case in point: Often I will write late into the night. At times I become very tired. If I push myself, what I write in this state will usually be bad. I’m in a tired, groggy and often bad mood. But if I come back to the prose in a better state, it’s easier to write, and the prose will most likely be better. Common sense, folks.

5 The job will be done by an older, wiser writer. Let’s face it–what happens after two or three months? You’re lave or three months older. A lot can happen in that amount of time. Lessons, life lessons, can be learned and applied to your fiction. Things can be resolved in your life. When I was in writing school at Iowa State University, nay teacher, Jane Smiley, used to tell me, “You don’t know how to finish a story because nothing big has ever been resolved in your life.” Boy, was she right. The more I lived, the more that I saw life narratives reaching their logical (or illogical) conclusions, the better I got at writing stories, particularly endings. And endings are extremely important in our stories, maybe the most important parts.

Case in point: I wrote a story about a woman who had been raped. In the first drafts, she, the narrator, gave readers a lot of details about the rape. At first glance I thought that those details made the rape seem more real. But after putting the story down for many years–yes, years–I grew older and wiser. I realized that the details were too much; they rang false. I realized that this narrator would more likely be private about this experience. Here’s the rub: I never would have been able to write this story the way it should be written if I had not left it alone for years and then come back to it as an older person.

6 The job could wind up being worth more. It can literally “pay” to slow down.

Case in point: My biggest, most successful story, “How To Write a Story,” was one that I wrote in two parts, with a huge time lapse in between. I wrote Part I in the 1980s. Thinking it was finished, I did nothing with it–simply filed it. Then, in the early ’90s, I was digging around in my papers and came upon it. The story was about a girl who goes to a peace research seminar in Norway, where she meets all kinds of people, including terrorists. But because so much time had elapsed, and because I was an older, wiser writer, I could now clearly see what the story was really about: finding one’s spiritual focus. I added a Part II to the story, about finding one’s spiritual locus in a university setting, an experience that paralleled events in my life.

In the end it took me about five years to finish the story. (Of course, it might only take you five months.) I brazenly sent “How to Write a Story” off to The Paris Review. An editor there picked it out of the slush pile and published it. I’m told that rarely happens. That was my first published story. And I was a little richer.

7 The job of revision will be done by a writer with a fresh perspective. This is the underlying point of all of the concepts above. It has often been said that revision is really “re-vision,” a new way of seeing the piece. This re-vision is invaluable in the writing process. Some even say it’s the most important step.

Case in point: Many times when writing a story, I’ll leave out important parts, such as dialogue tags. Because of this, it’s hard to discern who is saying what. But if I revise the story, look at it with fresh eyes, I can see the confusing aspects and fix them.

So over the years, I’ve learned that it is best to try to give stories time to germinate. One must wait, as Kafka told himself. This waiting, this burying of the story, is kind of like planting a seed in the ground. With time the seed grows into a beautiful, leafy plant. And the draft grows into a fully mature piece.

Workout
ONE Write a rough draft of a short story of about 500 to 1,000 words. The draft should be as complete as you can create it at this time. Put the story away where you won’t see it. Come back to it in a week’s time. Tinker with it. Read it. Absorb it. Try to perfect it. Try to finish it. Now put it away again, this time for a month. Come back to it again; take it out. See what it’s about after a month. If it’s still about the same thing, the little story might be finished. To test the theory, put it away again. If, after a couple more months, it’s still about the same thing, it’s really done.

TWO Get a group of writers together to discuss their revision processes. Share tips and ideas. Here are a list of questions with which to work:

• Do you revise?

• Approximately how many revisions do you do per piece?

• How much time do you allow for a piece to “percolate”?

• Do you have any revision success stories?

THREE Save all of your old drafts either on the computer or in paper form. You may edit out something vital that needs to be put back in. If you have your drafts, this makes that addition easier. It’s also fun to go back to see how a story evolved.

FOUR Read several published short stories. Try to imagine the stories in their earlier forms. What has been added? What do you think was the “central core” of the story? What’s been excessively tinkered with? What should have been edited out?

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–Laura Yeager

Resources

SOME USEFUL texts on the editing process (and much more):

• A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines A beautiful novel written by a writer and editor who, I think, must use time to his advantage–not a word out of place.

• The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka A novella by a master of waiting.

