By Debbie Burke

A log line or logline is a brief (usually one-sentence) summary of a television program, film, or book that states the central conflict of the story, often providing both a synopsis of the story’s plot, and an emotional “hook” to stimulate interest. – Wikipedia

A blurb “is a short description that praises something (such as a book) so that people will want to buy it.” – Merriam Webster

Okay, the definitions sound simple enough, but the truth is, most authors would rather write an entire novel than struggle over these few words that are critical to successful marketing. How do you condense your 100K-word masterpiece into a few lines that are so intriguing, so compelling, readers will drop everything and click on the “buy” button?

The quote by Mark Twain comes to mind: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Brevity is essential. Elevator pitches used to last 10 floors.  Now they better fit between the lobby and the mezzanine.

For instance, the Kindle Scout contest requires a book one-liner of 45 characters or less. Yikes! That’s only one-third of a tweet. The book description itself allows a slightly more generous 500 characters (fewer than 100 words), but is still tight, compared to a typical synopsis length of 250-500 words.

I checked out a number of successful authors we all know to discover how they handled these daunting tasks.

A few examples of loglines:

“When he sleeps, the hunt begins.” – Jordan Dane

“She was beautiful and naked and dying…” – James Scott Bell

“No names. No feds. No trace evidence.” – John Gilstrap

“Welcome to Durham, North Carolina, the diet capital of the world.” – Kathryn Lilley

“Three women. A cursed house. Generations of lives at stake.” – Laura Benedict

“When the old money façade fails, the lies come to light.” – Elaine Viets

Six different approaches, yet each reflects their particular subgenre, showcases a distinctive voice, and sinks a hook that draws the reader in. Jim’s is a paean to Raymond Chandler noir. John’s is stark and no-nonsense. Kathryn’s hints at her ironic humor.

For the slightly longer blurb, consider these examples:

“In darkness…. Two strangers meet. A woman without inhibitions…a man without limits…for a private game between two consenting adults.” – Larry Brooks

“They say it’s better to battle the devil you know. But what if you don’t recognize him before it’s too late?” – PJ Parrish

“Exchanging their bodies for machines, these teens will defy expectations, brave danger, and defend civilization. They are The Six.” – Mark Alpert

“Ursula Marlow thought she was done with death, but when her fiancé, Lord Wrotham, is arrested on charges of treason, her world is turned upside down.” – Claire Langley-Hawthorne

And last, but not least, Joe Hartlaub knows how to sum up books in his reviews that are both pithy and intriguing: “BRONX REQUIEM serves up a heady, dark, double shot of urban noir.”

Why are loglines so stinkin’ hard to write?

For authors new to marketing, loglines and blurbs are especially intimidating. Let’s break down the reasons for the difficulty and, one by one, find ways to overcome them.

1. Overwhelming – How do you distill 60-100K words into 45 characters? Or 100 words?
2. Hard choices – What do you include? What do you leave out? Will the story make sense to a reader who is unfamiliar with the plot, characters, or your intentions?
3. Lack of objectivity – You’re too close to the story. You no longer have any idea what will capture the interest of readers.

How to overcome being overwhelmed:

First, identify what elements must be in a logline: Character, conflict, stakes, and reader engagement.

Consider the legendary Hemingway six-word novel:

“For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.”

While questions still swirl whether or not Papa actually wrote the story, it illustrates a skillful example of a logline.

Even though no specific characters are mentioned, we understand the inference that a baby has died, leaving behind grieving parents.

The conflict is how/why the death of the child occurred.

The stakes are also inferred. Can the parents survive the unimaginable nightmare?

Reader engagement comes from the need to learn the details behind the tragedy.

How to overcome hard choices:

Again, the focus must be limited to only essential elements. No matter how attached you are to subplots, minor characters, and lyrical setting details, there’s no room for them in loglines and blurbs. Stick to “just the facts, ma’am.”

Who is the protagonist? Who is the antagonist? What does each want/need? How do their respective wants/needs come into conflict? What happens if they don’t achieve their goals?

