All Right Class, Where to Begin…
By Bruce Bethke
The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. “Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?” he asked.
“Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
—Lewis Carroll
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
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What marvelous advice for the aspiring writer. So simple. So succinct. So direct and to the point.
So often misinterpreted.
For a long time I admired writers who seemed able to spin a tale simply by grabbing hold of one end of an idea and pulling, to see where it went. At an impressionable age I was exposed to J. R. R. Tolkien’s assertion that he’d never outlined The Lord of the Rings, but had simply started writing, and “the tale grew in the telling.” I grew up believing that was the right and proper way for a creative writer to work.
Later, I came to realize that Professor Tolkien had tenure at Oxford University at the time he wrote LOTR and didn’t need to finish the thing on time for his publisher, or even to finish it at all. He had the luxury to flounder about for as long as he liked, to follow his nose wherever it led, and to let the story of the one ring develop organically.
With that also came the realization that I was not Tolkien and did not have that luxury, and for the rest of this column, I’ll assume you aren’t and don’t, too.
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There is a secret hidden in the King’s instructions to the White Rabbit, and it’s often overlooked. It is that the White Rabbit already knows the story he intends to tell. He doesn’t know where to begin telling it or how to develop it -- but he already knows how it ends.
That’s where most writers go wrong when they follow this dictum. They think they can just grab hold of the beginning of a story -- some think of it as pulling on a thread or a piece of yarn, others as teasing out a strand of cooked spaghetti, while I think of it as shoving my hand into a worm farm and trying to pull out a nice, fat, nightcrawler -- and if they can just stick with it and keep typing long enough, eventually the Muse will stick her tongue in their ear and they’ll come up with a brilliant idea for the rest of the story!
More often what they end up with is half a worm, as the rest of the poor crippled thing slithers off to die.
I’ve met writers who claim to work this way, starting at the beginning with no sense of direction, writing straight through until the end reveals itself, and never changing a word or a sentence once they’ve written it. I’ve met some who claim to have written hundreds of short stories this way. One even claimed to have written more than a thousand.
“That’s impressive,” I say. “How many have you published?”
“I have six collections out on Smashwords -- ”
“No. Not self-published. Not posted on your website. How many have you sold, to someone who paid you cash in advance for the right to publish your story, and who has released your work commercially in hopes that other people will pay them for the pleasure of reading your story?”
This is usually when the person I’m speaking with finds they have an urgent need to be somewhere else, talking to someone else.
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As a writer, I’ve had the good fortune to have been in workshops and writer’s groups with some really famous, accomplished, and successful people. As an editor, I’ve read more than five thousand slush pile submissions, and thus am familiar with a lot of people on the other end of the spectrum, too. What separates the two groups is not simply a matter of raw talent, innate genius, blind luck, or knowing the SFWA Grand Master secret handshake. It is, more than anything else, that successful writers know what they’re trying to do before they start trying to do it. Like the White Rabbit:
They already know how the story ends.
This doesn’t mean they write detailed outlines (though some do), but even the ones who insist they’re totally pantsers and not at all plotters start out with at least a glimmer of an idea as to how the story they want to tell is going to end.
They might begin by writing a rough draft of the final conflict and its resolution. They might just sketch out a final scene. Series writers especially might begin with just one thematic line: “This is the book in which I finally kill off Karl,” or “This is the book in which I resolve this sub-plot that’s been festering since Book 2.”
Such planned endings are rarely sacrosanct. Until the story is completely and truly done and published, anything and everything is subject to change. One of the more wonderful things that can happen when writing fiction is that your characters can suddenly come to life in my mind, highjack the story, and take it off in a completely different direction. I know one fantasy author whose characters ran into an unexpected plot complication in chapter one, had to detour off outline to resolve that, and spent the rest of her best-selling novel dealing with all the follow-on aftereffects that sprang from that one change. They never did get around to beginning the quest she’d thought she was sending them on when she first began to write the story.
My point is, time and again I have watched successful writers begin with a pretty good idea as to where the story they want to tell is intended to go.
After all, if you don’t know where you want to go, how do you know if you’re making progress towards getting there?
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It’s in the slush pile that we see the strongest evidence for what happens when a writer starts out with a good idea for a beginning but no clue as to how their story will end. As an editor, there are few things more frustrating than reading a story that is absolutely brilliant for the first twenty-one pages and then collapses into a puddle of meaningless goo on page twenty-two. We’ve especially grown to detest what we call “The Dan O’Bannon Ending,” which we see a lot. These are stories in which we can almost see through the manuscript, into the writer’s mind, and see all the anger and frustration building up in there as the writer comes to realize they’ve been telling a great story so far but have painted themselves into a corner with no way out. We can almost see the pressure and frustration continuing to mount, until finally --
“Aw, screw it. ‘And then the space-vampires crashed through the trans-dimensional gateway and killed everyone in the room. The End.’”
I’ll tell you right now, that story will be rejected. It might be rejected with a request for a rewrite and some suggested changes, if the story showed promise up to that point, but as it stands, it’s dead on arrival.
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A long time ago I came across a piece of writing advice from Mickey Spillane, which I’ll have to paraphrase as I can’t find the original quote now. In it, Spillane said a writer must always remember that while it’s the beginning of your story that gets an editor interested in reading it, it’s the ending that determines whether they’re interested in buying it. More importantly, even if you can get your story past an editor, once it’s published, it’s the ending that determines whether paying customers will want to read anything else by you.
So to answer the White Rabbit’s question: “Where shall I begin?”
By figuring out how you want your story to end. Your ending is what will leave your readers with a lasting impression of you and your work. Thus it should not be an afterthought that you trust to serendipity to discover on the fly as you write the story: it should be your first thought.
After all, once you know where you’re going, you can always change directions later.
