by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell
Today’s first-page critique is labeled biblical fiction. Let’s have a look:
It Fell From the North
“Kittim!” Meshach snarled – and threw a cold look across the table – “What’s the matter with you, boy – breezing into my house without a knock? –”
“Now, see the grief you’ve caused me again.”
The young man clung to the arms of his chair as if he was bracing for a wallop and he said, “Don’t be cross, Sir!”
“What else can I be,” Meshach retorted, “When you barreled through my door like a whirlwind and destroyed my vase and quiet –”
“It’s unlike you –”
“You’ve better manners than that,” he admonished.
“Sir!” Kittim pleaded, “I’ve got some urgent and disturbing news which you need to hear.”
“Kittim!” Meshach said – gesturing dismissively – “What could be more urgent than what I sent you to fetch from where you are supposed to be at now? But here you are! –”
“You need to go back and get it.”
“Sir! Please!” Kittim implored, “You need to hear what I heard out there.”
“Why would I want to? You know I don’t like gossip…and for that reason gossipers too.”
Kittim hesitated. “Yes! But your –”
“So! Tell me! Of what concern is it to me that I should hear what you heard?” he asked sardonically.
“– Y – Your name came up, Sir.” Kittim stuttered.
Meshach furrowed his brow and seemed surprised. “My name was mentioned? –”
“Yes!”
“Are you sure you heard right?” he asked again still not convinced.
“Yes! It was. More than once. So I thought, maybe you’re somehow involved in it, and you’d want to know what’s going on. That’s why I rushed back here,” Kittim replied.
Meshach placed his thick arms on the table and cupped his chin with his right hand. He scratched the week-old stubble on his jaw for a time and then he muttered, “There’s got to be a sound reason for all of this….”
“What was that, Sir?”
The old man stopped scratching and sighed.
“Eh! Just ignore that, Ok! –”
“Now then, speak! I’m listening. Try to make it quick and brief, there’s no time. In thirty minutes, I’ve to be somewhere else attending to other affairs, and I can’t be late.”
“Sir!” Kittim squeaked, “The King has finally lost it.”
Meshach stiffened and turned pale at the news. He felt his heart pounding loudly against his chest, his breathing coming in short but quick bursts.
The old man rose and headed for the door.
***
JSB: Here’s what I like about this opening. It starts with dialogue, which automatically makes it a scene. It’s not description or exposition. We get right into the action. (Remember: Dialogue is a compression and extension of action. It’s a physical thing characters engage in to pursue an agenda.)
The dialogue is confrontational. That means the scene starts off with the lifeblood of fiction, conflict. This automatically means there is a disturbance to the character’s ordinary world.
Now we have some cleaning up to do.
Don’t Confuse the Reader
With dialogue there has to be absolute clarity about who is speaking and what their attitude is. Thus, at the start, we’re confused:
“Kittim!” Meshach snarled – and threw a cold look across the table – “What’s the matter with you, boy – breezing into my house without a knock? –”
“Now, see the grief you’ve caused me again.”
The young man clung to the arms of his chair as if he was bracing for a wallop and he said, “Don’t be cross, Sir!”
So we have two characters, Kittim and Meshach. The latter is chewing out the former. Meshach speaks first. But then there’s a second line of dialogue which is still Meshach.
No: A new paragraph starting with an open quote is always—always—another character speaking. (Yes, in the past it was the style to break up a character’s long speech into two or more paragraphs, where you did not close the quote at the paragraph break, and then began the new paragraph with an open quote. But that’s hardly done anymore and might seem like a “typo” to many readers.)
I’m going to rewrite this for you, taking care of the issue. There will be others that we get to, so let’s do this one step at a time.
“Kittim!” Meshach snarled – and threw a cold look across the table – “What’s the matter with you, boy – breezing into my house without a knock? Now, see the grief you’ve caused me again.”
The young man clung to the arms of his chair as if he was bracing for a wallop and he said, “Don’t be cross, Sir!”
For the same reason, you’ve got to rewrite this:
“What else can I be,” Meshach retorted, “When you barreled through my door like a whirlwind and destroyed my vase and quiet –”
“It’s unlike you –”
“You’ve better manners than that,” he admonished.
That should be one paragraph, and you don’t need the second attribution (he admonished). (You do it again with the line: “You need to go back and get it.”)