Which qualities of your story are universally understandable?

What is unique, that only you could have written? If your voice is distinctive, let it show through.

How to overcome lack of objectivity:

This is where you enlist the help of coworkers, friends, critique partners, beta readers, book club members, and sometimes total strangers. They offer fresh eyes and fresh perspectives because they are not as intimately involved with the story as you are. You’re lost deep in the trees, while they see the whole forest.

Write at least 10, preferably 20, different one-liners and short descriptions. Show the examples to some (but not all) of the consultants described above.

What are their reactions? What intrigues them? What makes them yawn?

What questions do they raise?

What isn’t clear to them (even though it seems obvious to you)? Does the story make sense?

Would they buy the book based on your logline?

Next, combine the best elements of your examples and rewrite.

Put yourself into the mind of a potential customer. What qualities of your story might fascinate a reader living in a different region, or in a different socio-economic strata? Would a reader who’s younger or older than you identify with the story?

Winnow the choices down to three loglines and three blurbs. Show these to different consultants than you approached in the first round. You’re seeking fresh perspectives on the revised versions. Ask the same questions as before and see if you’ve resolved confusion, filled in missing parts, and deleted unnecessary information.

Like Blanche DuBois, rely on the kindness of strangers.

Strangers and casual acquaintances can be more accurate barometers of typical customer reaction because, unlike family and friends, they’re not as concerned with hurting your feelings. You don’t need to be embarrassed because you may never see these people again.

Visit your local librarian and verbally audition your short description to him/her. Librarians read thousands of blurbs and decide from a few words whether to stock a book or not. Ask if your book would be ordered or passed over based on your description. If a librarian offers a suggestion for improvement, take it!

On a plane trip, find out what your seatmate likes to read. Then ask, “What do you think of this idea for a book?” and recite your logline. If the person expresses further interest, try out your blurb. Pay close attention to their questions and opinions. You’re seeking honesty, not compliments.

One caution: if someone responds positively, don’t become a pest and regale him/her with a scene-by-scene outline. Thank the person for helpful input and offer your business card (which of course lists all your books for sale).

 Based on feedback, refine your examples further. The process should yield several solid, compelling variations on a theme to use for different applications. One might be appropriate for entering contests, another for submitting to agents or editors, yet another can be your Amazon description and the back cover of your book.

Barter with other writers – You write my blurb and I’ll write yours. My beta readers and I have successfully come up with titles, loglines, and blurbs for each other. Sometimes you’ve already written the perfect logline, but it’s buried in your novel. A helpful beta will spot it and point it out.

When a stranger can read your precious few words, understand the gist, and wants to know more about your book, you’ve succeeded.

TKZers, do you have a secret formula for crafting loglines and blurbs?

Debbie Burke just endured the ordeal of writing a 40-character logline and an 83-word blurb for her entry in the Kindle Scout contest. A sample of her thriller Instrument of the Devil is online until July 7. If the book is selected for publication, everyone who nominates it will receive the eBook for free. Thanks for checking out the link.

by Larry Brooks

Quick story from the writing conference front.

A while ago I was doing a couple of workshops at a major writing conference, and as is often the case at these gatherings, the spare hours between sessions were spent meeting one-on-one with writers to go over their projects.

One writer’s novel stood out as a case study in what can go wrong… when you don’t know what you don’t know.

This writer believed he knew what he needed to know about writing a novel. Because he had read a lot of them, he was a really smart guy, and he’d been working on this story for years.

It should be noted here that this writer had a way with words. What some call natural talent. But here’s what may be a newsflash to some: a talent for writing sentences and a talent for choosing and developing good stories are different things.

Millions have the former. Few are born with the latter… which is where the learning comes in. Because how to cobble together an effective, compelling story is, contrary to recent popular belief on this site, something that can absolutely be learned. It happens all the time, especially for writers who don’t buy into the lie that it can’t.

