The Mythcreant Podcast 462 – Avoiding Confusion During Your Opening
Sometimes you open a book, try to read the first few pages, and are hit with so much confusing terminology that your only recourse is to abandon civilization and return to the sea. This is not the ideal outcome, but how can we prevent it? A story’s beginning is intense pressure, as it must be entertaining enough to hook the reader while also delivering the information needed to understand what the heck is happening. Fortunately, we know a few tricks to alleviate the problem, and that’s what we’re talking about this week!
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[intro music]Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: And…
Bunny: Bunny.
Chris: Oh no! Our microphone shield can’t withstand the great voice eater now that it’s crossed the seventh boundary to reach us. Quick! Get Anne, Danika, and Malcolm to assemble under the boundary along with our calibration of the podcast frequency to match the voice eater’s song. Drat! It just passed by us faster than a lightning sigil. I think we’re doomed to be recorded by the voice eater.
Bunny: Oh no!
Oren: That sounded like a great intro to me. I don’t think we need to change anything, because if we made that a little easier to understand, it would be spoonfeeding! That’s everyone’s favorite term when you say that a story is confusing. They’re like, “I guess you just want to be spoonfed!”
Chris: “I like stories for adults.” Look, it is the voice eater. It’s gotta eat out of some sort of utensil. It might as well be a spoon.
Oren: It’s not gonna eat with its fingers. Come on.
Chris: It’s really very deep once you apply some of your brain power and figure out what it all means. That’s a metaphor. It’s very profound. Symbolism. It’s got some Shakespeare or something. Allegory. This time we’re talking about avoiding confusion during your opening. That first-page confusion and disorientation. And this is one of those things that’s much more common in manuscripts than it is in published stories. Which means either that publishers are just rejecting stories with confusing openings, or that editors are just really good at cleaning them up. Because of that reason, it’s one of those problems that’s easy to miss. Because, for instance, when I do critique posts talking about the openings of bestsellers, I’ve caught some disorientation in them sometimes. But it’s much lighter. It’s not as big of a problem there as it is in manuscripts, which people see less often.
Bunny: I guess that part of that is because when you’re querying agents, you have to include the opening of your story. Back in high school, I was way more confident than I should have been about this one manuscript. And so I was shipping it around and querying it. And of course the opening… was not the greatest, and probably turned people off even if the rest of the story had been good. So if you have a very confusing opening, you’re probably not even going to get past the agents.
Chris: Recently, I just looked at a whole bunch of openings from our followers for a 10-year celebration. And this was the most common issue; going over it a little bit more to help people look at their opening and make it easier to understand.
Oren: I don’t usually encounter this. Although I am having a lot of trouble with The Witch King by Martha Wells. And I can’t really say why. With something like Malazan, I understand why I’m having trouble. Whereas I’m not sure what the problem is with Witch King. It’s just constantly confusing me. The first few pages were especially bad.
Chris: It’s funny because I still think that The Witch King is an improvement on clarity over some of Martha Wells’ other works.
Bunny: Yeah, speaking of naming too many characters!
Chris: It is a complex world. And probably some of the confusing ones really come in when people have a really complicated world. And they’re using a lot of new terms. And they want it to feel very natural. And so they’re just like, “Oh, you’ll just pick things up. I’ll just have the characters talk the way they would normally talk, and you’ll just pick it up.” It’s not really friendly to readers who are coming in.
Oren: One reason might be, with Witch King, that I had trouble is that Witch King starts with two unusual things happening at the same time. It’s hard for me to figure out which either one is. Because first you have the protagonist and his weird situation. Because he’s, like, in a tomb. But he’s not dead. But he is dead. And you have to figure that out. And then at the same time he is seeing some bad guys bring in captives for a magic sacrifice. And I’m also trying to figure out what that is and what’s going on with that. And so that, I think, might be the reason why I was having trouble.
Chris: And then he has somebody that he’s talking to through something called a “pearl.” It can definitely add up.
Bunny: That sounds like too much.
