Learning from the Masters: Lincoln Child Shows Us How to Write an Effective Opening Chapter

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Typically, an opening chapter, beginning in media res, sets up a mysterious, sometimes bizarre, situation that involves danger, compelling a character (usually the protagonist) to take immediate corrective action, the outcome of which may be left, for the moment, in doubt.

Let’s take a look at each of these elements.

In media res means “in the middle of things,” and refers to the narrative technique of presenting an incident out of context, apart from the related sequence of related incidents of which it is a part. A classic example in detective fiction is to begin the story with the discovery of a murder victim’s corpse. Obviously, someone killed the person. Who? How?, Why?, When?, and even Where? (the dastardly deed could have been done somewhere else and the body moved from the true crime scene to its present location) are all implicit, but as-yet, unanswered questions. The incidents that led up to the murder have been omitted. The story, in other words, has begun in media res.

The way to create mystery is to withhold key explanatory details that would create a context in which the situation would be understood. Often, such details relate to who or what is causing the situation, how the situation is being caused, or why it is being caused. A writer has only five questions with which to work in developing his or her plot and in creating, maintaining, and heightening the suspense that keeps readers reading: Who?, What?, When?, Where?, How?, and Why?* It is best, perhaps, in the opening chapter to address as few of these vital questions as possible. If an author supplies the what?, for example, and need to address the other four questions, it is probably best to leave them for later. By keeping the reader guessing concerning these questions, the writer maintains suspense.

The bizarre, of course, is the unusual. The unusual can be outlandish, but it need not be. The unusual can be a description of the life of a little-known people, such as an arctic or an Amazonian tribe. It can be a look into the customs of a different culture, past, present, or future. It can involve an expedition to another world. The unusual can be the anomalous, phenomena that do not fit the current scientific view of nature or reality. The bizarre may relate to the monstrous, the abnormal, the deviant, the fiendish, or the aberrant. Folklore, legends, and myths are sources, at times, for beliefs and attitudes that may seem bizarre to modern men and women.

Danger is most often associated with the body; it is physical. Such danger should always be present in a horror novel, of course (and is present in almost all genre fiction). However, physical danger is often coupled another type of danger--theological, philosophical, social, familial, or technological, for example, which compounds and elevates the physical dangers to which the characters are exposed. Danger to the body is frightening, but when such danger is coupled with perils to faith, belief, nation, family, or infrastructure, the fear is magnified.

The danger must force the character (usually the protagonist) to take immediate corrective action, but what is “corrective action”? Ideally (from the characters point of view), it is action that solves the problem which he or she has encountered in the opening chapter’s situation. From the readers’ point of view, though, the problem should never be so small or simple that it can be easily solved by the endangered character. Instead, his or her attempt to solve the problem should fail and, in fact, lead to or cause an even greater, related problem. Therefore, “corrective action” might mean no more than evading the danger, escaping it, or temporarily neutralizing it, only to have the same peril recur, with greater intensity or be replaced by a superior, but related, hazard. Until the end of the story, “corrective action” is generally either evasive action or stop-gap measures designed to postpone what seems to be inevitable death and destruction or a failure of some lesser sort. (As a rule, if the opening chapter does not involve the protagonist, the character who is involved in the opening chapter’s situation must turn out to be related in some way, directly or indirectly, to the protagonist or the protagonist’s plight.)

Lincoln Child’s novel Terminal Freeze offers a textbook case of beginning one’s story in media res and of setting up a mysterious, sometimes bizarre, situation that involves danger, compelling a character (usually the protagonist) to take immediate corrective action.

A tribal shaman invokes a ritual by which he hopes to appease gods who, he believes, have been angered by a woman’s careless violation of a taboo--a violation that has already led to some (unnamed) catastrophe and which, if it is not propitiated, may lead to more, even worse calamities. He performs the ritual, but it doesn’t work. Instead, something far worse threatens his people, and the shaman realizes that it is not the woman’s accidental breaking of the taboo, nor is it the failure of the ritual, but something far worse: “Only a violation of the most serious of all taboos could cause the kind of spirit fury he now paid witness to” (4). The shaman’s response is to order the woman to pack her belongings, for they must leave the next day, to travel south, “to the mountain” (5), where the violation of the most sacred taboo, presumably, has occurred. Readers are left hanging, so to speak, concerning the question as to whether the shaman and his people will be able to put matters right. If not, what horrible fate awaits them? This is another question that, left, for the moment unanswered, compels further reading.