• So, Is It Done? Navigating the Revision Process, a DVD hosted by Janet Burroway, and Burroway’s book Fiction Writing

• Writing in General and The Short Story in Particular by Rust Hills

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By: Yeager, Laura, Writer, 00439517, Jul2006

Novelist focuses on artfully presenting an �alien environment’ to her audience

Once i heard an author speak about the challenges of translating a foreign novel into English. In a story set in Korea, a teenager about to graduate from high school got a haircut. This mundane act carried more significance than it might appear. The translator stressed that it represented the young man’s assertion of freedom. The original author devoted only a single sentence to this rather common practice. But the English translator faced a dilemma: how to get the cultural meaning across to his English readers without adding an explanation.

Most of us are not in the business of translating other authors’ works. Still, often enough in the course of developing our novel, we run into a similar situation. It could be that a myth or a cultural peculiarity is integral to the plot. Perhaps the story is centered in a society whose customs are unfamiliar to Westerners. Or a character follows an elaborate ritual as part of a scene.

Elements such as myth, culture, place and ritual add texture to the writing, but they can also hamper the unfolding of the plot. As every writer learns, a novel is not a textbook, and it is best to maintain the pace of the story by keeping exposition to a minimum. Readers dig into a novel not for the facts but to take part in the fictional dream. Straightforward explanation or presentation of information can intrude on that dream.

The question then is, how do you present an alien environment to your audience?

Note, too, that this dilemma pertains not only to stories grounded in another culture or country, or those with a historical context. You could as well be writing about the Boston Marathon or cold mining in Virginia.

As my writing career progressed, I learned to be sensitive to this issue. In my first three novels, I wove in the history, geography and sensibilities of my birthplace, India. A bigger challenge arose with my fourth novel, Pastries: A Novel of Desserts and Discoveries, in which I wrote about a culture I wasn’t intimately familiar with, that of Japan.

Given below are some of the ways I have brought the reader into the culture of the story. I’ve chosen to draw examples from Pastries because the tendency to clarify was stronger than in my previous novels. This had to do with explaining an alien culture to myself in the course of writing about it.

Here’s a synopsis of that novel. Sunya, an independent pastry chef and bakery owner in Seattle, is traumatized when a chain bakery opens a few blocks from her. On top of that, her boyfriend leaves her, and her mother decides to marry a man Sunya doesn’t approve of. Soon Sunya finds she has lost her touch in baking. She has acquired a “baker’s block.” A Japanese employee, Bob, suggests traveling to Japan and studying with a renowned baker who heals people through baking. At first Sunya is reluctant, but subsequent events propel her to make the trip.

And now some tips:

Talk it out. When possible, build your story world through direct or indirect dialogue. Here is an example in which Sunya, newly arrived in Japan, encounters the country and its cuisine.

Matsumoto informs me that tea comes from Shizuoka prefecture, home to Fuji-san–his affectionate way of referring to the country’s highest mountain. … He smiles down at his bowl. “The universe comes to you ill a bowl of tea, as we say.”

His universe intimidates me more when I taste the génoise, by far the best I’ve ever sampled.

Avoid a static description. Filter a concept, truism or even a step-by-step process through the protagonist and her interactions with her environment.

Today we’re preparing puff pastry dough, which will form the basis for the opulent dessert called mille-feuille, or “pastry of a thousand leaves.” I dice a bar of chilled butter and add it to a measured amount of flour in the food processor. Matsumoto explains to me how the buildup of moisture in the dough will make for flaky layers in the oven. I feel an immediate sense of chagrin at the implication that I don’t know this ordinary scientific fact.

In the following, I demonstrate the concept of mindfulness, of being present in the moment. This concept will ultimately break through Sunya’s “baker’s block,” allowing her to regain her touch in baking again. Rather than spend pages describing it, I show her beginning to understand the concept through work experiences.

I fill each rectangle with chocolate sauce, a bounty of thin apple slices, and whipped cream, thinking about nothing but what am I doing. Me mid my pastry. It all comes down to that. I can’t possibly master philosophical concepts that’d take a lifetime of study, but I can do this.

Introduce conflict. Take dialogue one step further by showing hidden conflicts and tension (as in my Before and After sidebar on The Writer Web site).