This is where the learning comes in. Because how to cobble together an effective, compelling story is something that absolutely can be learned. It happens all the time, especially for writers who don’t buy into the lie that it can’t.

Which means it can be taught, as well. Let us hope so, lest all of us on both sides of the head table at all of these writing workshops and conferences (guys like Jim Bell and myself) have been wasting our time for half of our lives.

Me thinks that’s not the case, however. I have hundreds of letters from writers – published writers – who have written to thank me for showing them what they did not know, many after years of seeking out enlightenment, are to be believed.

This writer’s story pitch had promise. It was a spy thriller with a hero and a bomb that must be found before Paris went up in smoke.

But when we popped open the hood to see how the thing was built, the wheels started to come off.

I asked him about his opening hook. His response was that he’d opened the story with some deep backstory about the hero. I asked if it would link directly to the forthcoming plot of the core story, and he said no, he just wanted to add characterization before putting the hero in harm’s way. “So we would really know this guy,” he said.

Strike one. Because a thriller needs a killer hook, almost every time.

Which implies the writer knows what a killer hook is, where it goes, what it does. It doesn’t matter if someone else shows that writer this knowledge (this being, of course, a case of the writer learning how to write), or if they figure it out for themselves… either way, they need to know.

Also, this writer didn’t know that a thriller is not a character-driven vehicle, but rather, a premise-driven narrative, one that does indeed give us a compelling character chasing a specific goal, against specific exterior antagonism.

Which means the hero’s crappy childhood is not a primary story element.

He seemed surprised by this. Because apparently this principle had not been taught to him, an chances are he’d probably misunderstood the half-truth that “fiction is all about the characters.” His personal story instincts – the very same instincts that some claim are all you need to get you there – weren’t able to recognize and assimilate this principle.

That’s the thing, you see. Not all really smart people who want to write a novel are able to recognize and assimilate what they need to know simply by reading novels, or sitting in a room discussing them with imaginary beings. This doesn’t mean that you don’t have talent (also a recent assertion), and it certainly doesn’t mean they can’t learn these truths.

This instinctual shortcoming is everywhere. In fact, it far exceeds the number of writers who are born with a natural gift of story, to the extent of the degree of resolution required. And thus this explains, as a generality, the primary reason so many writers never reach the finish line in one piece: not because of a lack of talent, but from a lack of knowing. Which too often stems from not knowing what to know.

Two strikes now. No hook, and character-intro overkill. An editor at a publisher would have already bailed.

I was still in listening mode. I wanted to see how badly he’d mangled other principles before I got specific about what his story – any story – should look like.

Before long, though, I had to ask the deal-breaking question: “So when in your story do you stop showing backstory and put your hero into action?”

He quickly answered, “When he gets his assignment to find the guy with the stolen bomb.”

That was the what and the how. I’d asked for when.

So I explained, again: the hero needs to seek something in the story, have a need or a mission to engage with, to take action toward, with something at stake and significant obstacles – a villain – in his/her way. And within classic story structure – not a rule, by the way, but a principle observed by nearly every published commercial novelists working today… including those that will tell you earnestly that they don’t – there is an optimal time and place to turn that corner in the story.

“Oh sure,” he said, momentarily relieved. “It has that. Like I said, it’s when the spy gets his assignment to find and disable the bomb. That’s when all hell breaks loose.”

I was nodding, but not in agreement.

“So when does that happen? Give me an approximate percentage based on total length.”

Mind you, this was a thriller he was writing. Not a literary novel. Not that it changes the answer… the best answer is the same for any genre.

He had to think a moment. Then his eyes suddenly lit up.

“It happens just short of the halfway mark.  Maybe, like, forty-five percent in.”

I think he heard me gasp.

Or maybe that was the sound of his story going off the rails.

Because he didn’t know what he didn’t know. Which was something he needed to know – a fundamental principle – because of its critical role in the efficacy of his or any other story.

I asked what his hero was doing in those first 200 pages of the manuscript, before the hero’s primary quest entered the narrative.

