Introduction

In which, perhaps unsurprisingly, I introduce myself and have a stab (pardon the pun) at whetting the audience’s collective appetite for the excitement to come.

My name is Roger Whiteley and I’m going to tell you about a couple of murders I got embroiled in recently.

            Perhaps I ought to clarify that. When I say “embroiled”, I was not what you might call a principal participant, in that I wasn’t actually involved in committing any of the dastardly deeds myself. I know that the “narrator as murderer” wheeze has been tried in the past by a very illustrious crime novelist, who shall remain nameless in case you’re one of the few who hasn’t had the pleasure of reading that absolute corker of a book yet. But whilst I may be what those literary folks refer to as an unreliable narrator, I can assure you that there’s absolutely nothing calculated about my fatuous meanderings. You can rule me out of contention. Not me, guv. I’ll let you have that one for free, although please don’t be lulled into thinking that I’m some soft touch incorrigible hint dropper who is going to sound a clue klaxon every time something plot critical crops up! No no, dear reader, from here on in, you will need to engage your brain.

            A quick google search reveals that the “victim as narrator” idea has already been done as well, several times. Done to death, in fact, if you’ll pardon another pun (and you may as well get used to them, as I am sorry to have to inform you that they are very much my modus operandi! Shakespeare had his knob gags, I have my puns). But this isn’t one of those stories either. I’m afraid that Roger Whiteley will be lively and thrusting (at times insufferably so) for the duration of the narrative, despite the best efforts of certain parties at times.

            By now you have doubtless already come to the conclusion that I am probably not the fellow who solved the murder either. And you would be quite correct in making that deductive leap. I did, however, have the singular displeasure of being the one to find the body. After that, my role essentially involved hanging around the vicinity like an unpleasant pong, making the odd inane comment in a vague effort to be helpful until some other bloke turned up and did all the legwork. 

            The bloke in question was none other than that celebrated Cambridge criminologist, Gerald Sinclair, a man it is now my honour to call a personal friend. He may be a deeply peculiar individual even by Cambridge’s rarefied standards. He may look eerily like a bleached mole. He may have the pained facial expressions and vocal intonations of Miss Jean Brodie with a mouthful of cotton wool doused in sheep dip (an upbringing in Morningside and a pair of oddly ill-fitting dentures will do that to you). But by thunder, if you’ve got a knotty little problem to solve, no matter how contorted the situation might be, he’ll winkle out the answer before most of us have even worked out what the question is! He particularly enjoys murders, su dokus and obscure vexillology, but he’ll turn his hands to all sorts.

            But more of him shortly; let’s get back to me! Little credit though I can take for the resolution of what has now become known in the more salacious tabloids as The Time Capsule Murders, I do feel I ought at least to take a few moments to introduce myself before we get stuck into the narrative and find ourselves getting too distracted by chaps getting themselves stabbed. You are stuck with me for the next few hundred pages, so it’s high time we got a little more intimate, methinks.

            I am 37 years of age at the time of writing. My comparative youth may come as something of a surprise to you, given that my given name is Roger and I’m prone to using words like methinks and embroiled. Well, if that’s what you’re thinking let me reassure you - it gets worse. My older brothers were named Sean and George. Notice a pattern yet? 

            If so, pat yourself on the back and give yourself a biscuit, as the brain teasers get trickier from here. The answer of course is 7, or 007 to be precise! I am sure plenty of you have parents who are James Bond fans, but I am rather hoping that they didn’t go to the lengths that mine did to infiltrate elements of the Bondverse into every aspect of our daily lives in my formative years. To give you just one example, when I was a nipper the family terrier was called Desmond Llewelyn, although sadly he didn’t last quite as long as his namesake, and he was duly replaced when I was four or five by a female of the species who went by the name of Reilly Ace of Spays (my folks had moved onto other secret agents by then!) 

            I was the youngest in the family (it would seem that the emergence of Timothy Dalton in 1987 was not enough of an incentive for my parents to indulge in any further procreation) and, mild eccentricities aside, I had a pretty benign upbringing, followed by a public school education that we will brush over with the single, all concealing term “character-building”. 

            After that, Cambridge beckoned. I’m still not quite sure how I made the cut, if I’m entirely honest, albeit one benefit of my school was that you got sufficient coaching for the big interview that even a bumbling oaf like me somehow managed to get through it without eating my shoes. But deserving or not, made it I did, and they were the best 3 years of my life. I would normally add the words “so far” to the end of that statement, but I would like to put a bit more distance between me and those murders I mentioned before daring to venture such a ludicrously optimistic caveat!

            Then, an undistinguished career as a solicitor down in London beckoned. My specialism is real estate, a practice area that the more unsympathetic corporate partners in my US dominated firm rather contemptuously refer to as “dirt law”. On the one occasion I managed to get my name into the Legal 500 I was praised by an anonymous client for my “prompt” service (a backhanded compliment if ever I saw one).

            Don’t worry, we will steer blissfully free of that aspect of my existence for the remainder of this narrative. If you want to find out my views on the importance of reserved rights of entry in leasehold property I would invite you to check out my five inches in Estates Gazette a year or so back (it would have been six inches but they cut all the innuendos I had tried to surreptitiously slip in). I am not proposing to trouble you with such trifles here, given that I was in the middle of a conveniently timed sabbatical when the events of this tale occurred.       For once, the timing was impeccable, for the very first week of my little break coincided rather delightfully with a long expected appointment at my alma mater, one that had been fifteen years in the planning, but which I had, naturally, completely forgotten about until a couple of weeks earlier, when Ed Dickinson (an old friend of mine with a very amiable manner but one you might not want to get too attached to!) texted me out of the blue to check I was still on board. 