There’s a typo (vase should be peace). You’ve also got a mixup on the punctuation. You really have to nail this stuff! First line should read:
“What else can I be?” Meshach retorted. “When you barreled through my door like a whirlwind and destroyed my peace and quiet. It’s unlike you. You’ve better manners than that.”
Now we have to talk about..
…Em Dashes
I love the em dash. It’s a great tool when used correctly. The author here is using an en dash, which is exclusively for dates (e.g., 1958–1963). Make sure you know how and why to make an em! (Please see my post on the subject.)
In dialogue, the em dash is used for interruptions, not for pauses in the dialogue itself. For that, a simple comma suffices. Thus:
“Kittim!” Meshach snarled, and threw a cold look across the table. “What’s the matter with you, boy, breezing into my house without a knock? Now, see the grief you’ve caused me again.”
The young man clung to the arms of his chair as if he was bracing for a wallop and he said, “Don’t be cross, Sir!”
Every other em dash on this page should be cut, save one:
“Why would I want to? You know I don’t like gossip…and for that reason gossipers too.”
Kittim hesitated. “Yes! But your –”
“So! Tell me! Of what concern is it to me that I should hear what you heard?” he asked sardonically.
That’s an interruption. But note two things. Make it a real em dash, and stick it right up against the dialogue:
Kittim hesitated. “Yes! But your—”
Aside: Here’s a little Word trick with smart quotes. If you just type the close quote after the em dash, it’ll come out backwards, like this:
Kittim hesitated. “Yes! But your—“
So after the em dash, use Shift-Option-[ and it’ll come out right.
Unnecessary Dialogue Tags
Now let’s get into the overuse of tags. My advice is simple:
- Use said or asked as defaults. They do their job and get out of the way.
- As much as possible, make it clear from the dialogue itself, or an action beat, how someone is speaking. Then you won’t need any tag at all. Thus:
“Kittim!” Meshach threw a cold look across the table. “What’s the matter with you, boy, breezing into my house without a knock? Now, see the grief you’ve caused me again.”
We don’t need snarled. It’s obvious from the exclamation point and the cold look. Here are the other tags used, as if the writer has been told not to use said too much, and to crack open the thesaurus:
retorted
admonished
pleaded
implored
replied
muttered
squeaked
These simply aren’t necessary, and anything unnecessary in fiction becomes what I call a “speed bump.” These mount up and make the fictional journey less than smooth for the reader. We want smooth!
Here’s one example
“– Y – Your name came up, Sir.” Kittim stuttered.
First of all, no em dashes! Stuttering is shown by ellipses, and because of that you don’t need any tag at all.
“Y…your name came up, Sir.”
Adverbs
You’ll hear it all the time, and it’s worth repeating—cut the adverbs. Almost always, especially with dialogue tags, you should let the action or dialogue itself do the work. Now, I’m not the adverb sheriff, and there are some occasions when it may be needed. But be ruthless. First see if you can strengthen the verb. Here you have:
sardonically (not even sure how many readers understand what that is anymore)
dismissively (this one you can probably keep)
loudly (he feels his heart. Can he really hear it?)
Details for Time and Setting
With historical fiction, you’ve simply got to weave in a few descriptive details to let us know where we are. I’m not sure where that is with this piece. Since it’s biblical fiction, and Kittim references a king, we’re probably somewhere in Old Testament times. But are we in Israel? Judah? Babylon? Persia? Cyprus?
Many authors simply use a setting and time stamp, e.g.,
Jerusalem
595 BC
Or you can drop in details a bit at a time. As an example, you might mention the name of the king:
“What could be more urgent than what I sent you to fetch from King Nebuchadnezzar, may he live forever!”
From John Jakes’ historical novel, The Furies, which begins:
About four o’clock Abraham Kent woke from a fitful sleep and realized he couldn’t rest again until the day’s action was concluded, in the Legion’s favor or otherwise.
His heart beat rapidly as he lay sweating in the tiny tent. He heard muted voices outside, saw a play of flame and shadow on the tent wall. Campfires, burning brightly in the sweltering dark. No attempt had been made to conceal the presence of three thousand men on the north bank of the Maumee River. The Indians already knew that the general who commanded the arm of the Fifteen Fires had arrived, and meant to fight. The only question was when.
