About 10 months ago, an agent doing a writing workshop told me the opening of Let No Man Put Asunder didn’t give any idea of the genre and I should fix that. As I said at the link, I don’t see that as a problem for stuff published through my Behold the Book imprint. Readers are going to see a cover image and read the back-cover copy so they won’t look at the first page and assume it’s a mainstream story about a kid who dropped out of college and now works in a greasy spoon.
The same for Southern Discomfort. It’s not got any magic on the first couple of pages, and no definite magic even through the first chapter. However readers will know when they pick it up or see the Amazon listing that it’s specfic, rather than a historical novel about a female fugitive.
Showing the magic up front won’t work in either case. The protagonists are ordinary people about to be sucked into the supernatural; until that point they have no reason to know magic exists (as Maria in Southern Discomfort protests very loudly at several points). In some stories you can have weird shit happening from the get-go even if the protagonist doesn’t know the reason; these two books are not that kind of story. Originally I started Southern Discomfort with the murder of Aubric McAlister, cluing the reader in to the basic premise of the book. Feedback convinced me that was too slow a start, without sufficient tension; Maria’s story’s got tension in spades.
It’s perfectly legit to start a fantasy novel with mundane scenes, provided their interesting. Much as I like the magical goings on in Pharisee County, I think Maria’s character arc is a stronger hook. The magic is essential to the story and becomes more so as things get crazier. Still, it’s more about ordinary people stuck in the middle of a magic war than the magic war itself.
Which brings me to the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. After completing my viewing for Watching Jekyll and Hyde, I’ve come to appreciate even more how good this film is (though the abuse subplot is horrifying. Consider that your trigger warning).
In a 90-minute film, it takes us half an hour before Edward Hyde comes on stage. Several movies do that, introducing Jekyll, his fiancee/dream girl/wife and the nature of his research before getting to the transformation. A lot of them are boring with uninteresting, undramatic pre-Hyde scenes. They’re a long establishing shot that sets things up but accomplishes nothing else.
Not in this one, thanks to Rouben Mamoulian’s direction and Fredric March’s performance. We open with a Jekyll’s eye-view of his life — his elegant home, his devoted butler — and that unconventional viewpoint makes it way more interesting than it would be otherwise. Then we watch March’s Jekyll lecture to an astounded audience about his vision of splitting off our evil side so that we can enjoy lives of pure goodness. As I explain in my book there are huge flaws in this idea (what are the pure evil sides going to be doing?) but Mamoulian makes it visually fascinating. Then we cut to Jekyll’s charity clinic where his medical genius enables a girl on crutches to cast them aside and walk — a classic miracle as the ultimate proof of his goodness.
We shift to the Carew dinner party where Jekyll’s future father-in-law dresses him down for being late, then he and Muriel (Rose Hobard) snatch a quiet scene alone. March was best known at that point as a romantic lead; alternating between dreams of passion and whimsy he keeps the scene arresting (Hobard’s not a bad actor but her role doesn’t give her much to work with). The result? It’s a good movie even before Hyde enters.
I don’t know if I can create anything that intense in my opening. I’m certainly shooting for it.