            The rationale behind our proposed reunion will reveal itself, seamlessly and organically, during the course of my narrative, so without further ado let us head over to Kings Cross station, early one Friday afternoon, Good Friday in fact, where, had you been there at the time, you would have found your humble narrator with a large, misshapen travel bag, intent on taking full advantage of his temporary status as a gentleman of leisure by getting back up to his old stomping ground early and fitting a couple of cheeky pints in before the festivities and fun really got started. 

            I was a South London man at the time, with a small flat in Herne Hill, and my visits back to Cambridge since graduating had been disappointingly infrequent. As a result I had very rarely had occasion to go to Kings Cross for well over a decade, meaning that the new(ish) layout of the station was taking a bit of getting used to, in particular the existence of a Platform 0. I can only assume that when they put this one in they couldn’t simply rechristen it Platform 1 and bump all the other platforms up one, on the basis that it would have resulted in all the Hogwarts students getting confused and ramming their trollies into an extremely solid, non-magical brick wall, thereby causing unspeakable damage to their poor unfortunate owls. 

            I am also getting increasingly short sighted in my middle age. I do wear contact lenses but at that point I was stubbornly refusing to accept the fact that I needed to change my prescription. I was in no hurry for another encounter with my optician after the extraordinarily patronising ticking off he had given me last time about the fact that I wasn’t giving my eyes time off to “rest” and “breathe”. The rest of me had hardly had a chance to do a great deal of that over the last decade or so, so why he thought those particular organs merited special treatment I have no idea. And yes, I am perfectly aware that other opticians are available but I am ultimately a creature of habit.

            As such, I was having to squint up at the departure boards to work out which platform I needed to be headed for. There seemed to be a lot of trains to Cambridge but it was a fast one I was after; I was finally allowing my excitement about the prospect of revisiting my old stomping ground to build up and I had no desire to prolong said build up unnecessarily. I found myself wandering backwards in an effort to perfect my squint, and that was when I found myself colliding with a stray tuba - and my destiny!

Reviews

[JayG]

• Perhaps I ought to clarify that. When I say “embroiled”, I was not what you might call a principal participant, in that I wasn’t actually involved in committing any of the dastardly deeds myself.

Why should you have to clarify? Say what you mean and mean what you say. Every word that is not absolutely necessary needs to be trimmed because it serves only to slow the narrative. In this chapter, the reader must plow through 1,706 words. That puts them on page 5, and not a damn thing has happened in the story. Someone we have no reason to care about is talking about things that have nothing to do with the actual story. Via a multi-page info-dump, we learn the backstory of someone who will be part of the actual story. Who cares? Would the story change had he gone to a different school? No. So why waste a reader's time talking about it, and other data that's irrelevant to the opening scene? Never forget that your reader may be with you for only ten minutes a tray at lunch, or on the train to work. By the time they might need what you're dumping on them, they will have forgotten it all.

Why do I make such a big deal about this? Because studies have shown that readers make their buy-or-put-it-back decision within three pages. But after five, your story has just begin and what's the big event? He bumps into a tuba.

I know, as you say, you're trying to "whet" the reader's appetite, but you're actually doing the opposite. Were this a submission to a publisher or agent it would be rejected instantly because you're transcribing yourself talking to an audience. It works when you read it because you hear your own voice, all filled with emotion. But only you know how you want it read. Have your computer read it to you. That's a powerful editing tool, in any case.

But that aside, you're thinking in terms of telling the reader a story. That works on the stage because you're alone there and must make up for the fact that you have no actors by performing, yourself. But that performance cannot be moved to a medium that can't reproduce your performance. The goal of fiction for the page sin't to make the reader know of the events in an interesting way. It is, as E. L Doctorow put it so well: " to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” Hearing a summation in overview, related by someone who who talks about it is as exciting as any other report—unless there's a storyteller performing, live, in the same room. Would you sit through a film where there were no actors, only a storyteller on stage? Of course not. And the same applies to fiction, where you have actors ready to go on stage and perform.

The short version: Begin with story, not history.

Chapter one is far more interesting, because things are happening in real-time, though you do digress far to much, with info-dumps of information irrelevant to the action in progress, slowing the pace of the story and boring the reader.

Nonfiction informs. It makes us know. Fiction moves us emotionally by making us feel as if we're on the scene as-the-protagonist, living in real-time. It makes us CARE. And how much time did your teachers spend on how to do that that, and other aspects of fiction?

The solution? Simple. First, dump the lecture and move what matters to chapter 1.

You also mifght want to add a few tricks the pros take for granted to the skills you now own. The best book I've found to date on the methodology of creating exciting scenes is Dwight Swain's, Techniques of the Selling Writer. The site I link to just below is providing free copies of it, so grab one before they change their minds.
https://ru.b-ok2.org/book/2640776/e749ea

It's the book that got me my first publishing contract, after six many times submitted but never sold novels. I wish you the same. For an idea of the issues he covers in depth, the articles in my WordPress writing blog are mostly based on his teachings.

So dig in. And while you do, hang in there, and keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/