He said, with some amount of confidence, that he was building up the character, showing us his life before he became a professional in the black ops business, adding a lot more backstory. Mostly backstory.

For the first half of his novel, there was no plot. No conflict. No dramatic tension.

He was certain that this was a good thing. Because he didn’t know what he didn’t know.

That’s when I told him that, in my opinion, he needed a major revision before it would work.

“How can you know that?” he asked, not a happy camper at this point. “You haven’t read it yet.”

“That’s true,” I replied, “I haven’t read it. I don’t need to read it. Let me ask you this – did you understand my question about when you begin the hero’s core story quest? The actual plot itself? And was your answer accurate?”

He assured me that he did, and that it was.

Both of those answers were wrong. He didn’t know at all.

And then I told him the deal-breaking truth:

Based on his responses, he didn’t actually know. He knew when, as I’d asked, but he didn’t understand that he hadn’t aligned with a core structural principle in doing it as he did.

I told him that until he knew about this principle and understood that it wasn’t something he could ignore, or even stretch to that degree, he would continue to struggle.

A setup simply cannot take that long. And the optimal place to turn the corner from setup, via something massively significant happening, toward the path that the hero would embark upon in the story, was closer to the twenty percent mark, give or take. The more give or take, the higher the risk.

No matter what you call it (because it is labeled differently from teacher to teacher, and probably not labeled at all if this is something you figured out on your own, which is rare), the is arguably the most important moment in a story – especially a thriller.

He thought a moment, then I saw a light in his eyes.

He said, “Okay, then. I’ve got it. I’ll open with it. Make it a hook.”

Still shaking my head. Because he still didn’t get it.

While there may eventually be a way to make that work, simply moving the First Plot Point into hook position wasn’t it. The principles of story architecture demand more finesse than that, which is the entire reason for knowing and using those principles, so the forces of story – what I call story physics – have a chance to work their magic on the reader in the best possible way.

This, too, being something he didn’t know that he didn’t know.

And since he’d been tinkering with this story for years, was unlikely to be enlightened on by one of those imaginary beings he was counting on.

More likely he’d heard this and written it off because there are no rules… never understanding that this never was about rules at all, it’s about a principle of storytelling that is universal.

I suggested he dig into this to learn more about the core principles of making fiction work – writing books, blogs, workshops, a writing coach –  to understand it all at a deeper level. And when he does, he should test it out there in the real world – this is where the sitting alone in a room part kicks in… if done in context to an awareness of what you’re looking for, that becomes a powerful learning experience – look for these principles in play within the books he reads and the movies he sees. Especially thrillers.

Seeing the principles in play is to believe in them. To finally know what you didn’t know before, and were unlikely to realize on your own, at least within a decade or two.

Our time was up. He asked me to wish him luck with his agent pitches.

I smiled, forcing a smile, knowing he would need it.

But the story has an epilogue.

Next day I ran into him in front of the hotel elevators. I asked about those pitches. And he was excited to answer.

“Went great! Two agents want a synopsis. I guess they didn’t agree with you.”

Behold, the great head-scratching paradox of confusion on the part of the over-confident, under-enlightened writer. Which comprises a massive percentage of the manuscripts submitted to agents and editors.

Writers who don’t yet know what they don’t know.

Pitches primarily reveal concepts and premises. Rarely do they expose to the listener the nature and depth of what the writer does not yet know.

Now I was nodding. Not in humble contrition, but with sad certainty. Because if he had written that novel as he described, he was in for a dark journey of frustration.

“Are you going to revise the draft before submitting?” I tossed out as the elevator doors opened.

“Naw. They want pages right away. We’ll see what happens.”

He smiled, as writers often do when they mistake the uncompleted conversation for the one that affirms their limited skill set.

This is what happens. This is where rejection comes from.

We don’t know what we don’t know. And thus, what we don’t know squashes our dreams. Usually without us knowing why.

That is, until we finally learn what we didn’t know then.

