Episode 212 - What Writers Can Learn from The First Two Pages with Art Taylor
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November 14, 2023
Art Taylor discusses WHAT WRITERS CAN LEARN FROM THE FIRST TWO PAGES, including the backstory of why "two pages"; the power of being a percolator (in addition to a plotter or pantser); how research can engender a story; waiting as a mechanism of conflict and suspense; short fiction as an experimental platform; the importance of thinking consciously about the craft issues and studying what gets scrapped; considering advise from veteran and first-time writers; and the power of starting with a bang ... or not.
If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
" I get an idea, and a lot of times, before I write about it, I just take walks, ride around in the car. Or if I've got part of it done, then I just step away from it to percolate. I just kind of let stuff bubble up inside. What are the possibilities for this story?" —Art Taylor
Art Taylor is the Edgar Award-winning author of two collections: THE ADVENTURE OF THE CASTLE THIEF AND OTHER EXPEDITIONS AND INDISCRETIONS and THE BOY DETECTIVE & THE SUMMER OF ’74 AND OTHER TALES OF SUSPENSE. His debut book, ON THE ROAD WITH DEL & LOUISE: A NOVEL IN STORIES, won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel. His short fiction has also won the Agatha, Anthony, Derringer, and Macavity Awards. He is an associate professor of English at George Mason University.
Links
Art's Links:
Author website: www.arttaylorwriter.com
Facebook profile: facebook.com/artTaylorShortStories
Instagram profile: www.instagram.com/arttaylorwriter/
LinkedIn profile: www.linkedin.com/in/arttaylorwriter/
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
Author website: www.arttaylorwriter.com
Facebook profile: facebook.com/artTaylorShortStories
Instagram profile: www.instagram.com/arttaylorwriter/
LinkedIn profile: www.linkedin.com/in/arttaylorwriter/
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Art! It would be fun to take a look at the first two pages of one of your early works and then the first two pages of your latest work and see what similarities and differences you see. If you do that experiment, I'd love to hear what you discover.
Please post your comments on YouTube--and I'd love it if you would subscribe while you're there!
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Transcript
The following is created by entering the Descript AI-generated transcript into ChatGPT with the prompt Correct spelling and grammatical mistakes in this transcript.
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indie Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Art Taylor. Hey Art, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Art: Good, how are you? Thanks for having me.
[00:00:08] Matty: I am pleased to have you here.
Meet Art Taylor
[00:00:09] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Art Taylor is the Edgar Award-winning author of two collections, "The Adventure of The Castle Thief and Other Expeditions and Indiscretions," and "The Boy Detective in the Summer of '74, and Other Tales of Suspense." His debut book, "On the Road with Del and Louise," a novel in stories, won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel.
His short fiction has also won the Agatha, Anthony, Derringer, and Macavity awards, and he is an associate professor of English at George Mason University. I met Art when I think we were both at Malice Domestic, and I attended one of your panel discussions, and I just thought it was so great. I did a little research on you after that, and I came across The First Two Pages.
So, before we dive into the focus of our conversation, I just wanted to ask you about what The First Two Pages are and what is the story behind that concept.
What is The First Two Pages?
[00:01:00] Art: Oh, sure. Thanks so much.
Um, you know, I'm very fortunate to be curating, and I use that word, The First Two Pages blog series. It was actually started by another short story writer in April of 2015, so it's been running for a while.
B. K. Stevens, Bonnie Stevens, was a terrific short story writer who came up with the idea of starting a blog. I'm going to read to you what she wrote to the folks who she recruited to participate. I hope the post on this blog will offer both writers and readers insights into how some successful opening pages were written.
What kinds of issues and approaches did the writers consider? What sort of decisions did they make? How did they create opening pages that made agents or editors keep reading? Why did these first pages work? I think your post will interest other readers if it offers them ideas they can use in their works.
I think it will interest your readers if it helps them understand why they've enjoyed your work so much. You know, there's the idea Noah Lukman wrote the first five pages. If you can't capture an agent's attention, an editor's attention in the first five pages, you've lost them.
[00:02:04] Matty: Or readers.
[00:02:05] Art: Stories, your readers, exactly. And if in a short story, is it the first five paragraphs? There's some shortness there. So a lot of that is how do you capture readers' attention?
Bonnie passed away in August of 2017, kind of abruptly right on the, in fact, as we were going to the Suffolk Mystery Authors Festival in Suffolk, Virginia, and she did not attend and passed away soon after that.
Her family asked me to continue the series; I had been a contributor there. Bonnie and I were terrific friends, and our thoughts about the short stories were very similar in many ways, as we found on panels at Malice and in other places. So I've been pleased to carry it on since then. It's hard to believe that I have carried it on longer than she did it because I still feel like it's her blog, in many ways, but I'm grateful to be able to curate it.
So that's some background on The First Two Pages.
[00:02:57] Matty: That's great. And I think that even for a longer work, first two pages is a great target because you were talking about the first five pages concept and certainly you want to grab a reader in the first five pages. But I think that as time goes on, even with a long work, maybe The First Two Pages are, you know. The key pages, writers should be looking at anyway.
[00:03:15] Art: Yeah, absolutely. I think there's so much that can be done there. I mean, it's, and it has to do with so many things. You know, are we laying the first clues of the plot? Are we introducing our characters? We're trying to... Get some conflict and tension introduced, but also give some—I hate to use this word—but backstory, you know, fold some backstory in. So there's a lot that has to be done, and so I do think it's a good place to focus this kind of attention.
[00:03:41] Matty: Yeah, perfect. So I had asked you to just go through your experience with The First Two Pages blog and pull out some best practices, the top lessons that you and your readers have learned from The First Two Pages. And so I'm just going to work through some of these.
[00:03:56] Matty: And the first one is everyone works differently. What did you learn about everyone works differently?
[00:04:01] Art: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think there's a sense in which if we can just get the magic formula, you know, then we'll know what to do, and it's the same way that people ask the question, how do you write if you're a writer? As if we could just figure it out.
What time to write and that sort of thing. I think the same thing is true with The First Two Pages, and what I found was how very different everybody is, how very different people come to stories. Number one, where the ideas come from, and then also the way they start the story itself. But then also the way that their process is about writing in general.
We hear about pantsers and plotters. There are people that I've hosted on the blog who have mapped out everything about a story before they've put down word one. And other folks who are like, well, I've got this idea, and it's about a paragraph long, and then let me see what happens next. So there's that range.
And of course, many of the writers talk about the genesis of a short story. Whether it's like, I read this book, or this story, and this prompted me in this direction, or I had a dream, or I was taking a trip and something about the setting, or here's an idea situation I conjured up. So I think it's interesting to see every stage of the process there.
Where an idea comes from, how it propels a writer toward the page, and then how they think about those blank pages and how they're going to approach them. Another thing I think is interesting is how many writers discover something about their own craft as they begin writing the essay. I've had so many people write to me as they've turned in their essay and say, you know what, I didn't realize what I'd done here until I started trying to articulate what I'd done.
In some cases, there is a sense in which a veteran writer, particularly, may have absorbed a lot of these craft techniques where they're not thinking about it. The same way a golfer, you know, when I've tried to play golf, it's like, put this finger here, put this hand here, make sure it interlocks there, and I joke with my students, like, well, Tiger Woods doesn't do that whenever he grabs a golf club because it becomes natural.
When they're forced to articulate it, though, that's where some of those craft choices come to mind. I will say, if I'm not going on too long, this is something that I've done myself. When I wrote an essay for Bonnie, Bonnie asked me to write about a story called "Parallel Play." And when she asked me about it, I realized that I knew where I wanted to talk about.
There's a scene in this story. It's about a young mother at one of these kind of Gymboree places with her son who finds herself getting into some trouble as they're leaving, and there's a scene in which one of the men in the story kind of forces his way through a door, and I thought, that is something I can talk about.
That wasn't until 40 percent of the story when I looked back, and suddenly, I was trying to realize, well, what had I done in The First Two Pages that laid the groundwork for everything ahead? So I think there's a process in which not only the readers and the writers can learn something, but the writers themselves will learn something about their own craft just by articulating some of those craft choices.