POV confusion
It seems that Meshach is your POV character because we never get into Kittim’s head. But some of your choices confuse us
Meshach furrowed his brow and seemed surprised.
Seemed? The only one it could seem to is the other character, Kittim. Another speed bump.
and turned pale at the news.
A POV character can’t see his own face (unless looking at a reflection). Again, this is Kittim’s POV.
Make it clear which character the reader should follow, and stay firmly inside that head.
Whew! That’s a lot to think about, writer. Let me conclude with the happy note I began with. You’ve got a handle on the most important narrative strategy for opening pages: a scene with disturbance and conflict. What you have to do now is get rid of the clutter that gets in the reader’s way. If you take to heart these fundamentals, you’ll be well on your way to engaging fiction.
Comments welcome.
Good post, Jim. Writers should understand the tools of their trade, and that includes the specific best uses for punctuation. The em dash is perhaps the most misunderstood of all.
Once they realize punctuation is nothing more than a set of pauses of varying lengths, writers are able to wield it as a tool rather than fear it as something they don’t understand. My Punctuation for Writers (second edition) is a tiny but powerful journey toward that understanding. It explains not only the “rules” of punctuation but how to apply the marks and why they have the same particular effect on any reader.
The book is available at all the standard outlets, but I’d be happy to email a free copy (ebook, your choice of .epub, .mobi, or .pdf).
Does anyone know the PC alternative for Shift-Option-[ ? Currently, I add the closing quotation mark immediately after the last word (which makes it face the right direction) then back up one space and hit Ctrl/Alt and the hyphen key, which are the keys I’ve assigned to create an em dash.
Since memorizing key strokes is more than my aging brain can handle these days, I simply find the correct punctuation mark and copy and paste it over the wrong one.
I’d like to know that, too, Harvey, just so I can help my PC friends. Terry’s cut-and-paste method does work, of course, and you can also do a “find” of every em dash.
Sincerely yours, Mac Lover.
I’ve set up LibreOffice’s AutoCorrect to replace == with —. Once set, it’s easy. This setting works across all of Libre Office. Rumor has it there is a similar tweak in MS Word, which I haven’t used in years.
Yes, in Word, typing two hyphens can be set up to “correct” to an em dash. It’s one of many ‘correct as you type’ options.
If you’re using Windows and a keyboard with a number pad, an Alt-150 will give you an n-dash and Alt-151 will give you an m-dash. If you ever forget the ASCII code for a glyph, you can get to any glyph on any fonts you have installed by opening up the command window and typing “charmap.”
Oops. That should be “The book is available at all the standard outlets, but I’d be happy to email a free copy (ebook, your choice of .epub, .mobi, or .pdf) to anyone who emails me at harveystanbrough@gmail.com.” Gracias.
Brave Author, you’ve just had a lesson from a master. Pay heed. You have something to work with here.
Harvey, I’d love to have a copy and will email you. Thanks!
Now for Brave Author. The first page grabbed my attention—I want to know what’s going on, but it was hard to pinpoint a time. Things like thirty minutes and the boy calling him sir made me think modern rather than Biblical times. It would help if we knew what position Meshach held.
Good catch on the “Sir” Patricia.
I look forward to your request, Patricia. And I don’t even do email captures. Feels wrong to me somehow.
A lot of good information and technique here, Jim. As usual. I see the “who’s talking” confusion all too often and it’s maddening and stops the story while I try to figure it out. Here, you’ve handled it perfectly.
Thanks, Doug. Confusion about speakers is just so unnecessary with dialogue, and simple to fix.
Great post! I’ve been writing for a while, and found all the mistakes you pointed out. Makes me feel pretty good. 🙂 I’d rather write dialogue than anything else, and love em dashes and ellipses.
I’m with you, Michelle. Love to write dialogue. Sometimes that’s all I’ll write in a scene, then fill in things later.
Me too. It really helps with getting the story down so I can edit later.
Go easy with the exclamation marks, Brave Writer. Most of these aren’t necessary. Unless a character is screaming, the dialogue itself should indicate urgency. Exclamation points do not. Other than that and the areas Jim pointed out, I’m intrigued. Best of luck!
Good advice on exclamation points, Sue!!!
Author, reading your page made me curious about the story, which is great! I agree with the assessment & had some other thoughts as well.