Go emotional. Show the point-of-view character’s emotional response to a new idea or situation. A familiar detail might help the reader share the character’s reactions.

In the example below, Sunya learns about a neo-traditional movement in baking taking place in Japan. Though there are many possible ways to illustrate the movement, I decided to employ a commonplace ingredient–chestnut. I show how the neo-traditionalists use chestnut in an uncommon way (uncommon, that is, to most Americans). For Sunya, chestnuts evoke many fragrant memories. Every autumn, she and her mother gathered chestnuts on Seattle’s sidewalks and roasted them at home. It was one of the few simple pleasures of life her single mother could afford.

Bob continues, the brightness in his voice echoing the esteem he obviously feels for the Kyoto baker. Matsumoto originated a neo-traditional movement by adapting local ingredients to European pastry-making techniques, perhaps best exemplified by his use of chestnuts. He dries fresh chestnuts picked at just the right stage of ripeness and grinds them into sweet-tasting flour for use ill baking …

Bob takes a second and swallows. I look off at the banked clouds hanging above the eastern horizon, glowing embers above the rising sun. But it’s chestnuts that haunt my mind.

Go light on research. How much detail should you put in? Use this test: If in doubt, leave out a sentence or paragraph of exposition mad see if the scene or the story still make sense.

It’s been many years since I heard the translator speak. I never found out how he imparted the importance of the Korean teenager’s haircut to his audience. It might have been a depiction of the teenager’s emotions, a daring action he took, or a brief exchange between him Íand his aging uncle. But the reader will have gotten the point without the author having to explain it.

THE WORK: Pastries: A Navel of Desserts and Discoveries (St. Martin’s Press, 2003)

THE PROBLEM: Conveying a foreign culture without intruding on the fictional dream.

THE SOLUTION: Use tools like dialogue and conflict; make characters respond to people and situations in the “alien environment.”

By: Kirchner, Bharti, Writer, Jul2006

“It entrances me. It may take weeks to form this structure, to know where it’s going to end, to know why it’s going to end there, to know how it’s going to get there.”

–John McPhee (in Literary Journalism, edited by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer)

ARCHITECTS RELY ON blueprints. Coaches design game plans. Directors use storyboards. But too often writers of nonfiction articles operate without a sense of structure. They act like the foolish or stubborn driver who refuses to consult a map or ask for directions. The result is often the same: a frustrating, confusing and unproductive journey.

Successful writers know that structure and organization are required to craft clear, coherent and compelling stories. They love to talk about their models and methods. Most importantly, they take the time early in the writing process to ask the tough questions, to analyze their material, and to use the most appropriate story structure. If you use this proven three-step approach, you will gain greater confidence as you craft your next story.

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1 Ask yourself the tough questions. What’s your story about? Can you state the focus, theme or premise of your story in one brief sentence? If you can’t, then you are probably confusing the meaning or focus of your story with its topic or subject matter.

For example, a feature on an underprivileged inner-city child overcoming obstacles to earn a college degree is not simply about education, poverty or locale. Those are topic statements. The heart of this story is transcendence: how an ordinary person achieves the extraordinary. Readers want to read stories that inspire and illuminate, not merely inform. So think theme, not just topic, in analyzing and arranging your material.

How can you find your story focus? Begin by interviewing yourself. Is there a single image, detail or quote that conveys your central message? Why would someone want to read what you’ve written? How will your words affect them? Is there a central conflict or complication in your story?

Once you understand the meaning of your story, you need to choose an appropriate lead–an opening that conveys both content and tone. What anecdote, description, statistic or other piece of information will hook the reader? Remember, a straightforward summary lead will often work best.

In the following example from my book Inspired to Serve: Today’s Faith Activists, I chose an understated introduction to my profile of a charismatic social reformer who had to cancel his organization’s national conference when confronted by an unexpected blizzard in Washington, D.C.

Skip Long and the antipoverty program he heads have faced many challenges since it began as a local effort in his hometown, Raleigh, North Carolina. But neither he nor his organization has ever been so stymied by an act of God–until today.