Being a percolator
[00:07:11] Matty: Well, one of the things that I think you said at Mouse Domestic, and I wrote this down immediately, is that everybody knows about plotters and pantsers, but you talked about being a percolator. Was that you?
[00:07:22] Art: Yes, that was me, and
[00:07:24] Matty: Tell me about that. I just love that.
[00:07:27] Art: Coming back to it, you know, I mean, you hear about plotters, and I know novelists — I can mention two of them, James Ellroy and Jeffrey Deaver, who plot out every step of the book before they ever write anything. In fact, outlines that are going to run almost as long as the book.
I think people with short stories do the same thing. And then folks, as I said, who start out in the middle. You know, I get an idea, and a lot of times, before I write about it, I just take walks, ride around in the car, or if I've got part of it done, then I step away from it, and then, again, to use that word, percolate.
I just let stuff bubble up inside. What are the possibilities for this story? And I'm going to come back to The First Two Pages with this. What have I laid down, maybe in the opening that I've written, that provides some of the threads that I want to follow up on without my maybe knowing it?
I'm going to come up with this idea that, you know, there's a great book I'd recommend called "Narrative Design" by Madison Smart Bell, if only because of the essay in the beginning about the unconscious art. We do a lot of stuff creatively without thinking about what it is, and so I try to turn around and listen to whatever I've done creatively to see what I've laid down that might have some longer resonance with the plot. And a lot of times, that just takes thinking about it, getting away from the computer and letting it percolate a little bit to see what brews.
[00:09:00] Matty: Yeah, that's why word count has never worked for me because I'm writing not only when I'm sitting at the keyboard, and a lot of times I'm folding the laundry or walking the dog or, you know, driving to the grocery store or whatever, and I'm writing, percolating away. And so by the time I sit down, I have a clear idea of what I want to capture.
I'm just having this interesting experience with the book I'm working on now, which is my fourth Lizzy Ballard thriller. And there are two poker scenes. I'm not a poker player. The first poker scene is the first scene in the book.
And then there's one about halfway through. So I was trying to learn about poker while I was writing the book. And so in the first chapter, even the first chapter that I gave my editor, I had to put in a thing that said, "And then she plays poker" because I was really struggling with how to present it.
Spoiler alert, but it's not standard poker because she's reading the minds of the other people who are playing the game. And so it's not like I can kind of do standard poker research. It's different. And I am going to 20 Books Vegas in November. So I thought, okay, I'm just going to wait until I get to 20 Books Vegas to write this scene.
Or, I should say, I'm just going to wait until I get to Las Vegas to write this scene, kind of independent of 20 Books, but finally, thanks to friends, poker-playing friends, and YouTube, I finally got to write this scene. I got my brain around what I needed to have this poker scene be. However, there's a long way of setting up the fact that it's the first time I've given my editor what I felt was an editor-ready copy that still had the first chapter that was very, very sketchy. So once I got my brain around it, I've been working on that first chapter, and I realized that there's a risk. Because I'm kind of working on it out of order, the tone of the first chapter is starting to feel very different, almost like more of a short story. Because I know I have like 2,200 words, and I'm polishing them and polishing them and polishing them, which is important for the first chapter. But I almost feel like there's a risk I'm going to polish them too much, and now it's going to go from kind of like a short story vibe to a novel vibe, which is like, less fussy about exactly weird descriptive words, like, I don't know that I would have called something Azure before.
After the first chapter, is what I'm describing sounding familiar to you, either as a writer or as a teacher?
[00:11:24] Art: Yeah, I think it's interesting, you know, the way that something comes together and the way you're trying to get it as a whole there. We think about the opening; I understand what you're saying as setting the foundation, not just for plot and character and all that, but for tone and style and everything. And when you go back and try to maybe retrofit something, you know, there are some challenges into making it seamless. Is that kind of what you're talking about?
[00:11:50] Matty: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's more of a change in tone, just as you're saying.
[00:11:55] Art: Yeah. And, you know, I'm a writer who doesn't necessarily, to be honest, always start with The First Two Pages. You know, sometimes I'll write something that's going to show up later in a short story and a primary, like short stories, something that'll show up later in a short story, even the end of a short story, and then it's a matter of how am I going to get a piece that I'm writing later that actually is earlier to work together.
And I think that's a challenge. This goes back to reinforce that there are a lot of different ways that a process can work, a lot of different ways that writers approach this. But I'm going to echo another point that you said as well about folding the laundry. You know, I've had people talk about they have to write 500 words a day or 1,000 words a day.
My advice is always don't focus on that, but just focus on steady steps forward. Whatever those steps are and wherever you're adding something to a manuscript, there are a lot of times when I'll write a lot during the day and other times when it's just. Use that word again, percolating in my head. That still counts as writing to me. And it is a matter of then fitting all the pieces together.
[00:13:00] Matty: Yeah, I think we're all doing all three of those things, plotting, pantsing, and percolating. It's just that one is more based at home, that we feel most comfortable with, and the other ones are maybe more of a stretch because everybody's got to plot at some point, and everybody pantses at some point, and everybody's percolating too. But sometimes they do it with their fingers on the keyboard, and sometimes they don't.
[00:13:17] Art: Yeah, I will say as well, you talked about kind of doing research and having to do the research. I'll fill in this scene later. You know, it's interesting the way that, looking at The First Two Pages that I've read, research can engender a story, can help to bring it along. I host the Edgar Award finalists each year, and I've hosted the Agatha Award finalists before as well.
I invited him to do an essay. James Ziskin did one, gosh, I guess it was a year and a half ago. I think it was, or maybe it was two years ago. I mean, post-COVID, all time is weird. But James Ziskin did a piece where he had written a Sherlock pastiche, and he was nominated for the Edgar for it.
It was interesting; the research he did, he looked at the concordance, read the Sherlock Holmes stories (he said he hadn't read them in a long time), and then looked at the concordance. See, what are the words that keep coming up in the Sherlock Holmes stories? And then looked at, and I'm going to check this out and make sure I have it right, the Ngram viewer on Google to look at word frequency, at the era in which he was writing.
So a lot of this was at the level of language. Let me do research about what was the vocabulary used at the time and let that contribute to things. In the same way you're talking about, let me go and see how poker is done. Let me immerse myself in some way in that world. What's going to come out of that?
And then the hope is that's going to lay a foundation for what's coming next, even though you're laying some of that foundation later. So yes, it's a challenge, I think.
[00:14:45] Matty: Yeah, and I think that idea of balancing the careful research with what you want to actually use in the story because I got to the point where I understood the poker terminology, and I have a friend who has actually played competitive poker, tournament poker, and she had given me a proposal for the game that this woman could play, but I realized that it was so heavy with poker terminology that would be unfamiliar to the reader, that I almost had to understand what she was saying at a more complex level, and then I had to dumb it down because this is not a book that's intended for poker players primarily, and so I have to create the excitement of the game without diving into too much detail, and I'm actually having fun watching, you know, what poker players consider the best movie poker scenes because that's, I think, a good example where the moviemakers have had to dumb it down a bit and yet still capture the emotion of the game.
[00:15:42] Art: Yep. Absolutely. I teach at Mason, as we said, I taught a course in spy novels and I taught an Ian Fleming book, "Casino Royale." It's amazing how much card playing is in the James Bond. We watch the movies, and you don't think about how much card playing. There's lots of card playing in the James Bond novel. So I would recommend you look in that direction, see how he manages that too. He does a good job of it, I think.
[00:16:03] Matty: Yeah, I just yesterday watched one where they're betting like 150 million dollars or something like that. That was super fun. And what I liked about that was there is a point where James Bond is looking at the guy he's finally betting against. It's just down to the two of them.
And there's a long period where he's just looking at him. I mean, it's probably only a few seconds, but in movie time, it feels very long. And you can tell he's kind of waiting to see if his opponent is going to have a tell. Super fun.
