Start with a Bang

If you know anything about fiction – either as a writer or a reader – one of the unshakable rules you’ll have internalised is to put the inciting incident right there where it belongs, up front. If you can’t manage to do it with the inciting incident, do it with something else that likewise grabs your reader by the throat.

One of the other novels gathering dust in the proverbial drawer in my past is a story about a young man who’s mired in a fit of depression and, in desperation to shake his life to the core, goes to Central Africa to volunteer in a refugee camp.

The original draft of the story started by describing his miserable state of mind as he drifted through his life, his snap decision to go down the street from the office building where he worked to the offices of a global charity and the machinations and red tape of being accepted, going through the requisite travel and health requirements, landing in Africa, being transferred to the camp, meeting his supervisor, flubbing his first job and enduring a torrent of abuse from her as a result.

It took a lot of shoe leather to get to where the real action started, so in the production draft I did something very particular and precise with the narrative structure. I cheated.

I opened the story with the scene of the hero being abused and screamed at by the supervisor, then made everything that led up to that point kind of a flashback that explained everything you needed to know about him, his decision and how it had led to where he was.

Falling had something similar, but even though I didn’t really need to reorder anything there was a lot of slogging to get to where the story proper actually begins.

It’s probably a quite common trap for novelists who fall in love with their characters or the premise – especially so for novice writers, as I was in 1990 when I started writing it.

The original draft had begun with a bit of esoterica about how you always remembered people as they were last time you saw them, and how shocking it was to see someone years later even though you know they would have changed considerably.

Then it branched off into a sequence several chapters long that told the story of a gang of builders on the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the 1950s who unwittingly caused the collapse over half a century later.

Then it cut to Dale in his workplace in the present day, giving you a lot of history and telling you a lot about what kind of guy he is in his late teens, even delving into a little bit of his workday.

He leaves work to meet his date with destiny and you then spend five minutes walking to the train station at Milson’s Point with him because the walk across the bridge was originally because of a cancelled train service.

He makes his way up the steps to the footpath and begins his journey and we’re still not there – going off into his stream of consciousness about the bridge and his own personal history of it during trips to the city as a kid with his mother.

Finally, on page 27, the roadway and path around him gives a sudden heave as the unthinkable happens and the inciting incident begins.

In the decades between that draft and the one you can hold in your hands/on your device now, I realised that was all backstory. You’ll find out who Dale is as you read the book (as it pertains to the story – everything else is superfluous).

And as for the construction gang, the reason the bridge collapsed is a bit like the reason Phil Connors is stuck in the same day over and over in Groundhog Day – it might be peripherally interesting but it’s just not part of the tale. The bridge collapses, that’s all you need to know.

Likewise, the reason Dale decides to walk across the bridge at the worst possible time isn’t part of the tale either. He just does. In the final version, his girlfriend has promised him an evening of erotic delight, and as he starts on the path that’s all he’s thinking about.

His inner thoughts there serve two purposes; they humanise him a little bit, and they let a little bit of time past to situate him in the time and place of the story.

And the sentence that sets this whole epic in motion is on page seven (that’s actually page two of the main text – after the titles, publishing details, etc). About 580 words in, two minutes reading time, and you’re already roaring down the first dip of this rollercoaster.

Short of putting a picture of a naked man or woman on the cover, that’s all I can do to get you interested.

(Coming in Falling’s Second Edition, a Special Collectors Cover with a picture of a naked man or woman.)