Story architecture is very much like anything in life that lives or dies by how functional it is. An engine, a first date, your computer… one thousand moving parts can be perfectly tuned and positioned and connected and humming along, but if one single essential thing is off the mark, if it sputters at all, the whole thing will crash and burn.

And the event will be fatal.

Knowing the broad strokes of how a story seems to be constructed isn’t enough. And while you may have heard it before and dismissed it as just one presenter’s opinion – when what we hear contradicts what we have, that’s usually the outcome – it is just as likely that you’ve heard it and haven’t yet fully grasped it.You need to. Not knowing will kill you, every time.

You need know.

When you know the core principles, everything about your creative choices – including how to break the so-called rules – will be enriched.

And best way to know is to seek out this information… and learn it.

By John Gilstrap

Building on PJ Parrish’s post from yesterday, it occurs to me that the casual discussion of writing poses many false dichotomies.  Is your work character-driven or plot driven?  Is it about action or about vivid storytelling?  If your story meets its potential, the answer to all of the above is simply, “Yes.”

I also hear a lot about rules that don’t really exist.  We all know that prologues are a mistake–unless they work.  We know that we should never start with the weather or with backstory.  Bull.  Anything that works for the story will work for the reader.  Countless works of successful fiction break the rules, thus proving that the rules were never truly rules in the first place.  Take a hard look at the latter Harry Potter books.  While I am an unapologetic devotee of Harry and his exploits, there is no objective evaluation of the prose itself that could rate it any higher than average-plus.  JK Rowling never found an adverb that she didn’t like, and she’s quite the fan of passive sentence construction.  A TKZ First Page Critique would not make her happy.

Yet her books work–really, really work.  Why?  Because the story and the characters are so compelling that we’re willing to overlook some of the basic mechanics.

When I teach writing seminars–as I will next month at the Midwest Writers Workshop at Ball State University, and again on August 5 at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC–I reveal two basic truths that I hold dear: 1) that no one can teach a person to write; and 2) that successful writers get out of their heads and out of their own way and just tell the damn story.

I do believe that instruction and workshopping can hone and develop talent, but it cannot create talent where there is none.  Some people are not wired for storytelling.  I say this from the point of view of a writer who is entirely self-taught and was driven by my unblinking desire to make my writing better by reading the works of others and dissecting them.  And I whole-heartedly admit that what worked for me may not work for all.

Some of the most creatively constipated writers I’ve ever spoken with have spent gobs of money over the years attending writing classes, yet paradoxically have few stories–and often no books–to show for it.  I think that has a lot to do with the fact that they believe in the rules and the dichotomies.  They value perfect sentence construction over compelling characters.  In short, they spend too much time stressing over getting it right when maybe they’d have been better off if they’d just gotten it written.

In my own case, my “first” book–the first to be published–was in fact the fourth book I’d written.  Those other three were my own private master class in fiction.  But the single biggest difference between Nathan’s Run and its unpublished predecessors is that that was my first effort to forget about WRITING A BOOK (read that with a rolled R) and instead tell the story the way I would tell it orally, using the same turns of phrase and the same rather cynical squint that pretty much defines my worldview.  As I wrote each scene, and I found that I liked them, I began to realize that I’d discovered that elusive “voice” that people always talk about.

At that point–before agents or sales–there was no way for me to know if the book was any good, but I knew that it was exactly the book I wanted it to be, exactly the book I’d set out to write.  And because I have always been a voracious reader, I had enough confidence (hubris?) to believe that it was as good or better than any book I’d read that year.

A good part of this writing biz is about attitude, I think.  It’s about believing from your own experience that the book you’ve written is exactly the book you want it to be.  If you know its close and you know what’s wrong–or at least you think you do–then by all means workshop the manuscript and attend classes and seek guidance.  Similarly, if you want to be introduced to the basics of the craft–the literary equivalent of learning how miter joints in carpentry–then classes and workshops are a terrific resource.