Waiting as a Mechanism of Conflict and Suspense
[00:16:36] Art: Yeah, I would say that's kind of a transition to another point. Something I've learned from The First Two Pages, and it brings us back to Bonnie as well, is about this idea of what conflict is, where tension is. You talk about the idea of just looking and waiting, and we don't think of that as action, you know, and yet it can be very suspenseful or a transition a little bit.
One of the things that I've learned from The First Two Pages is counterintuitive about what you can do, could do in the first two pages to capture the reader's attention without starting out at high conflict, without doing everything with a bang, I guess I should say. Bonnie, in addition to starting the blog, also contributed a couple of essays to it.
The last essay she did was on her story, "The Last Blue Glass." And I'm going to read what she said there. Conflict, we know, lies at the heart of fiction. That seems especially true of mystery fiction, where conflict leads to a crime. But it's not always possible or appropriate to open a mystery with a moment of intense conflict.
Sometimes I think it's more effective to begin with a quiet scene that drops hints about conflicts to come. If our characters are engaging, so engaging that readers both expect and dread the conflict, that can be a good way to keep them turning pages. And I thought about that a little bit, what you're talking about with a card scene, where not a lot is happening, and yet there's so much happening in terms of the way somebody's watching this, what the stakes are, how things are going to play.
It can be very quiet and yet very suspenseful. The conventional wisdom is to start with a body, start with something active, start with, and yet a lot of times I find that what works best is to lay these, what Patricia Highsmith called these lines of action or lines of tension between people, even if it's kind of quiet. If people can sense some tension and get to know the characters, they're going to invest in a different way than you.
Thank you. Then, if you just try to start with a body, with action, with movement, with a chase.
Studying What Gets Scrapped
[00:18:41] Art: One of the other essays I come back to again and again from The First Two Pages archive is Nick Kolakowski on "A Nice Pair of Guns." He started out writing this story, as he said, in medias res, you know, with action and with this happening. He said he kept thinking, got that gut feeling as a writer that something wasn't right there.
And he said he scrapped it. These are actually the most fascinating essays for me, where a writer says, here's what I did, here's what I scrapped, here's what I revised, here's why I changed it. Because I think it gives insight not only into the first draft but that revised draft, that final draft.
I'm going to read what he says as well. As any writer will tell you, there are times when you'll finish a draft and know there's something fundamentally wrong with it, but you can't figure out why. In the case of "A Nice Pair of Guns," I eventually decided that opening mid-story with a lot of action forced me to push way too much plot into the middle and end of the tale.
I might have succeeded in grabbing the reader's attention at the outset, but the story as a whole felt profoundly unbalanced. So when it came time to write the second draft, I decided to discard my fears about the hypothetical reader's attention span and begin at the beginning. I've got to tell you, I love that.
Follow your gut, follow your instinct, think through, and also write different versions of the same story to see where I'm going to introduce the tension that serves the reader. My story best rather than follow the conventional wisdom. So that made me, you're talking about the card scene, made me think about all that. How much can be invested in a quiet scene?
Short fiction as an experimental platform
[00:20:19] Matty: Well, the nice thing about short fiction is that you wouldn't want to do this with a novel, but you could write three or four, 12 or however many it takes, versions of the same story in a way that you would never want to do. You know, it would become a lifetime effort if you were to try to do that with a novel, but if you're writing three or four or five thousand words, you can keep putting the pieces together in different ways and see what the reaction is for you and maybe for early readers as well.
[00:20:44] Art: Yeah. It takes a lot of bravery to scrap something and start over to try something different with a short story. I think there's the possibility for that, as you said, often go to my son. I've told this before, when my son was little, you know, he was trying to walk and he took his first steps and it's like, well, you took a step and fell and took two steps and fell, but eventually got where he's going. Talk about the process, one step, two steps, you'll eventually get there if you just keep taking the steps. The other one is about the kind of willingness to tear something apart. If he's putting together a Lego. Something. Kids would be like, all right, I see a new idea. Let me rip this apart and start over. Whereas as writers, a lot of times we're like, gosh, I've put so much work into that. I can't, I have to, you know, and there is something, which I think is, you know, it takes a leap of faith to be like, tear it up. Let me start over or let me try something else as an alternative. So that's another thing from The First Two Pages that I've learned is writers who are willing to take those steps often get something much better out of it at the end.
[00:21:50] Matty: Yeah, I think the interesting thing about the Lego analogy is that the nice thing writers have is that they can keep the original construction and make a new one. You know, with Legos, unless you have an endless supply of Legos, you have to take the first one apart to make the second one. With writers, you can just set the first one aside and say, maybe I'll come back to that or maybe I won't.
[00:22:09] Art: Yep. Absolutely. Always an extra file. A new version. That's the perfect way to do it. Nothing's lost. Nothing's lost.
Thinking consciously about the craft issues
[00:22:15] Matty: Yep. Exactly. So I feel like we're probably kind of hitting some of the topics you brought up as learnings you had from The First Two Pages. But another one was, many people don't think consciously about the craft issues. I feel like we've hit that a little bit, but other learnings you've had along those lines?
[00:22:33] Art: Yeah. You know, it's interesting to see writers who are forced to look back at what they've done and try to think through as readers. What they did? Why here instead of someplace else? Why introduce this bit of dialogue there? And so, I think that's an interesting move, both in terms of what I said about accepting the first draft as maybe something unconscious that you're doing, and then turning consciousness to it. It's also part of, in terms of recommending process for writers, something that I recommend to my students at Mason. We don't always have the option to do this because of the shortness of the semester, but a lot of times I'll say, write something, and then put it aside for a while so that you're coming back to it with greater objectivity, with a reader's eyes, with seeing it. I think as we write more often, we hopefully develop the capacity to not need six months to put something aside to be able to see what's there and come back to it the next day or a week later, or obviously rely on beta readers for some feedback there. But I think trying to get that step from creator to reader.
Of your own work, it's an important part of the process, not just for a specific product, but also for your writing process generally. What is working best for me? How do I get to that point of reading objectively to revise? I'm going to go back to Bonnie Stevens again. Bonnie used to try to read some of her pages backward, as I recall. Once she had a full draft, she'd be like, "Alright, let me read this page and then move back to this," because she was reading it with a different eye.
Change the font. These are not things from The First Two Pages, but change the font. It forces you to see things differently. Read just a couple of pages and then stop and come back and read a couple more. Some of that will force you to not get lost in what you're doing, but rather to keep that, I come back to this phrase, that objective eye on your own work, your own craft choices.
So, I do think most people, a lot of times, don't think about it, whatever stage they're at, in terms of beginning writer, veteran writer, and yet it's worthwhile to stop, pause, and actually think through your choices.
[00:24:52] Matty: Perfect. Another lesson you had mentioned from the first few pages is ideas come from a lot of places.
[00:24:59] Art: Oh, sure. Yeah, absolutely. I think I mentioned, you know, we have people who say, "I had a dream about something," or, "This is a memory from my childhood." I just hosted Kate Ellis. I'm starting a series right now, as we're recording this, on the anthology, "Happiness is a Warm Gun." And that was prime fiction inspired by the Beatles. Editor Josh Pachter does a series of these anthologies. Kate Ellis wrote an essay where she said, "Here's something that happened in my childhood," and she had grown up in Liverpool in the same area where the Beatles, two of them, grew up, and she said, "I went back to that as the starting point for the story."
That's terrific. We talked about the idea of song lyrics or songs inspiring things. I've had a lot of times where songs or something I've read have inspired me to think about, "Here's a what if story just going on." And you talk about research as well. I always host the Black Orchid, award winner. This is a novella award hosted by the Nero Wolf Society, Rex Stout. Jacqueline Freimor wrote last year about the case of the bogus Cinderellas. Bogus Cinderellas are stamps, and she said she'd read something on Atlas Obscura, just reading about this on stamps, and it prompted this idea. She went through a fascinating essay, went through a couple of ways to try to write this. I think she thought about it as a novel at one point, and then a short story, and then ultimately found the inspiration for what the story should be and then went on to win an award for it.