Chris: It’s not that it’s impossible for the readers to figure things out. When people are creating their opening and they feel like they’re creating enough context, they don’t think about the way that it all adds up. Yes, the readers can probably figure out from context that Waffles is the dog. But if they have to do that while they are also figuring out who is speaking, which person is the dog’s owner, whether they’re presently at a dog park or in somebody’s yard, it’s like it compounds upon each other. And every single thing that you add makes everything else harder to understand. And it’s not that this can’t happen later in the book. But it’s especially easy to have it happen in the opening just because the reader starts with no context for anything. What is this place? When is this place? Who are these people? What are they doing? Why are they doing it? What is your fantasy terms? The other thing that I think makes openings really tricky when it comes to this is because we’re just working so hard to get the reader hooked. When everybody really wants to make their opening as exciting and engaging as possible, a lot of times they end up jam-packing it full of things. And that only results in cognitive overload. Basically, you’re making readers do too many mental calculations at once to sort through what’s happening. So they can’t just relax and read, and it raises the chance they’ll miss something important or they’ll misunderstand something because they’re having to pay attention to everything at once.
Oren: One thing that is a big cause of confusion is in medias res. Both the actual meaning of it and the weird fan rage thing that people use it for when you say an opening is confusing. What in medias res actually means is starting the story with the plot already going on. You don’t start at the beginning of the plot. You start partway into the plot. That’s what it actually means. And that can be really confusing. If your plot is defeating the supervillain and you start the story in the supervillain’s base fighting the supervillain, yeah, that’s kind of confusing. You’re starting in the middle of something. It can be exciting, but it’s also, “What is going on? Why should I care about any of this?”
Bunny: Wow, I didn’t realize until now it was in medias res.
Oren: I think it’s in medias res.
Bunny: No, it is. You’re right. I’ve only ever heard in media res. This is fascinating.
Oren: Maybe I’m saying it wrong. Who knows? I’m sure people will be happy to correct me.
Chris: Is it a light story or is it cozy?
Oren: And then people misuse that term to think that any opening that’s confusing is in medias res. We got all kinds of angry comments on the Malazan post claiming that we just couldn’t handle in medias res openings. And this is the farthest you could possibly get from in medias res. This is a kid standing on a wall talking to a guard for page after page. There is no plot happening here at all.
Bunny: If you go by that, then what it actually means is just things happening.
Oren: Technically, you could argue that it’s “in the middle” because time has passed in the universe before the story started. But that will mean all stories are in medias res unless they start with the Big Bang. There wasn’t time before that.
Chris: If you have any relevant backstory communicated at any time in the story, you’re in medias res. Checkmate.
Oren: People sometimes use that definition as a weird fan rage defense, which is making the term less useful because the term actually means something and it’s important to know what that is. But also, it doesn’t really make any sense, because maybe a story is in medias res. That can still be really confusing! That doesn’t change the fact that it’s confusing.
Chris: Look, it’s confusing, but it’s not the confusing thing you thought it was.
Oren: Yeah, that’s my first advice, is: know what in medias res is. That will help you a lot.
Chris: If I were to choose the biggest piece of advice, it’s that sometimes you need to slow down a bit. So that you can fit in context. And there’s a balance here, obviously. But a lot of times people are so eager to optimize their opening, fit so much in at once, get the story opened up right away, that they end up rushing too much. You just want to slow down and take just a little bit of time with every new story element you introduce. The tension actually sometimes gets better because tension is about anticipation. So if you rush your opening too much, readers don’t have time to feel tension because things happen too fast. You want the reader to be able to experience that something is coming. And so you want to sit and watch it come. Watch it headed this way for a bit. Before “Oops, suddenly it’s here.” So that we can do that little bit of build up of anticipation. And it doesn’t mean you can’t start with a hook. Just develop that hook a bit. For instance, if your hero is in danger, take some time to describe their surroundings and what that danger looks like. Why is it dangerous? What could it do to the hero? If your hero is unhappy, go into their current situation a little bit so readers know why they’re unhappy. What factors in their life are at play? If they’re trying to impress somebody, take some time. Describe that person. Who are they? What happens if the hero fails? This context is important and you don’t want to rush so much you don’t have time for it. So, if there’s a conflict between two different groups, what is the fight about? What are each group? What’s going on? And basically, if you introduce one thing and get readers comfortable with it, then you can introduce the next. And this might just be like a couple paragraphs. It’s not necessarily like a whole chapter describing what the hero’s surroundings and the hero’s in danger. But often we don’t even have a paragraph to appreciate the danger before something big happens.
Bunny: I’m curious what you think of openings that have a good opening conflict and they’re interesting and they dole out information pretty well, but then they time-skip into the future but the setup was still necessary. The book I’m talking about is Rosemary and Rue, where the opening is the protagonist in pursuit of villain. It sets up that she’s got a family and a kid and that she’s this half-fairy person and there’s all these different fake kingdoms and magical creatures all in San Francisco. And the prologue ends with her failing in her mission and getting turned into a fish for 14 years. And then obviously the story is not going to be about her being a fish. It needs to skip forward to when she gets turned back. But at the same time, it would be weird if the story started with her having just turned back into a human and not get this nice scene with her talking to her daughter and her husband. So we really feel, like, what she’s lost. I’m curious what you think of that.