After the lead, you need to craft a nut graph. This structural gem, also known as a thesis or billboard graph, will capture the essence of your story and guide the reader. Think of it as a movie preview on paper. It may be one sentence or an entire paragraph, but it must engage as well as inform. How would you write a nut graph for the story of the inner-city child mentioned earlier? It could go something like this:

Rachel’s journey out of poverty is a testament to her remarkable, resilient spirit. But her success is also a tribute to the love of her extended family. She says their support gave her the strength to overcome a host of obstacles en route to an Ivy League education.

If you read this paragraph and wanted to know more about Rachel, her family and the obstacles she faced, then this nut graph did its job. But many more decisions remain to be made on the road to structuring your story.

2 Analyze your material. John McPhee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and longtime contributor to The New Yorker, says structure should rise “organically out of the mass of raw material as collected.” Yet he also admits to agonizing about how to organize and tell his stories. A master of extended nonfiction narratives, McPhee knows that an effective structure should be customized to the material at hand.

One way to analyze your notes is to look for patterns. What messages or points keep recurring? What themes exist? Who or what are the subjects of your story? Who is doing what to whom with what result?

Depending on the type of story you are writing, categorization will enhance your analysis. For example, try listing the key conflicts or challenges in one column and strategies or solutions in another. Does your information lend itself to a chronological model? Then you may want to organize your notes according to a timeline.

If you have more dramatic material, you could-construct a scene list with a brief summary of major actions. When Gay Talese was organizing the notes for his award-winning article “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” he approached structure more like an artist than an author. He “sketched” oversized panels with comments for each of several intended scenes in his narrative-driven profile of the legendary singer.

Another analytical technique is a “jot outline”–a preliminary listing of statements that are central to your story. Writers may produce a jot outline after sorting through their notes. Or they may reach this outline stage after a “grope draft,” a free-flowing, rough rough-draft version of the story that is written without consulting notes. If you give yourself permission to write first from what you remember, you may capture many of the critical points needed to drive a compelling story.

I employed several of these tips when writing my book on social activism. My goal was to use a distinctive story structure for each of my 12 chapters, profiling individuals from different faiths across the United States. It wasn’t simply a matter of selecting a dozen different leads; I needed to analyze more than 1,000 pages of notes and discover what each profile was really about before choosing the most appropriate story structure.

One chapter chronicled a series of “movements” based on the many roles of an activist and man of faith. By movements, I’m referring to comprehensive sections of the story that work together much like music is organized for a symphony. My functional approach to this profile divided the 10,000-word chapter into seven sections: visionary, executive, son, disciple, activist, scholar and minister. Each section told a complete narrative as part of the larger life story. Other chapters in my book relied on different organizational techniques, dependent on factors such as dramatic scenes, biographical details and thematic highlights.

Fortunately, there are plenty of story models to choose from. But care must be taken to match the right structure with the right material. As the architect says: Form should follow function.

3 Select the appropriate story structure. The best advice I give to my writing students is to read widely. When it comes to structure, writers need models to analyze. Magazines such as Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report publish excellent examples of nonfiction story structure each week. The Wall Street Journal is arguably the best daily newspaper to read if you are interested in analyzing feature writing. In fact, the Journal pioneered use of the representative profile and the “full-circle” story structure, which strive to put a human face on economic, political or social issues.

Another tip is to remember the excellent story models you have learned through the years but may well have overlooked: fables, parables and fairy tales. Think of how many award-winning stories (not to mention books and films) have relied on the themes from narratives such as “City Mouse and Country Mouse,” “David Versus Goliath” and “Beauty and the Beast.” These archetypes may offer writers a blueprint for their contemporary stories.

Story models enable authors to craft their work in the same way that machinists make parts using product molds or dies. Here’s a brief look at some of the other models you might use in structuring your work

• Breaking news stories use the inverted-pyramid model to organize information from most important to least important.

• Profiles will often lead with an emblematic anecdote followed by a conventional or modified chronology which relies on flashbacks).

• Dramatic stories use scene-by-scene construction.

• The choice of structure depends not only on your material but also on your overall objective. Writers who are comparing or contrasting the views of political parties on an issue, for example, will find a point-by-point or block-by-block approach works well. With a point-by-point structure, you would alternate discussing each political party’s response to an issue (or point). With block-by-block, the writer would take those same views but reorganize them as a collective (group) response to all the issues (e.g., the Democratic Party platform on taxes, social services and import quotas).

