I’ve been struggling with revising the beginning of The Next Novel. Not because I don’t know what happens to set my protagonist on her journey—I do. I can see her history winding behind her like a river, pretty far back, before it curves out of sight for me. The trouble is: where should we join the main character’s stream of experience, and begin to walk beside her?
Now, I love a good craft book, or a lecture on craft, and I’ve heard lots of authors talk about beginnings. Part of the balance is in making your readers ask just enough questions. You want them to a) have enough knowledge to make sense of what’s going on and b) enough curiosity to wonder about what comes next. You want them to have a manageable amount of questions for you to answer over time.
But in the case of The Next Novel, this awareness of a reader’s cognitive load isn’t helping me. I’ve now written four different opening scenes to the story (by which I mean they start at distinctly different points in the narrative—whereas, if we count all the times I’ve tried to revise from each of these points the number of beginnings I have sky-rockets). They all work in terms of manageability. Yet they all leave me uneasy. They feel wrong.
So I looked elsewhere for the issue, and started wrestling with where the story is within my main character’s larger experience. There’s a great lyric in Everlast’s “What It’s Like” that goes, “You know, where it ends… usually depends on where you start.” This is true for the human experience, start (birth) to finish (death): our time of living is limited, and our options within that life will be further limited by what we do and don’t have at our disposal as we move through that time. We get where we get, and then it’s over.
Craft books and lectures hint at an opposite truth, when we move from experience to story: where you begin… usually depends on where it ends. It’s like when we tell stories to friends about that first date we had, the job interview, the incident at the movie theatre with a stranger: because we know the outcome (happy/sad, absurd/exciting, disappointing/satisfying) of this smaller piece of our whole lives, we make choices about our own delivery that serve to both a) keep our listening friend invested and b) make the ending as powerful as possible: its tone, the details we share, the details we leave out and, most importantly of all, where we begin.
This is why I (and plenty others) recommend to writers that they don’t sweat the beginning until they’ve written “The End.” I say they have to experience the entire thing they are writing before they can begin, through reflection, to tell it mindfully as a story.
So it makes sense that the next thing I’ve interrogated, to strengthen the beginning, is the Next Novel’s ending. Not just “Am I happy with how things turn out for my protagonist?” but “Does my beginning have enough to do with my ending?” If the difference between my protagonist’s life and self at the end, and her life and self at the beginning, is a chasm (as it should be!), does the bridge across that chasm—the story arc—have a certain symmetry in its build? This is important in bridges, and not just for aesthetics; if they aren’t built to bear weight evenly—or, if they cover too wide a span without regular support from underneath or overhead—then they will fall apart and anyone in the middle of crossing is gonna be in big trouble.
This is where I started revising those four different beginning points I had, with an eye to bridging the beginning to the ending I have written (and love very much) in my first draft.
In the first beginning, my protagonist argues with the powers-that-be; at the end, she’s arguing, too, just in a very different context—to very different results. The biggest change from there to here is in her surroundings, and so all I had to do to heighten the contrast was draw special attention to the stakes, the power dynamic between her and everyone else, in both scenes.
In the second beginning my protagonist gets caught mid-crime; the ending also has an element of her being guilty of a misdeed. The biggest change from there to here is in her sense of guilt/responsibility, and so all I had to do to heighten the contrast was draw special attention to the emotions driving her behaviors in the face of judgment.
In the third beginning my protagonist takes advantage of someone for personal gain… In the fourth beginning my protagonist confesses to wrong-doing in the hopes of getting help. I did this work for beginnings three and four as well. I built both ends of all four bridges to match each other, and… still wasn’t happy with any one of them. All the bridges would get a reader from one end of the chasm to the other, and yet I still worried. I worried that, as sturdy as the bridge was, a reader might not want to bother crossing it.
But why? If the arc bridge is story-worthy, and the beginning of the walk across is neither boring nor overwhelming, what’s bothering me?
It’s gotta be my protagonist—the person beside whom I’m asking readers to travel.
Have you noticed? She’s no goody-two-shoes. The story starts, as many do, with her getting herself into trouble. Despite my hardly giving you any specific details, it’s clear that she picks fights, acts out, takes advantage, and knows that what she does—whatever it may be—is not the best course of action in the eyes of others. She could, if I’m not careful, be deemed (gulp) an unlikeable main character.
That’s not always a story-killer. But with main characters who are women, it can be especially dangerous.
But see, I am careful. That’s why all four of those beginnings are designed to include (at least) allusions to the deep trauma the protagonist has suffered, and (at least) hints of the dire straits that force her to act the way she acts. She does bad things, but when she does them I make it clear that she really has no other choice. What more can I do, to make her a worthy travel buddy?