Chris: Usually the prologues that we really object to are prologues that don’t even feature the main character. So no, that’s just a time jump. “Prologue” label can be on anything. When there is a time jump early in the story like that, where the initial context for the hook that we need to set up happens years in the past, sometimes we put a “prologue” label on that. But a lot of the traditional prologues I’ve seen previously were the villain cackling, or in the viewpoint of some person that you think is the main character, only to watch them get murdered so that the villain can cackle. And the first chapter is now the main character and their sheltered little village. Villain’s not anywhere in sight. Completely disconnected. But no, I have no issue with opening up your context early and then doing a time jump if that’s really, like, the important context that sets up the plot and sets up the problem. Even though in that story you were talking about, Bunny, even though she’s no longer a fish in the next chapter, the fact that she was turned into a fish for 14 years is a big issue that kind of creates the problems that she’s dealing with.
Bunny: She starts the story in a very bad place, having been a fish and not wanting to return to the magical world, and then of course she gets sucked back into it. But she’s still estranged because she was a fish and absent and she can’t explain why. Didn’t get to see her daughter grow up and now her family doesn’t want to see her anymore. It sets up the stuff that’ll be relevant later in the series. So yeah, I think it was important that we saw her pre-fish. Not a lot of openings feature their main character getting turned into a fish for 14 years.
Oren: My personal thought on an opening like that is I do think it can be jarring. Anytime readers think they know what the story is about, and then suddenly the story is about something else, not about something else but it radically changes, so they think the story is going to be about the protagonist catching this guy, and then it’s actually about her recovering from being a fish for 14 years, that can create problems. But sometimes that’s what you gotta do. And I can’t throw stones: I did that in the manuscript I’m working on, because I could not find another solution. My beta readers told me that it was a little jarring, but I think that the cost was worth it.
Chris: What are the chances? You also had someone turning into a fish?
Oren: Yeah, specifically a fish, exactly. I’m actually making a Rosemary and Rue clone. I’m gonna call it Time and Tiffany.
Chris: But you can also do things to better set expectations about what the story is going to be on about. And try to prepare them. But yeah, sometimes you want to start a little earlier to get your context. There is definitely a balance. And it’s definitely good to start your plot up right away. That is not a bad thing. It’s just getting that kind of right balance where you’re not moving so fast that things are just whizzing by and the reader doesn’t have time to get their balance and appreciate any of it. Another big one is new terms that are specific to your world that your reader is not going to be familiar with. And character names. People have to remember a name and figure out who that person is and remember them. Another thing that’s hard in Martha Wells novels.
Oren: Another thing that will just contribute to a confusing opening that you should just think about a bit: Is your story just confusing? Because sometimes stories are confusing, and the beginning is confusing, and the story never stops being confusing because there’s just a lot happening. The novel The Quantum Thief is like that. It has some cool stuff in it, but it starts off super confusing, and it never stops being confusing. I kept expecting to eventually get it, and I never did. This is the first sentence of the plot summary, not the actual plot, just the plot summary: “Countless gogols of the legendary gentleman thief Jean Le Flambeur are trapped in the virtual Sobornost.” The heck does that mean?
Bunny: Am I having a stroke?
Oren: Pretty sure those are just non-English words. As the first thing to hit you, it’s just, “What is going on here?” What it means is that the protagonist is in a prison where tons of copies of his personality have been made. For reasons. So that’s what it means.
Bunny: Goobles and Snorfnorth?
Oren: Gogols and I think I might have pronounced that wrong. Sobornost, I think is actually how you say it.
Bunny: I like Snorbnorsst better.
Oren: Snorbnorsst perhaps not the correct pronunciation, but I think the true one, we can all agree.
Chris: Agreed. There’s this one book. The prose is just disorienting all the way through. It’s beautiful, though. So I can understand how the book got published, because there’s so much beautiful prose, but very hard to understand prose. It’s called The Marvelers. I think it’s a middle-grade magic school book. A lot of times when you describe something, you want to describe the big picture and then get into details. But for instance, she’ll just skip the big picture and just start giving you a bunch of details. Get the puzzle pieces and now you’re trying to assemble them into a puzzle and figure out what the picture is.
