The other day, I was talking about how tricky beginnings are, but what I’ve been struggling with this week is transitions, the parts that come after the big turning points. Particularly, what comes after the first major turning point. The heroine has achieved her initial goal, and the scene after that is the hard part because it has to establish her new situation plus set up what’s going to happen next. She may have achieved what she wanted, but now she’s starting to realize what she’s gotten herself into.

I think I’m on my third version of this scene, and I can’t just leave it and go on, with plans to come back and fix it later. The things established in this scene will play a big role in how the rest of the book works, so it needs to be right. Maybe not the exact words, but the events and the information that’s conveyed.

One problem I had was figuring out the characters. It’s a school-like situation, and my initial number of people involved was really too big to get a handle on, so I cut back. Then I had to develop all the characters who would appear, which also meant figuring out where they stood. Would they be enemies or allies? Who was going to do what as the story moved forward?

But then that made me figure out something new about the plot once I knew where everyone stood. There’s been a lot of going back and forth.

And still I don’t know that I’m quite ready to write it yet. Yesterday, I reached that scene and couldn’t seem to make myself do it. I told myself that I either had to write or clean.

So now my entryway coat closet has been purged, cleaned, and organized. It’s a thing of beauty. I keep opening it to admire it. It had become sort of the “junk drawer” of the house because there’s so little storage in this house. It’s a combination coat closet and broom closet. And, for some reason, it became the place where the candle supply lives. I have no idea how I ended up with so many candles. I think I’m going to have to start doing more things by candlelight to use them all. I like candles, but it looks like I was given a number as gifts, had a weakness for any kind of sale on candles, and then they might have bred in the darkness of the closet.

But today I will write that scene.

Beginnings are such a tricky phase of a book, especially in fantasy. You’ve got to introduce characters, possibly a whole world, and set up the story, and do it in a way that draws people right into the book. I think the most critical thing about a beginning is making readers care about the characters. If they care about the characters, then readers will want to know more about their lives, including their world and the history that affects them.

I got a case study in that last week when I tried to read a relatively recent book that shall remain nameless. This was a YA fantasy release from a major publisher, by a debut author. I haven’t seen a lot of buzz about it other than it being on a list of fantasy releases (I’m trying to be better about reading newish books), so I don’t think it was a “big” book given any kind of lead title treatment, probably the same kind of release I’ve had. And it had one of the worst openings I think I’ve seen in a long time.

There would be a paragraph or so about the current action — what the characters are doing now. Then a few paragraphs of backstory about their world. Then a paragraph of action and another paragraph or two about the world. Another paragraph of action, then some backstory about the characters and their history. And so forth. Very little of the backstory applied directly to what was happening in the present, and I didn’t yet care enough about the characters to care about their history and their world. It wasn’t the sort of thing the viewpoint character would really have been thinking about under those circumstances. The present action was the sort of thing that would have taken all her focus.

The result was that I couldn’t really dive into the characters and come to care about them because I kept getting distracted by the backstory. Because I didn’t yet care, I didn’t care about the backstory and kept skimming over or even skipping it. All the skipping back and forth between the story and the backstory meant I wasn’t really following either. At least in those 1970s fantasy epics that tended to begin with the wizard showing up at the tavern and telling the entire history of the world it was one coherent story instead of skipping back and forth. I kept trying to read on in the book, but I don’t think I ever really attached, and after about page 80 (it took me nearly 5 days to get that far), I skipped ahead and skimmed a few bits, found that my guesses about what would happen were more or less accurate, and gave myself permission to put the book down.

It looked like a fairly common rookie mistake from someone who’d heard the advice not to just dump backstory in but who didn’t quite understand how that worked and didn’t get that splitting up the paragraphs didn’t make it not an infodump. I’m just surprised that the editor didn’t do something about it. I think I would have really been pulled into the book if we’d just had that opening scene, which on its own might have been very moving, and then learned exactly why that event was so significant. Instead, we were told the significance before we saw the event, but instead of making the event more meaningful, I think it took away from the emotion. I did notice that the initial Amazon reviews were fairly harsh on the infodumping, but then there was a wave of “how dare those mean reviewers say mean things about this awesome book” reviews (most of which mentioned receiving a free copy in exchange for an honest review).

I was particularly concerned because the book I’m working on now has a lot of similarities to this book (one of the reasons I was reading it, as it might come close to a “comp” title to compare mine to when marketing it to publishers). In my case, there’s an incident in the heroine’s past that’s utterly critical to understanding the inciting incident, but I didn’t want to put it as a prologue. The solution I came up with (which may or may not stick) was to have an opening scene in which she has to deal with a daily life situation that shows her strengths and weaknesses. She got into this difficult situation because she has a tendency to daydream and get sidetracked, and once she’s out of the difficult situation, she goes back into the daydream, which involves obsessing about a memory about this past event, so then I follow her daydream as a flashback, showing that past event as she remembers it. And then the inciting incident happens and we know why it happens and why it’s important to her. We still don’t know why it’s important to the world since the heroine doesn’t entirely know. There are bits and pieces of what she knows in both the present and in the flashback.

I think (hope!) this will work, so readers will care about her and be curious about what daydream is so distracting, then want to see how this past incident will affect her life going forward.

I haven’t exactly been stuck on the book I’m working on, but I have been dissatisfied with how things have gone after the first big turning point. My heroine has crossed the threshold into the world of the story, to use Joseph Campbell terms, but the new world wasn’t quite clicking for me. I realized that while I’d developed the place the heroine was from, her ordinary world, quite thoroughly, and I had the external trappings of the place where the story takes place, I hadn’t dug into it enough to figure out how it worked and what the people in that place would be like.

So, it was back to the drawing board to figure out the specifics. That led me to really figure out the villain, what he’s up to, and why. Then that made me figure out the structure around him — who’s in his family, who are his allies? That gave me a new character, essentially giving a soul and identity to a character who was basically an extra, little more than human scenery.

And then further digging into things gave me another new character who I think is going to be what I needed to spark this part of the book. My problem was that I had a mostly offstage villain. He shows up enough to suggest that he’s going to be trouble, but there’s nothing the heroine can do about him without making a big stand that will upset the order of things. She’ll probably end up doing that in the climax of the book, but for most of the book there was no specific person who served as a true antagonist on her level. But then this round of digging gave me a henchman who’s a peer of the heroine and who’ll be around her on a daily basis. He’s not in direct opposition to her yet because he doesn’t really see her as a threat, but his presence means she has to be very careful about what she’s doing, and he’s a representative of the offstage villain who will be present in most scenes..

And now I have to replot the book because it’s going in a different direction than I initially planned, but it’s for the better.

I think I also need to do a bit more character work. One of my challenges is that there’s a group of about twenty people, and I’ve been treating about half of them like extras, but I really need to create characters for each of these people. I may go back and cut the number down. That might make it a little easier so I’m not juggling so many people.