So, you never know where ideas are going to come from or what's going to spark things. Again, this goes back to different writers, different inspirations and influences, different processes, all that. There's no one way to do this, and that's one thing that keeps coming back to me. If there are a lot of ways to do it, you find your best way, or hopefully be inspired by some of these essays to be like, "Oh, I could do that. Here's another opening for me." I think that's moving us all in good directions.
Capturing your ideas
[00:26:59] Matty: Well, this might take us, such a tangent that we spend the entire rest of the time talking about it, but that idea of the bogus Cinderella's, right, is that what the phrase was. It brings to mind a conversation I was having online with some folks recently about where you store your ideas.
And so the dilemma I was finding myself in is that there were kind of three categories of ideas. One was, there's this concept of the Boca Cinderella stamps that would be super cool to include in a story. Another flavor is I really wanted to explore, like, the almost unhealthy tendency people have that is represented by collectors and what is really behind the whole concept of collecting and why would people care about having an unusual stamp or whatever.
And then there's like, "Oh, I really like that word. I'm sure I'm going to use that somewhere." And I'm just wondering if you have a system that you use that handles all three of those kinds of concepts because just as you have the, "I wrote this and I'm not going to use it now, but I'm going to put it in the file." I think there's the, "Here's the file of things that I might want to use in the future." But they're so different sometimes that I think it's hard to manage them. Any thoughts about that?
[00:28:10] Art: I am, um, you know, I try to be systematized about so many things in my life, but I always fall short in some ways it seems like. I do keep a notebook handy where I can write down a quick idea for something. I do keep a file on my computer where I'll write, you know, here's, talk about writing the first paragraph of something, or a paragraph that might end up somewhere.
Here's an idea I had and I wrote it down. Or again, like you said, here's a word, or, I mean, just the smallest thing. It's all over the place, though, and I've had the time, unfortunately, where I've gone back through my computer trying to clean up some stuff, and I opened a document, and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I forgot completely about this. Where did that come from?" It ended up being not an idea I pursued, but the point is I wish I were more systematized so I could go back to the right place.
John Curran wrote about Agatha Christie's secret notebooks. I love these books in terms of what they tell us about the creative process. And she kept, I want to say it was like, there were 18 or 19 different notebooks, I've got the number wrong, but she didn't use them in order apparently, and so you'll find notes for a certain book in Notebook 16, as well as in Notebook 9, and in the midst of it, you might find a grocery list or something like that, so it's all over the place.
She seemed to do well with the unsystematized approach. The point is, write something down, get it somewhere, because it will stay there better. Then it does just in your mind. So I do try to get stuff down on paper in some place, even if I end up losing it.
[00:29:44] Matty: Well, I do kind of like the idea of the power of the physical page. And I can imagine having, you know, like three baskets in your office, one of which would be big ideas, one of which would be medium ideas, one of which would be small ideas. Maybe the small idea basket is tiny, and the big idea basket is big because one might be several pages of your written out or typed out notes, and one might be just little tiny pieces of paper where you're dropping in. And if you ever find yourself, like, at a loss, you could just take out a basket and start going through it and say, "Oh, cool. I haven't used the word azure forever!"
[00:30:14] Art: Yeah, and I think that's made me think about the ideas, not just the big ideas, it's the small ones. My notebook, as much as it might be filled with, "Here's an idea for a story," or "Here is a paragraph that's going to go in there," a lot of times it'll be like just some little stuff.
Yeah, phrase or little detail that I want to add to a scene I've been working on. And I don't have the time to go ahead and add it, so I just jot it down real quick so I can go back to it and remember. And that will a lot of times spark something, something bigger. So I think in terms of creativity, it's like, you know, obviously do whatever you need to keep that forward momentum, keep those ideas flowing, or keep those things percolating and come back to that word as well, and trust that it's going to go, hopefully where it needs to go.
Start with a bang... or not
[00:31:02] Matty: Another lesson that you would learn from The First Two Pages, which I think we've discussed, but you may have some things to add, is start with a bang or not. Were there any other thoughts you had about that?
[00:31:12] Art: Sure, yeah, that's kind of what I was talking about a little bit with Bonnie and with Nick Kolakowski, the idea of starting with something quiet. But I'm going to take this a little further. There are so many ways to start a story. Patricia Highsmith, whom I've come back to again and again, she has a great craft book.
Well, no, it's an awful craft book. It is very inspiring, but it is not the kind of craft book that people read to be like, "Here is step by step how to do something." It is more like, "Here's some ideas." But Patricia Highsmith would start a story with setting, you know, this thing we're not supposed to do, but she would start with this long description of setting in a story like "The Black House." Then in a story like "The Terrapin," she starts with this moment of great conflict, or small conflict, that leads to great conflict between a mother and her son, a little bit of dialogue, and a little bit of action, real short paragraph. I think this goes to the idea again that you don't have to start with action.
In the beginning, there's a lot of opportunity to begin in many places and still engage a reader, whether that's with—and I keep throwing out craft books—Michael Kardos has a great book, "The Art and Craft of Fiction," where he talks about the five elements of scene building: dialogue, narration (by which he means not just narrating things, but actual action, like stage directions), description, interiority, or exposition (by which he doesn't mean just backstory, but just like a little sentence of information).
You could start with dialogue. Start quickly with dialogue. Let us learn later who the people are that are talking. Other folks might argue, "Well, let's not start with dialogue. We want to know who people are talking to first. Give a little bit of description, then jump into the dialogue." Or as Patricia Highsmith did in "The Black House," start with this long paragraph about the city where "The Black House" is and the history of the city.
So, there's not one way of doing things. As long as you are finding a way, either through the prose, or through—I'm going to come back to this idea of lines of action, Trisha Heisman's lines of action—to begin to give a hint of conflict, a hint of tension, and I think your reader can pick up on even the small things, and then you can keep building on it. But again, there's not just one way of doing it. And that's one of the things that comes back again and again. Needless to say, I would encourage folks to look at the blog, first few pages, read some essays in order to see the wide range of approaches that writers can take and find possibilities of your own, experiment with things, see what's going to happen.
[00:33:51] Matty: I think that's always interesting, also, to listen to beta readers or read reviews or whatever to hear what other people's reactions are to, like starting a story with a long scene description, which as you're saying goes against most of the advice, but you might find that people are commenting that they're gripped by that, and that would be good input to have.
[00:34:11] Art: I had a time; this is my own kind of—this is not a first few pages essay but a story. I'd written a story, which was eventually published, called "Mrs. Marple and the Hit and Run." And I remember writing it for a reading. I'd written it originally for a reading, and it was long; it got long. It was 10,000 words long.
I was just going to read the first portion of it. And I read it to my then-girlfriend at the time, and my brother, and I could tell they were falling asleep. It was bad. I eventually cut the story, rearranged where the opening was, and cut the story from 10,000 words to about 2,500 words. So, I cut 75 percent of it out, and it was published in that way, but much stronger from having gone through that process of, "Let me try it first of all with some description, with some narration," and then it's like, "No, no, no, I got to start someplace else." I got to start someplace else. So, tinkering.
[00:35:00] Matty: Yeah, and I think that's the kind of thing that people who are writing novels have some leeway that people who are writing short stories don't because every once in a while, I'll kind of indulge myself by putting in a scene that tickles me and I think will tickle my readers too. And sometimes I actually get feedback that it's true, that I would never keep in, like, it's probably a darling I should kill, but I'm having so much fun with it, and then it turns out my readers do too. And I think you can do a little bit of that in longer work, whereas you probably can't do it in shorter work.
[00:35:29] Art: Yeah. Yep. Yep. Absolutely.
Advice from veteran versus first-time writers
[00:35:32] Matty: So, I think this takes us to the last tip, which I love, which is veteran writers versus first-time writers offering advice. What have you learned from The First Two Pages in that area?