At the same time that I was having this struggle, three things happened (not in quick succession, mind you):
The first was that a student in a writing class discussion mentioned how tired they were of sexual trauma in women characters’ backstories. She said that she knew plenty of strong, decisive, interesting women in her life, and that their strength, their value, didn’t come from their trauma.
At the time, my response was statistical: a majority of women have experienced, or will experience, some form of sexual trauma, ergo it would make sense that sexual trauma would figure into a majority of women characters’ stories. The discussion moved on, and I didn’t think much more about it.
The second thing that happened was I accidentally saw a negative review of On Good Authority. (When I say accidentally, I really do mean that: I like to check my Goodreads stats, like anyone would, so that puts me close to danger—but I believe reviews are for readers and are none of my business. I can only be grateful that someone would be willing to spend their time reflecting on what I made, regardless of what the content of that reflection is.) It was a short review—which is part of how I managed to take its meaning in before scrolling away: this reader felt that no one in the book was likable.
And the third thing that happened? I ended a relationship, for the first time in my life, before someone could hurt me—on the basis of being pretty sure they were going to hurt me in the future, if I let them stick around.
Only after I had done it did I realize that I had never done it before. In the past, it was always my way to give folks the benefit of the doubt until all doubt had been removed. My letting go in the aftermath of being hurt was always awful—because I was hurt, of course—but at least it felt justified: like anyone could understand why I was walking away, based on what had happened to me.
I guess a fourth thing happened, too, which is the thing that always happens: I took a shower. (I owe a lot, creatively, to the inventors of modern plumbing.) I was working through The Beginning Problem in the Next Novel once again while I washed up: what more could I do, in the first chapter, to make my protagonist worthy of walking beside?
I was so tired of this issue. And not, I reflected, because I was tired of this manuscript. Rather, it dawned that this isn’t just a plot problem, for me. This is a life problem. I worry, so much, about what people think of me and everything I do. I have a history of hiding my hurt from other people so that I won’t upset them. I have a history of hiding my frustration because, if I can handle it myself, what good do I do anyone else by sharing it? I have a history of holding my tongue about my fears, my misgivings, until the worst has already happened—because only after the fact can I be absolutely sure that I was right, that my point of view was unassailable and, thus, worth expressing.
Standing up for myself at the expense of someone else’s comfort puts me in danger of being an unlikable character. And I certainly don’t want to walk my life alone.
That was when that review of On Good Authority popped back into mind. Not because it hurt me, but because it puzzles me. I tried to make Marian Osley, the protagonist of that book, as good as I could. Like, it’s her whole thing. She’s what my other former husband and I would call a “justice junkie.” They both are—her and Valentine Hobbs, the love interest. I did everything I could think of to make her likable, and not in a manipulative way… I mean, I made her someone I liked. I think she makes sense, in that way that I would like to make sense to others at my most apologetic. She comes from the me who hates to hurt people, or disappoint them, or inconvenience them in any way.
And yet, not everybody likes her. From this, standing in the shower, blinking water out of my eyes, I extrapolated:
Maybe I am not in danger of being an unlikable character, if I stand up for myself. Maybe I just am an unlikable character, no matter what I do.
And not in a woe-is-me way. Not in a sweeping judgment, eternal damnation kind of way. More prismatic. More 3-D. There are a bajillion ways to look at me—a bajillion places to stand, a bajillion lenses to look through, and so, so many lights to stand me in. Even if I take the time to make myself look just right, as far as I’m concerned, I’m only one concerned person. Everybody’s gonna take their own read, on everything.
And then, I remembered the comment about how sexual trauma comes up so often in women character’s backstories. And I thought: maybe that student wasn’t talking about the inclusion of sexual trauma in fiction, but more the purpose it was serving, as tiresome. Maybe she was saying that women characters are worth our time, our wanting them to have success, without having to prove that they have suffered enough to “deserve” that success?
What if those sorts of backstories are common for a sociologically/statistically common reason, but not in the way I thought? You know, where it ends… usually depends on where you start. What if it’s not just about the prevalence of sexual trauma in reality showing up in story, and it’s also about another sociological struggle: that, because of their experience, women writers are—that I had been, that I still am—afraid that a woman who makes choices in advance of experiencing deep trauma, in anticipation of hurt, will have no one willing to walk beside her?
What if my discomfort with the beginning isn’t my protagonist’s problem? What if it’s mine?
I asked myself: what if I did less to make her “worthy” to walk beside? Who would she be if her past didn’t have to be the most awful, in order for her to want to pursue a better future? Where could I start her story if I didn’t have this deep need to perfectly justify her first, imperfect choice?
The answer came at once. A fifth beginning. I got out of the shower, and back to the desk, and now I have a bridge to test.
Briana Una McGuckin 