Oren: That was the book that I bought for Chris, because I tried listening to it and I could not visualize anything. Am I doing something wrong? Why can’t I visualize any of it? There’s all these details. Then I showed it to Chris and she explained.
Chris: A lot of things referred to in passing or implied or hinted instead of stated outright just adds up to the point where it’s almost like you can’t clearly see anything. And it’s exhausting to read because your brain has to do so much work. Again, as I said, a lot of the prose really is very lovely. So hopefully this writer will just get that clarity figured out.
Bunny: I wonder if that came from poetry. I wonder if that person was a poet.
Chris: I don’t know, but this is the kind of pretty wordcraft that I tend to teach people. I don’t think there’s anything unique to poetry in the way that it’s pretty.
Bunny: That’s fair. I do feel like I’ve seen, doing workshops in class and stuff, people who are normally poets, I think sometimes struggle to unlearn the more… “abstract” is the wrong word, because I don’t want you to be too abstract in poetry. But that style of writing, there’s information that you need to convey a bit more clearly here. It’s not so much open to interpretation on the wordcraft level when you’re telling a story.
Oren: “Ephemeral,” perhaps, is the word.
Bunny: Ah, indeed, “ephemeral.”
Oren: That can work a lot better in poetry than in a novel because the novel is still there after I read the opening paragraph. I still need to continue. I’m not just done reading it.
Chris: With poetry, it makes a lot more sense for the reader to spend more brainpower on fewer words because it’s real short. The creative expression, and sometimes over clarity, is usually what people expect from poetry. But when you have to read an entire novel, that really adds up if it’s not clear.
Bunny: Especially in a middle-grade novel. I feel like I had a much shorter attention span then.
Chris: That would be hard. When it comes to terms for your world, again, a lot of times people have terms to use. If you just delay a little bit and call something “the protagonist’s home village” instead of naming the home village. Call a person “the protagonist’s sister” instead of naming the sister. If you can just delay so that you’re pacing out your introduction of words, then that’s really helpful. Try not to use multiple terms for the same thing!
Bunny: Please!
Chris: If you’re going to use a nickname, try to do it carefully. Do it close to where the name is, especially if it’s just not an intuitive nickname. In fact, if it’s not an intuitive nickname, if it’s a nickname based on somebody’s last name, maybe just introduce their nickname and clarify what their full legal name is later. Or switching between first and last name for a character is definitely something you want to avoid.
Oren: English has too many names. I want fewer names. I want everyone to have only a single name.
Bunny: What if they also had an epithet, though?
Chris: It’s repetitive if we always use the same name for a character. We’ve got to be creative. We’re flipping the thesaurus. Use as many terms for characters as we can.
Bunny: Look, if you’re not talking about the soul-rendered Elliptar, I don’t know what you’re doing.
Chris: When you do put in a new term, you can put in exposition if it’s really important. But if you take the time and be like, “The city of Marca is the big trading hub on the coast,” you’re also asking the reader to just pause and remember that city. Worth it if you need to know what Marca is, or you’re not going to understand anything else. But otherwise, mostly what people need is just like, is this an animal or a vegetable? Is it like a type of spell? Is it a city? Is it a humanoid species? So, “They set out for Marca, hoping to reach the city’s markets by the following month.” You’ve inserted some words indicating that Marca is a city. Usually in the beginning, as much as they need to know. Although if you have the relationship, “This is the enemy city,” or something that indicates it’s relevant to the story or the character, that is also a really helpful thing to include when you introduce a new term.
Oren: Something you can hang a bit of drama on. I’ve definitely found that the starter conflict, I call it, is a good tool to use here. There are some situations in which the protagonist is just interacting with a bunch of weird stuff that is going to be really hard to explain all at once, in medias res or not. Like if your protagonist is commanding a space fleet in the middle of a complicated sci-fi battle, or even just getting ready for one, that’s going to be a lot. And I’m not saying you couldn’t make it work, but you might be able to make it a little easier if you first introduced your captain having to take a call from an admiral they don’t like, who’s going to give them some orders that are bad. So you have a little bit of a starting conflict, as opposed to like, “And here I have to introduce all the bridge characters, and this complicated sensor system that we use, and how the weapons work.” That’s a lot. That’s just maybe a little too much.
Chris: Your characters should definitely split up to cover more ground in your opening. No council meetings for opening scene. Please no. Don’t do it. That’s a hint towards a particular property.
Oren: At the meeting of Congress, there are 500 representatives, and you’re going to learn all of their names.