[00:35:42] Art: Sure. You know, I mentioned Kate Ellis having a recent essay about her story, and actually, the story is "Happiness is a Warm Gun." But I'm also running an essay from the same anthology, by Kristopher Zgorski and Dru Ann Love, two bloggers whom many of us know and love, who are writing together their first piece of published fiction.
And so I've got their essay, and in the essay, Kristopher says, "We realize that we're new. We don't need to be offering advice to anybody on this," and yet, the insights they had into the creative process were terrific. My point: veteran writers obviously have a ton of experience, and we look at them for authority.
And I've been very fortunate that writers who are big-time established writers have been generous with their time, contributing an essay to the blog. I've had Martin Edwards and Peter Lovesy and Andrew Taylor, to mention three people who've won the CWA Diamond Dagger award for lifetime achievement who have contributed essays to the blog.
I've been generous with their experience, but I also find myself learning something from those folks, like Chris and Drew Ann, or like Sarah Cotter, or like Lisa Matthews, Lisa Q. Matthews, who are first-time writers who are being like, "Here's what I discovered, here's what I thought about." They're bringing a lot of enthusiasm about new perspectives, a lot of discovery.
And the excitement of discovery to kind of what they're doing with short fiction, and I think that we other writers and we readers can learn from that, as well as we can learn from the professional veteran writer, so to speak, and so there's excitement to have that range. It's like in the classroom as well.
I learn from my students. Some of the things they do will oftentimes excite me in new directions, whether it's process or product or a detail or something like that. So always know that you can learn from many directions.
[00:37:34] Matty: Well, one of my bucket list interviews is going to be Stephen King, and the question I'm going to ask him is, what advice have you published that you now wish people hadn't taken so much to heart because they think that if they follow it, they're going to enjoy your success? Like, are adverbs really that bad?
And the thing that always makes me think about it when I'm reading one of his books is that I've got to believe that Stephen King's editor pretty much lets Stephen get away with whatever he wants to. And, that he'll go on these long, tangential stories about, and then we put on a play, kind of things.
And I love that kind of stuff. And he gets to do it because... You know, the book would be only 300 pages if he didn't, but now it's 450 pages, but he's Stephen King, so he can do it. But I don't think he would say, "Feel free to write these completely tangential subplots." And, I just sometimes wonder if he thinks, "What have I created?"
Because there are all these people who are like following the Stephen King way, but he was known as Stephen King, and I don't think he would have given the early Stephen King that advice.
[00:38:40] Art: Yeah, you know, that is so true in many ways, and there's a couple of directions I could go in with that. I think I'm not going to.
[00:38:48] Matty: No? Please feel free if you'd like.
[00:38:51] Art: Well, I mean, it's a matter of, you know, practice what you preach to some degree. But also, I mean, Stephen King is brilliant in so many ways, and we go with this idea of how you think about craft and what you might advise somebody who is struggling to get a story right is different from what somebody might be able to do once they learn the craft. I'm a take it out of writing, you know, Pablo Picasso can draw a few lines and they look really, really good.
And somebody out there is going to say like, "Well, my four-year-old could do that," but the four year old doesn't have the background and the learning to understand why this line, why that line, what this line does. And there's something that is sort of magical about, you know, about an artist in whatever field who has learned so much and then can do something different with it.
David Foster Wallace is, this is where I was hesitating to go. David Foster Wallace was, you know, obviously a brilliant writer, and he's got these long sentences and digressions and he's got footnotes and he's got asides and he's indulgent in so many ways and yet if you take a look at it, it works. When I've had students in the past, increasingly less these days, when I first started teaching, I had students who were just enamored of David Foster Wallace, and they tried to do that in their own work, and it didn't work.
[00:40:23] Matty: But if you listen to Wallace, as I did just the other day, talk about here are some suggestions for writers to follow. He's not just glibly filling the page with junk and free writes. He's really carefully constructing all this stuff, and I think that's something that writers will skip. Practice what you preach, yes, and it's not always about don't use the adverb, but use the adverb well, or use the adverb when you need to, and there comes a point where Stephen King can use an adverb, and I apologize, but it's, I love that. I'll have to percolate on that.
[00:41:02] Art: Yeah, there you go, there you go, bring it back, percolate it.
[00:41:05] Matty: Yes. Well, Art, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much for sharing your best lessons from The First Two Pages, and please let the listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and The First Two Pages and everything else you do online. Great.
[00:41:18] Art: Sure, my website is arttaylorwriter.com. The First Two Pages is a page on that website, part of the blog on that website, so if you go to arttaylorwriter.com, you'll actually just scroll down and you'll see The First Two Pages down there. It also has links to BK Stevens' website, which is still available; again, she passed away in 2017. But the archive of those original first two pages is at her website that's linked from mine on each and every first two pages essay. Check it out.
[00:41:51] Matty: Thank you so much.
[00:00:06] Art: Good, how are you? Thanks for having me.
[00:00:08] Matty: I am pleased to have you here.
Meet Art Taylor
[00:00:09] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Art Taylor is the Edgar Award-winning author of two collections, "The Adventure of The Castle Thief and Other Expeditions and Indiscretions," and "The Boy Detective in the Summer of '74, and Other Tales of Suspense." His debut book, "On the Road with Del and Louise," a novel in stories, won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel.
His short fiction has also won the Agatha, Anthony, Derringer, and Macavity awards, and he is an associate professor of English at George Mason University. I met Art when I think we were both at Malice Domestic, and I attended one of your panel discussions, and I just thought it was so great. I did a little research on you after that, and I came across The First Two Pages.
So, before we dive into the focus of our conversation, I just wanted to ask you about what The First Two Pages are and what is the story behind that concept.
What is The First Two Pages?
[00:01:00] Art: Oh, sure. Thanks so much.
Um, you know, I'm very fortunate to be curating, and I use that word, The First Two Pages blog series. It was actually started by another short story writer in April of 2015, so it's been running for a while.
B. K. Stevens, Bonnie Stevens, was a terrific short story writer who came up with the idea of starting a blog. I'm going to read to you what she wrote to the folks who she recruited to participate. I hope the post on this blog will offer both writers and readers insights into how some successful opening pages were written.
What kinds of issues and approaches did the writers consider? What sort of decisions did they make? How did they create opening pages that made agents or editors keep reading? Why did these first pages work? I think your post will interest other readers if it offers them ideas they can use in their works.
I think it will interest your readers if it helps them understand why they've enjoyed your work so much. You know, there's the idea Noah Lukman wrote the first five pages. If you can't capture an agent's attention, an editor's attention in the first five pages, you've lost them.
[00:02:04] Matty: Or readers.
[00:02:05] Art: Stories, your readers, exactly. And if in a short story, is it the first five paragraphs? There's some shortness there. So a lot of that is how do you capture readers' attention?
Bonnie passed away in August of 2017, kind of abruptly right on the, in fact, as we were going to the Suffolk Mystery Authors Festival in Suffolk, Virginia, and she did not attend and passed away soon after that.
Her family asked me to continue the series; I had been a contributor there. Bonnie and I were terrific friends, and our thoughts about the short stories were very similar in many ways, as we found on panels at Malice and in other places. So I've been pleased to carry it on since then. It's hard to believe that I have carried it on longer than she did it because I still feel like it's her blog, in many ways, but I'm grateful to be able to curate it.
So that's some background on The First Two Pages.
[00:02:57] Matty: That's great. And I think that even for a longer work, first two pages is a great target because you were talking about the first five pages concept and certainly you want to grab a reader in the first five pages. But I think that as time goes on, even with a long work, maybe The First Two Pages are, you know. The key pages, writers should be looking at anyway.
[00:03:15] Art: Yeah, absolutely. I think there's so much that can be done there. I mean, it's, and it has to do with so many things. You know, are we laying the first clues of the plot? Are we introducing our characters? We're trying to... Get some conflict and tension introduced, but also give some—I hate to use this word—but backstory, you know, fold some backstory in. So there's a lot that has to be done, and so I do think it's a good place to focus this kind of attention.