*Some argue that a sixth question, How many? or How much? is also implied by any situation.

Retake

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

One of the things I enjoy reading about is how businesses solve problems. When the business involves storytelling, the reading is, for me, all the more interesting.

Consequently, reading about how Merian C. Cooper, the executive producer of Son of Kong (he had also produced King Kong, of course) was told that he had to limit himself to a budge to a budget of $250,000 (originally $238,000), solved the problem of making the movie on a shoestring, as it were, was fascinating.

What he did was to “scale the project back considerably,” Ray Morton recounts in King Kong: The History of a Movie Icon from Fay Wray to Peter Jackson. This scaling back required Cooper to revise “the script, condensing and simplifying all the way through,” so that some scenes were eliminated altogether and the film’s action sequences were combined or juxtaposed without the originally intended transitions. For example, Morton writes:

To save money on recreating the native village and the Great Wall, the scenes set in the village were eliminated--the natives would nor confront the landing party on the beach and refuse to allow them to come ashore, forcing them to row around the island looking for a landing spot. When Denham’s party finally did land, it would be right near the site of the temple, eliminating the need for any lengthy treks through the jungle. The remaining jungle and temple scenes were all consolidated so that they would take place in just two primary locations. . . (95).

Short story writers and novelists don’t face such restrictions, because they don’t have to film their stories. However, by imagining that they are forced, by the vagaries of the economy, the whims of studio executives, or other unanticipated problems, to make similar changes to their plots, settings, or cast of characters, such writers could learn (or hone) their skills in plot development, description, and characterization, which is always a good thing.

Imagine that you are plotting a story about a radio talk show host, while operating a metal detector, which he does as a hobby, finds an artifact in the Nevada desert. It is inscribed with odd characters. Suspecting that the piece may be worth a fortune (and that it may even be of an otherworldly origin), the man attempts to decipher the strange characters inscribed upon the relic. He is unable to find the characters in any of the sources he consults at a major university. Finally, he decides to copy them onto a sheet of paper and take the paper to an anthropologist at the same university. Unable to identify or decipher the characters, the anthropologist consults a linguist. The linguist is a consultant for a secret government project which is recording a history of an alien species in its own language--the strange characters on the artifact that the talk show host found--and the linguist alerts the government that the talk show host has discovered the object that was lost decades ago. The talk show host is taken for a ride by government agents who inform him that the government has confiscated the artifact and threaten him not to divulge anything about his discovery. After going into hiding, the talk show host tells everything to his audience during a show and promises to share the characters with the world in the hope that someone somewhere can decipher them and interpret the message on the artifact that the government has confiscated.

So far, so good, you think.

But, then, out of the blue, you are told that your story cannot feature either an alien species or the government. You have to shoot a retake, as it were, to provide another explanation for the mysterious characters.

Perhaps you come up with something like this: a radio talk show host, while operating a metal detector, which he does as a hobby, finds an artifact in the Nevada desert. It is inscribed with odd characters. Suspecting that the piece may be worth a fortune (and that it may even be of an otherworldly origin), the man attempts to decipher the strange characters inscribed upon the relic. He is unable to find the characters in any of the sources he consults at a major university. Finally, he decides to copy them onto a sheet of paper and take the paper to an anthropologist at the same university. Unable to identify or decipher the characters, the anthropologist consults a linguist. The linguist identifies the characters as belonging to a lost tribe of ancient mystics. Finally able to interpret the characters, the linguist says that they are the words to an incantation that supposedly summons The Nameless One, which he believes is the tribe’s guardian daemon. On his show, the radio talk show host recites the linguist’s “wild story” and reads the translated text aloud, joking that he hopes he hasn’t thereby summoned the tribal daemon.

You’d now have two explanations for the origin and significance of the characters. As a result, you can create a more sophisticated plot. For example, perhaps the linguist’s account of the artifact’s characters is a deliberate falsehood, told to deceive the talk show host as to the true origin and significance of the inscription, which is that it really is a history of an alien species, written in their own language, which the government wants to cover up. When he subsequently learns the truth, the host can then tell everything to his audience during a show and promise to share the characters with the world in the hope that someone somewhere can decipher them and interpret the message on the artifact that the government has confiscated.