Bunny: There’s a book called Antigua, the Land of Fairies, Wizards, and Heroes, I think, that one of the other podcasts I listen to did. And mind you, this is not a good book, nor one that is by any means well known. The thing that’s significant about it, among many others, is that it has 200-something named characters.
Chris: Wow.
Bunny: Someone did the math on it. It was something like 80 characters per 100 words. Or, sorry, per 100 pages.
Chris: 100 words, what? So all of the words were just names. Just a list of names.
Bunny: For reference, I think Game of Thrones, or something, had 30 characters per 100 pages. Which is a lot.
Chris: I made fun of Malazan for having 90 characters in his Dramatis Personae, which is, I think, too much.
Bunny: Less than 200. And a lot of these characters were just mentioned, or you get a scene with them and never come back.
Chris: It’s very inefficient.
Bunny: A different book from the same podcast, a podcast of 372 pages, will never get back. And this was the third or fourth book they did. It’s called The Forensic Certified Public Accountant and the Cremated 64-Squares Financial Statements.
Chris: Ugh.
Oren: Someone’s doing a lot of work on that title.
Bunny: Every character in it has not only their first and last name, plus their list of certifications, but they say it every single time they say someone’s name. The main character, every time he refers to himself, says, “I, Titus Uno, Certified Public Accountant, Forensic Certified Public Accountant, Chartered Global Management Accountant,” and then says what the rest of the sentence is supposed to say.
Oren: That’s weirdly specific. Are we sure this isn’t a troll?
Bunny: Can’t be sure, but again, this is one of those super-obscure books. And there’s also multiple of them. I don’t know. It’s impossible to tell.
Oren: Having too many characters? That is something that is very easy to see coming up. Giving your characters too many different names that audiences need to remember? Also very common. Stating their credentials every time? Very specific.
Chris: Never heard of that.
Bunny: The host of the podcast just resorted, when they were reading through the books, they just had to go, “I, Titus Uno, etc., etc.”
Chris: A few other things that cause issues, real quick: Metaphors. It’s not that you can’t use metaphors in the opening, if they’re clear or if your opening is fairly simple, so it doesn’t have a lot of stuff going on. But again, a metaphor is something that people just have to take an extra bit of processing power. If your opening already has a lot going on, that can be an issue. Long sentences: Again, long sentences can be great, but in a lot of long sentences, the construction makes it so that people have to hold all of the ideas of the sentence in their head until they reach the end, and then assemble them together. Then it’s dependent on how the sentence is constructed, but a lot more can go wrong, so just shortening sentences can make things a lot easier to understand in certain situations. Abrupt changes to the narration: That is a big problem.
Oren: Do you mean changes in narrative premise or changing from first to third person?
Chris: Sometimes it’s just going from a regular narration to a thought immediately in your first sentences. Sometimes, people put little weird snippets before their narration starts. Thoughts is one of them. Thoughts that aren’t marked. It only goes from person to first person. Or something like that. Or changes tense. Or anything that changes how the narration works.
Oren: The novel Middlegame had an odd example of that. This might have been more clear in the print novel or the ebook version, but when you were listening to it, each chapter starts with an excerpt from an in-universe fictional book. That book exists, incidentally. Seanan McGuire, the author, just went and wrote it and published it, so you can read that if you want. But at the time, that book didn’t exist. It was a purely fictional novel. Each chapter of the novel Middlegame would start with an excerpt from it. The first couple times that happened, I didn’t realize that those were excerpts. I thought that’s just where we were. We were just in this story. And suddenly it would start talking about someone else, and I had just no idea what was going on.
Chris: Audiobooks can be an issue because sometimes Audible just doesn’t include chapter headings or episode headings or other things like that. “Wait, am I in a new chapter or a new episode of this audiobook? What is happening?” Starting with dialogue can work, but because people are usually in the middle of a conversation, again, it’s just more likely to be disorienting. I’ve seen dialogue openings that were fine, but it’s a little bit harder for people to catch on mid-conversation. Some works start with exposition, and that may sound bad, but exposition gives us a lot of freedom, and sometimes it can be used really well. You can have a really engaging voice with exposition, you can bring in really interesting information with exposition, and sometimes that will make the best opening paragraph. But that freedom that exposition offers means it’s also very easy to pack in a lot of stuff in a small space. Easier than it would be if you were just narrating action that’s happening, or a description, or something like that. So that’s another place where you have to be a little bit more careful.
Oren: Okay, with that, I think we will call this episode to a close.
Chris: If we helped reduce confusion about confusion, you can support us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com slash mythcreants.
Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie McLeod. Then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing music]This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.