But never lose sight of the fact that if you truly believe that a scene or a chapter or a whole story is exactly what you want it to be, yet others in your group disagree, only one name goes on the spine.  Only in workshops do people sit down to read with an eye toward nit-picking and changing things.  In the real world, when people sit down to read, they have every expectation of a good story well told.

Don’t let them down.

Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist. — Picasso

By PJ Parrish

So I cracked open a new thriller the other day. Starting a new read is like going on vacation. You buy your ticket and you’re filled with excitement and expectations. Where am I going to go? What cool sights will I see? What fascinating people will I meet? What great adventures await me?

I had heard this book was really good, and I haven’t been swept away by a novel in a long time. I was ripe for seduction.

Then I started reading it.  And the writer in me took over the reader in me. I started to analyze what the author was doing.  Good grief…he broke every rule we here at TKZ talk about:

• The opening graph was slow and boring.
• The style mixed past and present tense
• The writer cut away at a crucial peak moment in the set-up action scene and didn’t show it “on camera.”
• The first four chapters are heavy with backstory info dumps
• The point of view head-hops between characters in mid-scenes
• One chapter ends with “little did he know that…” (death was coming for him)

But I couldn’t put the book down. See all those bullet points above? I didn’t care about any of them because the story was so darn compelling that the writer in me was elbowed aside by the reader in me. I’m now about halfway through the book and it’s getting better and better.  I’m totally invested in the characters, even the detestable ones. I can’t foresee what is going to happen. And I can’t wait to see how this all plays out.

I guess you want to know the title. It’s Before the Fall by Noah Hawley.  It won the Edgar for Best Novel this year.

Now Hawley isn’t exactly a novice. He’s written four novels before this, including two that could be classified as thrillers.  He’s also a screenwriter, best known for creating and writing the television series Fargo and Legion.

Before the Fall definitely has the bones of a good screenplay. Here’s the setup: A privileged family sets off on foggy night from Martha’s Vineyard with a down-on-his-luck painter tagging along for a ride back to Manhattan.  The plane goes down into the ocean and only two survive — the painter and the family’s four-year-old boy.

The story then moves into flashback, with detailed dossier chapters on the main characters, and the driving ideas and themes start emerging — the harsh price of our 24-7 media culture, the twists fate takes, how ordinary people become heroes, and the inextricable ties that bind us together.

Let’s go back for a moment and the rules that Hawley broke. Here’s the opening paragraph:

The private plane sits on a runway in Martha’s Vineyard, forward stairs deployed. It is a nine-seat Osprey 700SL, built in 2001 in Wichita, Kansas. Whose plane it is is hard to say with real certainty. The ownership of record is a Dutch holding company with a Cayman Island mailing address, but the logo on the fuselage say GULLWING AIR.  The pilot, James Melody, is British. Charlie Busch, the first officer, is from Odessa, Texas. The flight attendant, Emma Lightner, was born in Mannheim, Germany, to an American air force lieutenant and his teenager wife. They moved to San Diego when she was nine.

Snooze-fest, right? I mean, none of these people is important. They all die within sixteen minutes of takeoff. Who cares where the plane was built? If this showed up on one of our First Page Critiques we’d tear it to shreds.  Here’s the second paragraph:

Everyone has their path. The choices they’ve made. How any two people end up in the same place at the same time is a mystery. You get on an elevator with a dozen strangers. You ride a bus, wait in line for the bathroom. It happens every day. To try to predict the places we’ll go and the people we’ll meet would be pointless. 

Again, this breaks the usual thriller rules. It is omniscient point of view, the writer telling us something about the book’s theme. It’s a tad portentious. The protagonist artist won’t even come on scene for another nine pages and even then he’s a blip on the narrative radar. Yet I was very willing to let the writer rather than the characters steer the story at this point.