By further tweaking the original storyline, you can add more twists to the plot. Maybe your imaginary studio executive says he wants the host to advertise the characters on billboards before he announces the truth bout his discovery on his radio show, and, in major market areas across the country, the strange symbols appear on billboards, without explanation (ore perhaps with the caption, “Curious? Listen to KXYZ radio’s Hot Talk.” At first, you may think the exec’s demand asinine, but what can you do but humor him. You revise your plot, incorporating the billboards. In the process, you must explain why the talk show host posted the message on billboards rather than just explain things on his radio show.

Maybe his show is local, but he wants a national audience. Maybe he wants to protect himself against possible reprisals by the government or the aliens (or both). Maybe he is trying, as it were, to smoke the extraterrestrials out of their hideout, wherever it may be.

In this manner, by forcing yourself to plot and revise, shooting “retakes,” as it were of scenes and acts that you’ve already filmed (that is, written), you may facilitate your creativity as a writer, develop less straightforward (and predictable) plots, heighten suspense, and compose more sophisticated and complex plots.

Everyday Horrors: Masks

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Hillary: A Mask the Democratic Party Rejected as Presidential Candidate

The mask that she wore,
My fingers would explore;
The costume of control--
Excitement soon unfolds. . . .

-- The Doors

In the factory, we make cosmetics; in the drugstore, we sell hope.

-- Charles Revlon

Masks. At the same time, they both conceal and reveal or, sometimes, protect. They link those who wear them to ancient superstitions and to their cultural heritage. They symbolize enterprises and aid in performances. They may even impart the powers and characteristics of those whom they represent to those who wear them.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, words the origins of which are associated with mask include mascara (meaning stain, or mask); larva (meaning ghost or mask, “applied in the biological sense. . . because immature forms of insects ‘mask’ the adult forms”); mummer (in part from momer, meaning mask oneself); mascot; person (“originally ‘character in a drama, mask”); masque; boycott (based upon the “Irish Land League ostracism of Capt. Charles C.
Boycott. . . land agent of Lough-Mask in County Mayo, who refused to lower rents for his tenant farmers”); masquerade (for masked party or dance); oscillation (“supposed to be from oscillum ‘little face,’ lit. ‘little mouth,’ a mask of open-mouthed Bacchus hung up in vineyards to swing in the breeze”); muskellunge (“long mask”); and mesh.

Comedy and tragedy, the two chief divisions of the drama by which human behavior and its significance are enacted upon a public stage before a live audience, are represented by masks--a smiling and a frowning mask, respectively. The faceless faces of everyman, they suggest that the proper response to human conduct is either humor or sorrow; drama--or, rather, the spectacle of human behavior that it represents--makes us laugh or cry.

Masks have been worn to protect fencers, athletes, and soldiers, but their chief use is to disguise those who wear them, the role that they serve in Alexander Dumas’ The Man in the Iron Mask, Johnston McCulley’s Zorro, George W. Trendle and Fran Striker’s Lone Ranger, and countless costumed superheroes and movie villains, including Darth Vader. A cursory examination of the masks of DC Comics and Marvel Comics characters discloses the almost infinite variety that is possible with regard to such coverings of one’s countenance. They range from the simple Zorro or Lone Ranger type mask that is little more than a strip of cloth with eyeholes cut into it to the helmet-style masks of Dr. Doom and Galactus. Occasionally, comic book characters’ masks are also equipped with weapons effects and, indeed, the mask that the X-Men’s Cyclops wears is a protective one, blocking the optical energy beam that, unleashed, can demolish a mountain.

Masks are associated with one’s traditions. In ancient Rome, the death masks of one’s ancestors, stored in the family’s shrine, or lararium, were evidence, albeit not living proof, of a citizen’s lineage. During funerals, surviving relatives would wear such masks as they enacted the feats of the deceased (Kak).

Halloween masks and costumes were donned, originally, to ward off evil spirits, who, it was believed, would be frightened by the masks’ and costumes’ hideous appearances.

Leopold Sedar Senghor’s poem, “Prayer to the Masks,” conveys something of the communal ties that were believed to exist between family masks and tribe:

Masks! O Masks!
Black mask, red mask, you white-and-black masks
Masks of the four cardinal points where the Spirit blows
I greet you in silence!
And you, not the least of all, Ancestor with the lion head.
You keep this place safe from women’s laughter
And any wry, profane smiles
You exude the immortal air where I inhale
The breath of my Fathers. . . .

