impractical, a dreamer and her new life with the guy who saved her from a possible Article 58 conviction is a dream world. I have though of a plausible way to provide a corpse on page one, offering action from line one, and it may be that I shall have to do that. I don’t want to, as I believe that seeing ‘The Little Dreamer’ as her parents have called her contented and happy makes a better counterpoint to the action that erupts later on.
Would Gertrude Snodgrass, or the as yet anonymous corpse I may have to add to my own novel help either book? A literary agent in search of a hook would say yes. A reader in search of instant gratification would say yes, but I have a hunch that we have not got to that stage yet. I may be right. I may be wrong.
To Hook or Not to Hook? That is the question. I wonder what the answer will be. Like all the best fiction, the answer is on the last page, and that has yet to be written.
I had originally ended at this point, but I realised that having asked the question, I would welcome answers. It is remarkably easy to get answers from those ‘in the trade’, but the answers that I think matter are what readers think. I can find a hundred accounts of how important ‘the hook’ is although John Buchan and Erskine Childers did not seem to think so, yet what do a hundred readers think? What does one reader think, even?
I love reading Sir Walter Scott, and like Buchan and Childers, his novels often start out in a low key, which is a dramatic contrast to what follows later. If Scott was not a good novelist, we would have forgotten him long since, just as we would have forgotten Buchan and Childers. Their names live on because they were good writers, and I suspect that they will still be read in 200 years time, when most of us are long forgotten.
What I am certain of is that the literary conventions of 200 years time will be very different to what is mandatory today. They may be better. They may be worse, but they will be different.
I have challenged the current conventions. I may be completely wrong. The pundits may be right, and tastes may have changed so markedly that Jane Austen really does need the body of Gertrude Snodgrass on page one. One of the problems of being an expert is that if 99 experts say X, you cannot say Y without being wrong.
It is a bit like fashions. Skirts become shorter and shorter as each designer jumps on the bandwagon until they get so short that a great many girls rebel and will not wear them. They then get longer. The designer who bucks the trend when it is going one way is out of touch. The designer who changes direction at the right moment is inspired.
Readers who are not pundits can say what they thing and I hope you will do so in the feedback options. You may feel that what I have said is a load of codswallop. If so, then that is of interest to me. Maybe you feel that we do need the unfortunate Gertrude on page one. Maybe you agree that there is scope for a traditional beginning.
I have my opinions and you can tell what they are. I would love to have some feedback to go on, and if you are happy for me to refer to it, to revise this essay at some time. If it is 99% say codswallop, then I shall be sad, but wiser. If 99% say, we agree then maybe it sends a message to the wider world that the older conventions in literature are not dead.
THE END
(for the moment)
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