[00:03:41] Matty: Yeah, perfect. So I had asked you to just go through your experience with The First Two Pages blog and pull out some best practices, the top lessons that you and your readers have learned from The First Two Pages. And so I'm just going to work through some of these.
[00:03:56] Matty: And the first one is everyone works differently. What did you learn about everyone works differently?
[00:04:01] Art: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think there's a sense in which if we can just get the magic formula, you know, then we'll know what to do, and it's the same way that people ask the question, how do you write if you're a writer? As if we could just figure it out.
What time to write and that sort of thing. I think the same thing is true with The First Two Pages, and what I found was how very different everybody is, how very different people come to stories. Number one, where the ideas come from, and then also the way they start the story itself. But then also the way that their process is about writing in general.
We hear about pantsers and plotters. There are people that I've hosted on the blog who have mapped out everything about a story before they've put down word one. And other folks who are like, well, I've got this idea, and it's about a paragraph long, and then let me see what happens next. So there's that range.
And of course, many of the writers talk about the genesis of a short story. Whether it's like, I read this book, or this story, and this prompted me in this direction, or I had a dream, or I was taking a trip and something about the setting, or here's an idea situation I conjured up. So I think it's interesting to see every stage of the process there.
Where an idea comes from, how it propels a writer toward the page, and then how they think about those blank pages and how they're going to approach them. Another thing I think is interesting is how many writers discover something about their own craft as they begin writing the essay. I've had so many people write to me as they've turned in their essay and say, you know what, I didn't realize what I'd done here until I started trying to articulate what I'd done.
In some cases, there is a sense in which a veteran writer, particularly, may have absorbed a lot of these craft techniques where they're not thinking about it. The same way a golfer, you know, when I've tried to play golf, it's like, put this finger here, put this hand here, make sure it interlocks there, and I joke with my students, like, well, Tiger Woods doesn't do that whenever he grabs a golf club because it becomes natural.
When they're forced to articulate it, though, that's where some of those craft choices come to mind. I will say, if I'm not going on too long, this is something that I've done myself. When I wrote an essay for Bonnie, Bonnie asked me to write about a story called "Parallel Play." And when she asked me about it, I realized that I knew where I wanted to talk about.
There's a scene in this story. It's about a young mother at one of these kind of Gymboree places with her son who finds herself getting into some trouble as they're leaving, and there's a scene in which one of the men in the story kind of forces his way through a door, and I thought, that is something I can talk about.
That wasn't until 40 percent of the story when I looked back, and suddenly, I was trying to realize, well, what had I done in The First Two Pages that laid the groundwork for everything ahead? So I think there's a process in which not only the readers and the writers can learn something, but the writers themselves will learn something about their own craft just by articulating some of those craft choices.
Being a percolator
[00:07:11] Matty: Well, one of the things that I think you said at Mouse Domestic, and I wrote this down immediately, is that everybody knows about plotters and pantsers, but you talked about being a percolator. Was that you?
[00:07:22] Art: Yes, that was me, and
[00:07:24] Matty: Tell me about that. I just love that.
[00:07:27] Art: Coming back to it, you know, I mean, you hear about plotters, and I know novelists — I can mention two of them, James Ellroy and Jeffrey Deaver, who plot out every step of the book before they ever write anything. In fact, outlines that are going to run almost as long as the book.
I think people with short stories do the same thing. And then folks, as I said, who start out in the middle. You know, I get an idea, and a lot of times, before I write about it, I just take walks, ride around in the car, or if I've got part of it done, then I step away from it, and then, again, to use that word, percolate.
I just let stuff bubble up inside. What are the possibilities for this story? And I'm going to come back to The First Two Pages with this. What have I laid down, maybe in the opening that I've written, that provides some of the threads that I want to follow up on without my maybe knowing it?
I'm going to come up with this idea that, you know, there's a great book I'd recommend called "Narrative Design" by Madison Smart Bell, if only because of the essay in the beginning about the unconscious art. We do a lot of stuff creatively without thinking about what it is, and so I try to turn around and listen to whatever I've done creatively to see what I've laid down that might have some longer resonance with the plot. And a lot of times, that just takes thinking about it, getting away from the computer and letting it percolate a little bit to see what brews.
[00:09:00] Matty: Yeah, that's why word count has never worked for me because I'm writing not only when I'm sitting at the keyboard, and a lot of times I'm folding the laundry or walking the dog or, you know, driving to the grocery store or whatever, and I'm writing, percolating away. And so by the time I sit down, I have a clear idea of what I want to capture.
I'm just having this interesting experience with the book I'm working on now, which is my fourth Lizzy Ballard thriller. And there are two poker scenes. I'm not a poker player. The first poker scene is the first scene in the book.
And then there's one about halfway through. So I was trying to learn about poker while I was writing the book. And so in the first chapter, even the first chapter that I gave my editor, I had to put in a thing that said, "And then she plays poker" because I was really struggling with how to present it.
Spoiler alert, but it's not standard poker because she's reading the minds of the other people who are playing the game. And so it's not like I can kind of do standard poker research. It's different. And I am going to 20 Books Vegas in November. So I thought, okay, I'm just going to wait until I get to 20 Books Vegas to write this scene.
Or, I should say, I'm just going to wait until I get to Las Vegas to write this scene, kind of independent of 20 Books, but finally, thanks to friends, poker-playing friends, and YouTube, I finally got to write this scene. I got my brain around what I needed to have this poker scene be. However, there's a long way of setting up the fact that it's the first time I've given my editor what I felt was an editor-ready copy that still had the first chapter that was very, very sketchy. So once I got my brain around it, I've been working on that first chapter, and I realized that there's a risk. Because I'm kind of working on it out of order, the tone of the first chapter is starting to feel very different, almost like more of a short story. Because I know I have like 2,200 words, and I'm polishing them and polishing them and polishing them, which is important for the first chapter. But I almost feel like there's a risk I'm going to polish them too much, and now it's going to go from kind of like a short story vibe to a novel vibe, which is like, less fussy about exactly weird descriptive words, like, I don't know that I would have called something Azure before.
After the first chapter, is what I'm describing sounding familiar to you, either as a writer or as a teacher?
[00:11:24] Art: Yeah, I think it's interesting, you know, the way that something comes together and the way you're trying to get it as a whole there. We think about the opening; I understand what you're saying as setting the foundation, not just for plot and character and all that, but for tone and style and everything. And when you go back and try to maybe retrofit something, you know, there are some challenges into making it seamless. Is that kind of what you're talking about?
[00:11:50] Matty: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's more of a change in tone, just as you're saying.
[00:11:55] Art: Yeah. And, you know, I'm a writer who doesn't necessarily, to be honest, always start with The First Two Pages. You know, sometimes I'll write something that's going to show up later in a short story and a primary, like short stories, something that'll show up later in a short story, even the end of a short story, and then it's a matter of how am I going to get a piece that I'm writing later that actually is earlier to work together.
And I think that's a challenge. This goes back to reinforce that there are a lot of different ways that a process can work, a lot of different ways that writers approach this. But I'm going to echo another point that you said as well about folding the laundry. You know, I've had people talk about they have to write 500 words a day or 1,000 words a day.
My advice is always don't focus on that, but just focus on steady steps forward. Whatever those steps are and wherever you're adding something to a manuscript, there are a lot of times when I'll write a lot during the day and other times when it's just. Use that word again, percolating in my head. That still counts as writing to me. And it is a matter of then fitting all the pieces together.
[00:13:00] Matty: Yeah, I think we're all doing all three of those things, plotting, pantsing, and percolating. It's just that one is more based at home, that we feel most comfortable with, and the other ones are maybe more of a stretch because everybody's got to plot at some point, and everybody pantses at some point, and everybody's percolating too. But sometimes they do it with their fingers on the keyboard, and sometimes they don't.
[00:13:17] Art: Yeah, I will say as well, you talked about kind of doing research and having to do the research. I'll fill in this scene later. You know, it's interesting the way that, looking at The First Two Pages that I've read, research can engender a story, can help to bring it along. I host the Edgar Award finalists each year, and I've hosted the Agatha Award finalists before as well.