• If you’re writing about a contentious topic with clearly drawn sides, such as smoking bans in public facilities, a pro-con structure will work. You should limit the number of points or perspectives to be commented on to three or four, and then seek commentary from each side.

• Another common story type is problem-solution (or complication-resolution). With this format, the problem is stated clearly and early in the story. The problem-solution structure works well with how-to stories, including consumer articles on popular subjects like dating, dieting, home remodeling and financial management. Anecdotal leads and use of representative (personal) profiles are ideal for these stories. The challenge is to marshal a coherent mix off acts and opinions (quotes) to support each of the proposed strategies meant to address the problem. If you’re fortunate, you will have dramatic material to tell the story using scene-by-scene techniques.

• The cause-effect model is used for illuminating a subject or issue. An illustration would be a story on a scientific discovery (cause) that has several ramifications (effects) for readers.

You may be wondering if structures maybe combined in a hybrid model. The answer is yes. For instance, pro-con and point-by-point work well together.

A wide array of structural techniques exists to help you analyze, organize and craft your material. Consult the titles in the Resources sidebar (on this page) to learn more about the dozens of story models available to writers. Just remember: Structure is the road map for successful storytelling. Enjoy the journey.

* writermag.com For a quiz that asks you to match a topic to an effective story structure, go to The Writer Web site and click on Online Extra.

BEFORE AND AFTER
Choose a lead to match the structure
Problem
The challenge was to choose the most compelling opening for my profile of the Rev. Richard L. Tolliver, a minister and social activist who had spearheaded a remarkable revitalization on Chicago’s South Side. But the lead would also have to be consistent with the overall story structure. I had contemplated playing it “safe” with a traditional chronological structure, using this type of beginning:

Richard L. Tolliver was born in 1945 in the often racially polarized city of Springfield, Ohio. The oldest of three children, Richard loved to read books. His mother, Evelyn, told him that books would help him achieve his dreams.

In his youth, his self-confidence was nurtured by the support of his mother and his maternal grandparents. His Baptist preacher grandfather led by example, gaining the respect of blacks and whites in the community. Richard was raised by hard-working, clean-living true believers. He became a proud young man who knew both the road to success and the way of the Lord.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this opening. But it is straight exposition. I am telling, not showing. I am hinting at characterization by providing background details, but description and dramatization are missing.

Solution
Once I selected my functional story structure based on Tolliver’s many roles, I was free to craft an opening that was more compelling. I would choose a representative scene that I felt illustrated who this man was. I would open the story in the middle of things. The expository material in the previous example would be used in two subsequent sections of the story. My goal was to let readers see my protagonist in action first and leave his biographical material until later in the narrative:

Reverend Richard L. Tolliver fights the midday traffic on the Eisenhower Expressway on this deep-sky mid-May afternoon. He also fights the clock on his way to yet another appointment. Always on the clock. Always robbing Peter to pay Paul, or so it seems for this driven man of faith, who shifts between his many roles and responsibilities with Protean zeal.

“You’re relentless but not overbear,” a prospective donor said to him recently. Admirers call him a visionary, a prophet of blueprints and master plans, a builder, more Solomon than Moses. He believes he is serving his people by providing new homes and new hope in a community that had been lost decades ago. He believes in living his faith through social activism.

In this revised example, I open with part of an extended scene (these are just two of several paragraphs) to portray Tolliver. I use a quote from a source to help with my characterization. Yes, some exposition is given. But I believe this is a much more dramatic and engaging start to my story. The first paragraph also functions as a nut graph by commenting on the man’s “Protean zeal.”

Mark H. MassГ©
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WORKOUT

Read several feature stories in Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report. Then analyze the types of leads used.

• Are they anecdotal, descriptive or dramatic?

• Do they rely on exposition (e.g., statistics or explanatory language), quotations or straightforward summary statements?

• Can you locate the nut graphs in the first few paragraphs?

• What structures are used to tell the stories? To help answer this question, think about what the purpose of each article was–e.g., compare/contrast, debate, dramatize, explain, illuminate, offer ideas/strategies/solutions.

RESOURCES
• Feature and Magazine Writing by David E. Sumner and Holly G. Miller

• Literary Journalism, edited by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer

• Writing Creative Nonfiction by Theodore A. Rees Cheney

• Writing for Story by Jan Franklin

By: MassГ©, Mark H., Writer, Sep2006