Engage, engage, engage!

At the weekend I had the pleasure of appearing on literary agent Peter Cox's internet TV show Litopia Pop Up Submissions. In this, five brave souls provide a title, a blurb and the first 700 words of a book for comments from three industry experts and the extremely helpful online comments of viewers.

This particular edition happened to have a focus on historical fiction, but I've done a few of these before and whatever the topic, one thing repeatedly comes across in that opening sample from the books - the author hasn't thought enough about how to engage their readers early on.

If you start a book with a set of facts (one example here was described as like reading a Wikipedia entry), you will rapidly lose your readers. Similarly, if the opening is totally introspective with nothing actually happening, an opening that is all tell and no show, it's hard for the reader to engage fully.

The 'show don't tell' thing is a hoary old piece of writing advice - but that doesn't mean that authors remember it. If you spend too much time telling us a character's thoughts or feelings, it's not a natural way to engage with them. If, instead, you show those inner aspects through the character's outer appearance and behaviour, it's effective because it's how we encounter others. Let your readers absorb the internals as much as is possible from the character's actions and words, rather than hit them over the head with an thought information dump. (Like all writing techniques, there are times when telling works superbly, but it's still a useful general guide.)

This excess telling came across very strongly with one of the submissions, where we spent the entire opening in the character's thoughts, but no one really did or said anything, even though he was a soldier, returning from war and a prison camp, surrounded by comrades.

Although this show was about historical fiction (though one submission seemed more an attempt at humorous historical fact), this advice applies to both fiction and non-fiction. Each involves storytelling. In the popular science world, for example, it's just as important to be conscious of your narrative. A collection of facts is not a book. In popular science we often bring in people and what they've done, rather than present the dry scientific content on its own. Alternatively, the author can frame the information they are presenting in a way that adds interest. If we are to escape producing a long-form Wikipedia entry we need always to be thinking about how to engage the reader - especially with those crucial opening words.

Here's the whole thing to see how it all turned out (note, by the way, there were some technical glitches, not usually present in these shows):

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