I invited him to do an essay. James Ziskin did one, gosh, I guess it was a year and a half ago. I think it was, or maybe it was two years ago. I mean, post-COVID, all time is weird. But James Ziskin did a piece where he had written a Sherlock pastiche, and he was nominated for the Edgar for it.
It was interesting; the research he did, he looked at the concordance, read the Sherlock Holmes stories (he said he hadn't read them in a long time), and then looked at the concordance. See, what are the words that keep coming up in the Sherlock Holmes stories? And then looked at, and I'm going to check this out and make sure I have it right, the Ngram viewer on Google to look at word frequency, at the era in which he was writing.
So a lot of this was at the level of language. Let me do research about what was the vocabulary used at the time and let that contribute to things. In the same way you're talking about, let me go and see how poker is done. Let me immerse myself in some way in that world. What's going to come out of that?
And then the hope is that's going to lay a foundation for what's coming next, even though you're laying some of that foundation later. So yes, it's a challenge, I think.
[00:14:45] Matty: Yeah, and I think that idea of balancing the careful research with what you want to actually use in the story because I got to the point where I understood the poker terminology, and I have a friend who has actually played competitive poker, tournament poker, and she had given me a proposal for the game that this woman could play, but I realized that it was so heavy with poker terminology that would be unfamiliar to the reader, that I almost had to understand what she was saying at a more complex level, and then I had to dumb it down because this is not a book that's intended for poker players primarily, and so I have to create the excitement of the game without diving into too much detail, and I'm actually having fun watching, you know, what poker players consider the best movie poker scenes because that's, I think, a good example where the moviemakers have had to dumb it down a bit and yet still capture the emotion of the game.
[00:15:42] Art: Yep. Absolutely. I teach at Mason, as we said, I taught a course in spy novels and I taught an Ian Fleming book, "Casino Royale." It's amazing how much card playing is in the James Bond. We watch the movies, and you don't think about how much card playing. There's lots of card playing in the James Bond novel. So I would recommend you look in that direction, see how he manages that too. He does a good job of it, I think.
[00:16:03] Matty: Yeah, I just yesterday watched one where they're betting like 150 million dollars or something like that. That was super fun. And what I liked about that was there is a point where James Bond is looking at the guy he's finally betting against. It's just down to the two of them.
And there's a long period where he's just looking at him. I mean, it's probably only a few seconds, but in movie time, it feels very long. And you can tell he's kind of waiting to see if his opponent is going to have a tell. Super fun.
Waiting as a Mechanism of Conflict and Suspense
[00:16:36] Art: Yeah, I would say that's kind of a transition to another point. Something I've learned from The First Two Pages, and it brings us back to Bonnie as well, is about this idea of what conflict is, where tension is. You talk about the idea of just looking and waiting, and we don't think of that as action, you know, and yet it can be very suspenseful or a transition a little bit.
One of the things that I've learned from The First Two Pages is counterintuitive about what you can do, could do in the first two pages to capture the reader's attention without starting out at high conflict, without doing everything with a bang, I guess I should say. Bonnie, in addition to starting the blog, also contributed a couple of essays to it.
The last essay she did was on her story, "The Last Blue Glass." And I'm going to read what she said there. Conflict, we know, lies at the heart of fiction. That seems especially true of mystery fiction, where conflict leads to a crime. But it's not always possible or appropriate to open a mystery with a moment of intense conflict.
Sometimes I think it's more effective to begin with a quiet scene that drops hints about conflicts to come. If our characters are engaging, so engaging that readers both expect and dread the conflict, that can be a good way to keep them turning pages. And I thought about that a little bit, what you're talking about with a card scene, where not a lot is happening, and yet there's so much happening in terms of the way somebody's watching this, what the stakes are, how things are going to play.
It can be very quiet and yet very suspenseful. The conventional wisdom is to start with a body, start with something active, start with, and yet a lot of times I find that what works best is to lay these, what Patricia Highsmith called these lines of action or lines of tension between people, even if it's kind of quiet. If people can sense some tension and get to know the characters, they're going to invest in a different way than you.
Thank you. Then, if you just try to start with a body, with action, with movement, with a chase.
Studying What Gets Scrapped
[00:18:41] Art: One of the other essays I come back to again and again from The First Two Pages archive is Nick Kolakowski on "A Nice Pair of Guns." He started out writing this story, as he said, in medias res, you know, with action and with this happening. He said he kept thinking, got that gut feeling as a writer that something wasn't right there.
And he said he scrapped it. These are actually the most fascinating essays for me, where a writer says, here's what I did, here's what I scrapped, here's what I revised, here's why I changed it. Because I think it gives insight not only into the first draft but that revised draft, that final draft.
I'm going to read what he says as well. As any writer will tell you, there are times when you'll finish a draft and know there's something fundamentally wrong with it, but you can't figure out why. In the case of "A Nice Pair of Guns," I eventually decided that opening mid-story with a lot of action forced me to push way too much plot into the middle and end of the tale.
I might have succeeded in grabbing the reader's attention at the outset, but the story as a whole felt profoundly unbalanced. So when it came time to write the second draft, I decided to discard my fears about the hypothetical reader's attention span and begin at the beginning. I've got to tell you, I love that.
Follow your gut, follow your instinct, think through, and also write different versions of the same story to see where I'm going to introduce the tension that serves the reader. My story best rather than follow the conventional wisdom. So that made me, you're talking about the card scene, made me think about all that. How much can be invested in a quiet scene?
Short fiction as an experimental platform
[00:20:19] Matty: Well, the nice thing about short fiction is that you wouldn't want to do this with a novel, but you could write three or four, 12 or however many it takes, versions of the same story in a way that you would never want to do. You know, it would become a lifetime effort if you were to try to do that with a novel, but if you're writing three or four or five thousand words, you can keep putting the pieces together in different ways and see what the reaction is for you and maybe for early readers as well.
[00:20:44] Art: Yeah. It takes a lot of bravery to scrap something and start over to try something different with a short story. I think there's the possibility for that, as you said, often go to my son. I've told this before, when my son was little, you know, he was trying to walk and he took his first steps and it's like, well, you took a step and fell and took two steps and fell, but eventually got where he's going. Talk about the process, one step, two steps, you'll eventually get there if you just keep taking the steps. The other one is about the kind of willingness to tear something apart. If he's putting together a Lego. Something. Kids would be like, all right, I see a new idea. Let me rip this apart and start over. Whereas as writers, a lot of times we're like, gosh, I've put so much work into that. I can't, I have to, you know, and there is something, which I think is, you know, it takes a leap of faith to be like, tear it up. Let me start over or let me try something else as an alternative. So that's another thing from The First Two Pages that I've learned is writers who are willing to take those steps often get something much better out of it at the end.
[00:21:50] Matty: Yeah, I think the interesting thing about the Lego analogy is that the nice thing writers have is that they can keep the original construction and make a new one. You know, with Legos, unless you have an endless supply of Legos, you have to take the first one apart to make the second one. With writers, you can just set the first one aside and say, maybe I'll come back to that or maybe I won't.
[00:22:09] Art: Yep. Absolutely. Always an extra file. A new version. That's the perfect way to do it. Nothing's lost. Nothing's lost.
Thinking consciously about the craft issues
[00:22:15] Matty: Yep. Exactly. So I feel like we're probably kind of hitting some of the topics you brought up as learnings you had from The First Two Pages. But another one was, many people don't think consciously about the craft issues. I feel like we've hit that a little bit, but other learnings you've had along those lines?
[00:22:33] Art: Yeah. You know, it's interesting to see writers who are forced to look back at what they've done and try to think through as readers. What they did? Why here instead of someplace else? Why introduce this bit of dialogue there? And so, I think that's an interesting move, both in terms of what I said about accepting the first draft as maybe something unconscious that you're doing, and then turning consciousness to it. It's also part of, in terms of recommending process for writers, something that I recommend to my students at Mason. We don't always have the option to do this because of the shortness of the semester, but a lot of times I'll say, write something, and then put it aside for a while so that you're coming back to it with greater objectivity, with a reader's eyes, with seeing it. I think as we write more often, we hopefully develop the capacity to not need six months to put something aside to be able to see what's there and come back to it the next day or a week later, or obviously rely on beta readers for some feedback there. But I think trying to get that step from creator to reader.