I may be way off base as I’m not hip to biblical era furniture, but I was immediately thrown out of the story by the use of “arms of his chair.” Maybe having arms on chairs was quite common in biblical times but I had a vision of someone sitting in a rolling desk chair being startled from his computer work.
I found myself mentally editing my own scenes for a few things I read here–awkward sentences. It’s especially difficult when writing dialogue for a different ethnic group etc. How to make it SOUND like a different ethnic group but still pull it off smoothly.
But I think it’s interesting that the strongest pull I had reading this first page is that the thought came immediately to mind: “I wish I was reading the scene where Kittim overheard whatever it was he overheard, because that just seemed like the starting point.” As is, when I reached the end of this first page, I was a bit confused about what it was I was supposed to understand and the curiosity in me just couldn’t help but wonder what it might’ve been like to start with Kittim overhearing the situation.
By extension of that, I would say Kittim was the more interesting character in this opening page–not just because he was being yelled at, but because he was the one who emerged from the page with more substance.
I’ll be interested to see where you go with this story.
I had the same immediate thought about the arms of the chairs, too. So I did a little research and found that yes, the well-off might have had chairs with arms.
Still, as with “Sir,” the issue is sounding too contemporary. There are many other physical beats that could be substituted for gripping the arms of a chair.
Good start, Brave Author. I also like your starting with dialogue, but I was confused about who was speaking and had to stop several times to figure that out. Making the changes Jim suggests will make this piece easier to follow.
One other thing I noted: The young man clung to the arms of his chair as if he was bracing for a wallop and he said, “Don’t be cross, Sir!” If he just breezed in with some terrible news, I’d be surprised that he sat down. I would have thought he’d be standing up, bouncing from one foot to the other, anxious to tell his master the bad news.
Good catch, Kay. It’s important to visualize the physics of a scene. Too many times I’ve seen, when editing, that a character is standing when he should have been sitting, or walks the wrong way out of a location.
My thought, too, Kay.
Also, Kittim is a messenger. He would not sit down unless Meshach, the person in authority, invited him to.
I love the advice of starting with dialogue to immediately have a Scene. My fiction suffers from the same problem I had with academy writing in college. As one professor put it, my essays “began with a big windup before the pitch.” She scratched out the first 4 sentences and gave me an A.
I remember clearly L. Sprague de Camp’s example of a good opening from his Science Fiction Handbook, back in the 50s:
“Put down that wrench!”
IIRR, it’s from Heinlein’s Blowups Happen.
Your story begins when you strike the match, not when you lay out the wood.
Like that, Jim!
Wow, Brave Writer, lots of great advice today. Your beginning will grab the reader once you learn the punctuation and remove all those speed bumps.
Good luck!
A good editor is also a bump remover.
Great post, Jim. And I love the beginning of your story, BA. You’ve been critiqued by the best, which all by itself is super good.
I was thinking that this story might turn out to be about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the trio who defied the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar and almost ended up as crispy critters. If so, I’d read it for sure! I love the opening because it starts with a nobody coming in to warn Mr. Meshach. A novel idea for sure. I like stories that flesh out real characters and situations . . . transporting me into their world.
Good job, BA. Take heed to Jim’s critique and you’ll have a winner that I’d read.
Good biblical possibility there, Deb. Make Nebuchadnezzar the main character and the title could be Some Like it Hot.
Oh, you!
🙂
Masterfully handled, Mr. Bell et al. I, too, would like some scenic detail: a desk made of wood from the myrtle tree, Meshach’s height in cubits, his headgear, his sandals, Kittim’s bare feet, a stylus and papyrus scroll or codex, the aroma of frankincense, etc., etc.
Right, J. That’s exactly how it’s done.
Excellent critique, although I can’t agree with forbidding muttered.
‘”Bitch,” he muttered, stomping away from his mother.’ for example. That works for me.
Sure you could use ‘said under his breath’ but muttered is better and simpler. Whispered may be occasionally useful, although mostly the reader will realise if a character is whispering.
The others are things redundant such as ‘replied’ or are things you really cannot do with human speech unless the ‘speaker’ literally makes a snarling sound, for example. The same with hissed. Most words of English are impossible to hiss. But if I feel another verb is better than said, I do not hesitate to use it, *if* attribution is required. Truthfully, mostly they are not needed.
Fair points, and no “forbidding” here. For me, Kittim’s response indicates Meshach muttered, but this is not a federal case.