Before the advent of the camera, death masks (plaster casts of the deceased’s face) were made to preserve the appearance of famous people, including such luminaries as Blaise Pascal, King Henry VIII, Dante Alighieri, Francois-Marie Arouet (Voltaire), Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon Bonaparte, Frederic Chopin, Czar Peter the Great, and Abraham Lincoln. For photographs of famous death masks, visit the online Lauren Hutton Collection of Life and Death Masks.

In Gaston Leroux’s play, The Phantom of the Opera, Erik wears a mask to hide a physical deformity. Other characters’ reactions to his deformed appearance, once he is unmasked, reveal their own spiritual deformity or the beauty.

The example of the man in the iron mask, who became the subject of Dumas’ novel, shows how a mask often creates mystery. Many books have been written in the attempt, as it were, to unmask the mysterious prisoner who was supposed to have worn the iron mask at all times to conceal his identity and to fathom the motives of the one who ordered this extreme measure, with such candidates as the illegitimate son of Mazarin and Anne of Austria (and, therefore, a half-brother to King Louis XIV) being named by Voltaire and Alexander Dumas; Luis XIV’s father being named by Hugh Ross Williamson; General Vivien de Bulonde; a composite of a valet and Ercole Antonio Mattioli, named by Roux Fazaillac (a variation of which theory was also advanced by Andrew Lange); the bastard son James de la Cloche of England’s King Charles II, named by Arthur Barnes; and others (“The Man in the Iron Mask”).

Masks, not surprisingly, have appeared in a number of horror stories, novels, and films. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” involves a masquerade party at Prince Prospero’s castellated abbey, during which the Red Death makes his appearance. The masks and costumes seem to suggest the outwardly merry demeanor that people effect in the face of tragedy and death in their attempts to deny the reality and the inevitability of their own imminent demise, whether as a result of disease or some other means.

In “Dead Man’s Party,” an episode of the televisions series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy Summers’ mother, Joyce, the owner of a local art gallery, hangs a ceremonial mask on her bedroom wall, causing the resurrection of the dead. First a cat, and then quite a few human zombies, appear, the latter attacking Buffy, her mother, and friends during a coming-home party in Buffy’s honor.

In another Buffy episode, “Halloween,“ the masks (and costumes) that teenagers and younger children buy at an occult Halloween costume shop cause them to become the characters that their masks and costumes represent. Buffy becomes an aristocratic lady, and her friends Willow Rosenberg and Xander Harris become a ghost and a pirate, respectively, while children become demons and various other monsters.

Masks in horror films are used both to conceal identities and simply to frighten moviegoers. Thanks to the magic of special effects, masks can be both gruesome and realistic--at least on the silver screen. Movies in which characters (often the human monster) wear masks include Halloween, Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Scream.

In Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the villain, Leatherface, wears a mask fashioned of human flesh, a takeoff on the masks that Ed Gein, the so-called “Butcher of Plainfield” (Wisconsin) wore, which were the faces he removed from corpses he’d dug up in the town’s cemetery or the graveyard, known as Spirit Land, a few miles north of Plainfield. Also the basis of Norma Bates (Psycho) and Buffalo Bill (The Silence of the Lambs), Gein’s wearing of literal facemasks (and leggings, labia, and a “mammary vest”) were attempts by him to resurrect his mother, with whom, despite her death, he maintained a love-hate relationship.

Horror stories’ use of masks plays upon the notions that masks both conceal and reveal, disclosing the horrors of custom, tradition, family history, individual trauma, and a host of other influences that make up who (and what) we are, whether we happen to be heroes or horrors. What really lies behind the social mask, or persona, that each of us wears? The face of Norman Bates? Michael Myers? Leatherface? Ed Gein? In “Halloween,” Buffy tells Willow, “Halloween is come-as-you-aren’t night.” Let’s hope she’s right!

Sources

Ritual, Masks, and Sacrifice; Subhash Kak, Studies in Humanities and Social Services, vol.11, Indian Institute of Advance Study, Shimla 2004.
“The Man in the Iron Mask.” Wikipedia. 2008.

Everyday Horrors: Frogs

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In “What’s My Line, Part I,” an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Willow Rosenberg, during an all-night research session in the Sunnydale High School library, falls asleep. When the librarian, Rupert Giles, awakens her, she mutters something about tadpoles. When he looks puzzled, Willow explains, “I have frog fear.” She’s not alone.