The plane takes off.  At the end of what is essentially a prologue (untitled as such) we drift into the wife’s POV:

As she does at a thousand random moments of every day, Maggie feels a swell of motherly love, ballooning and desperate. They are her life, these children. Her identity. She reaches once more to readjust her son’s blanket, and as she does there is that moment of weightlessness as the plane’s wheels leave the ground. This act of impossible hope, this routine of suspension of the physical laws that hold men down, inspires and terrifies her. Flying. They are flying. 

Then here is the last sentence of the “prologue”:

And as they rise up through the foggy white, talking and laughing, serenaded by the songs of 1950s crooners and the white noise of the long at bat, none of them has any idea that sixteen minutes from now their plane will crash into the sea.

Little did they know…

Maybe Hawley deserve a small wrist slap for that one, but I was willing to let him get away with it. It fit in with the tone he was using, like he had gathered us all around a campfire and was pulling us in. We know from the back copy what is going to happen, so he’s not stepping on any surprise here.

Back to the broken rules.  In the next chapter, Hawley switches from present tense to a more conventional past tense. And it is all backstory on the artist, Scott Burroughs, starting with a key childhood memory of Scott going on a family vacation to San Francisco that culminates in the boy watching Jack LaLanne swimming from Alcatraz pulling a boat in his wake. The chapter is laden with details and ends with the author telling us that as soon as Scott got home, he signed up for swimming classes. We are left to understand that this memory chapter is here to underscore the theme of heroism and doing the impossible. But we really want to return to that plane crash, right?

Here is the opening of chapter 2:

He surfaces, shouting. It is night. The salt water burns his eyes. Heat singes his lungs. There is no moon, just a diffusion of moonlight through the burly fog, wave caps churning midnight  blue in front of him. Around him eerie orange flames lick the froth.

The water is on fire, he thinks, kicking away instinctively.

And then, after a moment of shock and disorientation:

The plane has crashed.

Why didn’t Hawley show us the crash “on camera?” He’s a screenwriter! We should have seen the whole crash, like that terrifying scene with Tom Hanks in the film Castaway? Yet Hawley CHOSE to withhold it. As a reader, I initially felt deprived of a visceral experience. But when I got to a later chapter, I understood why he did it.  When Scott the artist is finally safe and has to recount the crash for authorities, the horror of the crash feels even more vivid and it becomes a tool for Hawley to comment on the fragility and unreliability of memory.

The chapter is all action (again in present tense) that intensifies when Scott happens upon the little boy clinging to a cushion. Scott, dislocated shoulder and desperate, takes the child on his back and starts swimming for a shore he can only see in his hopes. The chapter after takes place in the hospital and starts dealing with the media frenzy and Scott’s realization that he is man who has been hiding from a failed life and now has been pushed into the light.

The next chapter is titled DAVID BATEMAN, April 2, 1959 — August 23, 2015. This reverts to past tense and is devotes to the backstory of the dead father, who is a younger, handsomer version of Roger Ailes in that he created a Fox News type network.

The rest of the book jumps back and forth between present (Scott and the boy) and the past (backstories on all the key dead  characters). Again, the rule is broken: Stay with the linear more visceral plot.  But I wanted to know, needed to know, what had brought the dead characters to their tragic ends. There is reason the book is called Before The Fall. Yes, it can be a biblical allusion, that people are innocent until they are corrupted. But it is also a comment on the novel’s structure and the choice Hawley made: What happened BEFORE is just as important as what happened after.

I didn’t realize until I went back and looked at the notes I had made in the margins that Hawley broke another basic rule.  He has no chapter numbers. Most chapters are titled: “Storm Clouds,”  “Orphans” “Funhouse” and such. But the titles are not what they seem; they all have double meanings.

I wish I had finished the book so I could comment more fully on it here for you.  But as I said, I am halfway through and it is keeping me turning the pages and the characters are very alive in my mind when I put the book down. So yes, you can break the rules. In fact, sometimes you must.  I will probably go back and read Hawley’s other novels now, because I am interested not only in what the author has to say but how he says it.

But for now, I’m off on an adventure.  I’ll let you know how it turns out when I get back.