The audience needs a little background first
In Media Res
Some talesmen start their tales in the middle of the action. This has some good to it, for it gets the audience right into some action, some suspense, and ‘hooks’ them from the first phrases.
In short, tales that start in media res start with the predicament complete, or all but complete. They launch us into the second act right off.
The Iliad and The Odyssey both begin in this way. With them, it works. The Iliad skips over the birth of Helen, all the kings and princes who want to marry her, the pact of the suitors, her wedding to the King of Sparta, and at the other end of the known world, how three goddesses vied to be named as the fairest by a handsome shepherd, and how Aphrodite bribed his vote for her with the promise that she would get him Helen for his bed-mate. Which she did, which brought the kings and princes, per their pact, to help the King of Sparta wage war on Ilium to win Helen back. Then they fought for nine years of what would be a ten year war. This is where the Iliad opens, on that tenth year.
The Odyssey skips the war on Ilium (which is why Odysseus left home in the first place), the sack of the city, the departure of the other victors to their homeland, how Odysseus set forth, was blown off course, and suffered many adventures in strange lands, and was at last caught by the island goddess Kalypso, and forced to serve her in bed for a few years, and at the other end of the known world, how his wife and queen Penelope tried to rule Ithaca in his place, but was beset by local young noblemen who thought Odysseus must by now be dead, so Penelope was free to wed, and who all wished to win her so as to take over the principality. Meanwhile Odysseus and Penelope’s son has grown up almost to manhood with no memory of his father, but he hates these suitors lounging around the palace, eating all the food, dicing and quarreling, and making eyes on his mother.
One reason why Homer can skip these background events is that almost all his audience already knows them.
A Modern Example
Here is how Holly Lisle begins Memory of Fire
CHAPTER 1 Ballahara, Nuue, Oria
MOLLY MCCOLL WOKE to darkness—and to men dragging her from her bed toward her bedroom door. The door glowed with a terrifying green light.
She didn’t waste her breath screaming; she attacked. She kicked upward, and felt like she’d kicked a rock—but she heard the satisfying crack of bone under foot, and the resulting shriek of pain. She snapped her right elbow back into ribs and gut, and her hand broke free from the thin, hot, strong fingers that clutched at it. She twisted and bit down on the fingers holding her left wrist, and was rewarded with a scream. She clawed at eyes, she kneed groins, she bit and kicked and fought with every trick at her disposal, with every ounce of her strength and every bit of her fear and rage.
But they had her outnumbered, and even though she could make out the outlines of the ones she’d hurt curled on the floor, the rest of her assailants still dragged her into that wall of fire. She screamed, but as the cluster of tall men around her forced her into the flames, her scream—and all other sounds—died.
No pain. No heat. The flames that brushed against her didn’t hurt at all—instead, the cold fire felt wonderful, energizing, life-giving; as her kidnappers dragged her clawing and kicking onto the curving, pulsing tunnel, something in her mind whispered “yes.” For the instant—or the eternity—in which she hung suspended in that place, no one held her, no one was trying to hurt her, and for the first time in a long time, all the pain in her body fell away.
She had no idea what was going on; on the one hand she felt like she was fighting for her life, and on the other hand like she was moving into something wonderful.
This sure gets the action going, and involves us in suspense right away … only …
Who the heck is Molly McColl?
And where does she live? Does she live alone? What land is it? What age is it?
The passage has the quality of the nightmare. But the nightmare grips the dreamer because he is the character Molly McColl, and he identifies wholly with her predicament. No reader does this, because he can’t. While Homer’s audiences already knew the cause of the war in Ilium, and who Agamemnon was, and who Achilles was, no-one in the world outside Miss Lisle herself knows at this point who Molly McColl is.
The Second Start
Molly undergoes further trials for a few pages, and then Miss Lisle (still in Chapter 1) takes us to another place:
Cat Creek, North Carolina
Lauren Dane finished scraping the last of the black paint from the antique mirror’s glass. She swore a final time at the unknown vandal who had painted it over, then sighed and stood. Her legs ached from crouching for so long—she stretched, hearing the creaking in her knees and feeling the cracking in her spine, and she reflected that thirty-five was a lot harder than twenty-five had been. She was pretty sure she was getting smarter, but she figured she was falling apart at about the same rate. By the time she was seventy, she ought to be both brilliant and too decrepit to make any use of her hard-won knowledge.
But at least now the mirror looked good. Reaching from floor to ceiling at the back of the foyer—ten feet high, framed by one of those ornate carved dark wood frames that collected dust in the crevices but looked so pretty when rubbed with oil—it seemed a little out of place, too grand to be at the back of the foyer in the old Southern farmhouse. But the mirror had always been there. Lauren remembered being terrified of it when she was little—of refusing to walk past it in the dark, and of staring into it in the daylight, certain that she could see ghosts moving within its silvered depths.
She smiled at her childishness and liked the look of the smile on her reflected image. She couldn’t resist a little primping—this particular mirror had always been fairly kind with the images it reflected, unlike the closet mirror in her old apartment, which had put twenty pounds on her and made her skin look green no matter the lighting or the time of day. She thought she still looked decent for her age. No gray in her hair yet, no real lines on her face—though she could see where she’d have crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes in a few more years—and when she stood sideways, her stomach was flat enough and her butt still looked good in her jeans. The last year had been rough on the inside, but it hadn’t done much to the outside.
This, I think, is the tale’s true start. Here we have a character properly introduced to us. We know something about Lauren Dane, where she lives, what she does, how old she is. We’ll find out more in the next passages.
Why (and How to Fix it)
My guess is that Miss Lisle (or her editors) thought that this start was too slow to get to Eartherea, or even to action, and so she moved Molly McColl’s abduction up ahead as a sort of prologue — and it would have been easier to accept if it had been openly marked as Prologue — but the problem is that we don’t know anything about Molly, so we can’t really care. At best we can sympathize with her situation, and maybe the nightmare will echo some of our own.
How then to fix this?
It would be best to give us some clue as to who Molly is, and where she lives.
“Molly McColl looked out at the woods of Cat Creek, North Carolina. The early evening was a time she always liked, but tonight she felt something in the air that made her shiver. It was almost as though she were coming down with something, which was odd, because she never got sick, outside of the pain she felt when those fits took her. But she didn’t want to think of them. Instead she drank some hot cocoa with a chocolate Dove bar, which was one of her favorite foods in the world, and went to bed early.
“But the nightmare started after she woke up…”
I’m sure the first paragraph could be made shorter still, and yet hold the same brief moment alone with Molly so that we learn a bit about who she is, and where she lives, and ‘settle in’ to her skin, so that when the creatures come to take her away through the fire-green door into Eartherea, we are with her, we identify with her enough so that the effect of the action grows stronger.
We need at least a little opening information.
(Composed on keyboard Monday, March 3, 2008)
No comments:
Post a Comment