God himself used frogs to terrify his enemy, the pharaoh of Egypt who was holding Moses and the ancient Israelites captive: “And if thou refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite all thy borders with frogs” (Ex. 8:2).

What’s so frightening about frogs?

Bible commentaries find plenty to say on the topic:

Concerning Exodus 8:2, quoted above, the Geneva Study Bible observes, “There is nothing so weak that God cannot use it to overcome the greatest power of man,” while the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary comments that “Those animals, though the natural spawn of the river, and therefore objects familiar to the people, were on this occasion miraculously multiplied to an amazing extent, and it is probable that the ova of the frogs, which had been previously deposited in the mire and marshes, were miraculously brought to perfection at once.”
Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary on God’s plague of frogs is not quite as concise as the previous two:

Pharaoh is plagued with frogs; their vast numbers made them sore plagues to the Egyptians. God could have plagued Egypt with lions, or bears, or wolves, or with birds of prey, but he chose to do it by these despicable creatures. God, when he pleases, can arm the smallest parts of the creation against us. He thereby humbled Pharaoh. They should neither eat, nor drink, nor sleep in quiet; but wherever they were, they should be troubled by the frogs. God's curse upon a man will pursue him wherever he goes, and lie heavy upon him whatever he does. Pharaoh gave way under this plague. He promises that he will let the people go. Those who bid defiance to God and prayer, first or last, will be made to see their need of both. But when Pharaoh saw there was respite, he hardened his heart. Till the heart is renewed by the grace of God, the thoughts made by affliction do not abide; the convictions wear off, and the promises that were given are forgotten. Till the state of the air is changed, what thaws in the sun will freeze again in the shade.

But what if you're not Jewish or Christian? What's so frightening about frogs if you're an atheist or a member of another faith?

They’re slimy! Okay, they’re not--at least, not all of them are. Frogs need moist skin and, since they don’t stay in the water all the time, they have a skin coating that keeps them moist. For quite a few people, slime is icky. A lot of folks are both disgusted by it and afraid of it. It’s different and it’s yucky and there’s no telling what might be in it that makes it slimy and yucky and icky.

Frogs cause warts--and they do it by urinating on their handlers! Okay, they don’t, not really. Viruses cause warts, and they’re usually transmitted by other people, not by frogs. But, again, perception is truth for those who won’t do their homework.

They’re poisonous! We’re not going to deny it: some are. In fact, blue poison dart frogs, as their name implies, exist for no other reason than to supply the poison for the blowgun darts that some South American tribes use. According to the National Aquarium in Baltimore, their diet (in the wild, at least) is the source of their poison. They eat such delicacies as “ants, termites. . . beetles, and other. . . insects.” However, in captivity, they’re “fed fruit flies and baby crickets” that are fortified with various vitamins and minerals and, as a result, are themselves “completely non-toxic.” Usually, the poison frogs are brightly colored. (Posion dart frogs may also be red and blue, strawberry, golden, green and black, and other colors.) The bright colors are warning signs that shout, STAY AWAY. Those animals, including people, who don’t are sometimes the victims of these frogs, but, even then, the poison’s usually only enough to make a body sick, not to kill him or her.

Besides, according to psychologists, frog fear isn’t based on reason. It’s irrational. It’s a phobia. Shrinks claim that people fear frogs because they’ve associated them with some sort of traumatic event in which they--the people and the frogs--were involved, probably in the dim past. A rather extreme example is an incident in which a person developed frog fear is that of a woman who ran over several frogs while mowing her lawn.

For those who want their frog fear to sound a little less irrational and a little more clinical, there’s a Latin name for it that confers dignity and culture to the phobia (for those who believe that Latin is a dignified and cultured, if dead, language, at least). The term is ranidaphobia. An alterative term is batrachophobia. The latter term can also apply to the fear of other amphibians, including Newt Gingrich. Folks whose phobia is specific to toads suffer from bufonophobia.

People who fear frogs should stay away from the Goliath frog, for sure!


“Everyday Horrors: Frogs” is part of a series of “everyday horrors” that will be featured on Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear. These “everyday horrors” continue, in many cases, to appear in horror fiction, literary, cinematographic, and otherwise.