Of your own work, it's an important part of the process, not just for a specific product, but also for your writing process generally. What is working best for me? How do I get to that point of reading objectively to revise? I'm going to go back to Bonnie Stevens again. Bonnie used to try to read some of her pages backward, as I recall. Once she had a full draft, she'd be like, "Alright, let me read this page and then move back to this," because she was reading it with a different eye.
Change the font. These are not things from The First Two Pages, but change the font. It forces you to see things differently. Read just a couple of pages and then stop and come back and read a couple more. Some of that will force you to not get lost in what you're doing, but rather to keep that, I come back to this phrase, that objective eye on your own work, your own craft choices.
So, I do think most people, a lot of times, don't think about it, whatever stage they're at, in terms of beginning writer, veteran writer, and yet it's worthwhile to stop, pause, and actually think through your choices.
[00:24:52] Matty: Perfect. Another lesson you had mentioned from the first few pages is ideas come from a lot of places.
[00:24:59] Art: Oh, sure. Yeah, absolutely. I think I mentioned, you know, we have people who say, "I had a dream about something," or, "This is a memory from my childhood." I just hosted Kate Ellis. I'm starting a series right now, as we're recording this, on the anthology, "Happiness is a Warm Gun." And that was prime fiction inspired by the Beatles. Editor Josh Pachter does a series of these anthologies. Kate Ellis wrote an essay where she said, "Here's something that happened in my childhood," and she had grown up in Liverpool in the same area where the Beatles, two of them, grew up, and she said, "I went back to that as the starting point for the story."
That's terrific. We talked about the idea of song lyrics or songs inspiring things. I've had a lot of times where songs or something I've read have inspired me to think about, "Here's a what if story just going on." And you talk about research as well. I always host the Black Orchid, award winner. This is a novella award hosted by the Nero Wolf Society, Rex Stout. Jacqueline Freimor wrote last year about the case of the bogus Cinderellas. Bogus Cinderellas are stamps, and she said she'd read something on Atlas Obscura, just reading about this on stamps, and it prompted this idea. She went through a fascinating essay, went through a couple of ways to try to write this. I think she thought about it as a novel at one point, and then a short story, and then ultimately found the inspiration for what the story should be and then went on to win an award for it.
So, you never know where ideas are going to come from or what's going to spark things. Again, this goes back to different writers, different inspirations and influences, different processes, all that. There's no one way to do this, and that's one thing that keeps coming back to me. If there are a lot of ways to do it, you find your best way, or hopefully be inspired by some of these essays to be like, "Oh, I could do that. Here's another opening for me." I think that's moving us all in good directions.
Capturing your ideas
[00:26:59] Matty: Well, this might take us, such a tangent that we spend the entire rest of the time talking about it, but that idea of the bogus Cinderella's, right, is that what the phrase was. It brings to mind a conversation I was having online with some folks recently about where you store your ideas.
And so the dilemma I was finding myself in is that there were kind of three categories of ideas. One was, there's this concept of the Boca Cinderella stamps that would be super cool to include in a story. Another flavor is I really wanted to explore, like, the almost unhealthy tendency people have that is represented by collectors and what is really behind the whole concept of collecting and why would people care about having an unusual stamp or whatever.
And then there's like, "Oh, I really like that word. I'm sure I'm going to use that somewhere." And I'm just wondering if you have a system that you use that handles all three of those kinds of concepts because just as you have the, "I wrote this and I'm not going to use it now, but I'm going to put it in the file." I think there's the, "Here's the file of things that I might want to use in the future." But they're so different sometimes that I think it's hard to manage them. Any thoughts about that?
[00:28:10] Art: I am, um, you know, I try to be systematized about so many things in my life, but I always fall short in some ways it seems like. I do keep a notebook handy where I can write down a quick idea for something. I do keep a file on my computer where I'll write, you know, here's, talk about writing the first paragraph of something, or a paragraph that might end up somewhere.
Here's an idea I had and I wrote it down. Or again, like you said, here's a word, or, I mean, just the smallest thing. It's all over the place, though, and I've had the time, unfortunately, where I've gone back through my computer trying to clean up some stuff, and I opened a document, and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I forgot completely about this. Where did that come from?" It ended up being not an idea I pursued, but the point is I wish I were more systematized so I could go back to the right place.
John Curran wrote about Agatha Christie's secret notebooks. I love these books in terms of what they tell us about the creative process. And she kept, I want to say it was like, there were 18 or 19 different notebooks, I've got the number wrong, but she didn't use them in order apparently, and so you'll find notes for a certain book in Notebook 16, as well as in Notebook 9, and in the midst of it, you might find a grocery list or something like that, so it's all over the place.
She seemed to do well with the unsystematized approach. The point is, write something down, get it somewhere, because it will stay there better. Then it does just in your mind. So I do try to get stuff down on paper in some place, even if I end up losing it.
[00:29:44] Matty: Well, I do kind of like the idea of the power of the physical page. And I can imagine having, you know, like three baskets in your office, one of which would be big ideas, one of which would be medium ideas, one of which would be small ideas. Maybe the small idea basket is tiny, and the big idea basket is big because one might be several pages of your written out or typed out notes, and one might be just little tiny pieces of paper where you're dropping in. And if you ever find yourself, like, at a loss, you could just take out a basket and start going through it and say, "Oh, cool. I haven't used the word azure forever!"
[00:30:14] Art: Yeah, and I think that's made me think about the ideas, not just the big ideas, it's the small ones. My notebook, as much as it might be filled with, "Here's an idea for a story," or "Here is a paragraph that's going to go in there," a lot of times it'll be like just some little stuff.
Yeah, phrase or little detail that I want to add to a scene I've been working on. And I don't have the time to go ahead and add it, so I just jot it down real quick so I can go back to it and remember. And that will a lot of times spark something, something bigger. So I think in terms of creativity, it's like, you know, obviously do whatever you need to keep that forward momentum, keep those ideas flowing, or keep those things percolating and come back to that word as well, and trust that it's going to go, hopefully where it needs to go.
Start with a bang... or not
[00:31:02] Matty: Another lesson that you would learn from The First Two Pages, which I think we've discussed, but you may have some things to add, is start with a bang or not. Were there any other thoughts you had about that?
[00:31:12] Art: Sure, yeah, that's kind of what I was talking about a little bit with Bonnie and with Nick Kolakowski, the idea of starting with something quiet. But I'm going to take this a little further. There are so many ways to start a story. Patricia Highsmith, whom I've come back to again and again, she has a great craft book.
Well, no, it's an awful craft book. It is very inspiring, but it is not the kind of craft book that people read to be like, "Here is step by step how to do something." It is more like, "Here's some ideas." But Patricia Highsmith would start a story with setting, you know, this thing we're not supposed to do, but she would start with this long description of setting in a story like "The Black House." Then in a story like "The Terrapin," she starts with this moment of great conflict, or small conflict, that leads to great conflict between a mother and her son, a little bit of dialogue, and a little bit of action, real short paragraph. I think this goes to the idea again that you don't have to start with action.
In the beginning, there's a lot of opportunity to begin in many places and still engage a reader, whether that's with—and I keep throwing out craft books—Michael Kardos has a great book, "The Art and Craft of Fiction," where he talks about the five elements of scene building: dialogue, narration (by which he means not just narrating things, but actual action, like stage directions), description, interiority, or exposition (by which he doesn't mean just backstory, but just like a little sentence of information).
You could start with dialogue. Start quickly with dialogue. Let us learn later who the people are that are talking. Other folks might argue, "Well, let's not start with dialogue. We want to know who people are talking to first. Give a little bit of description, then jump into the dialogue." Or as Patricia Highsmith did in "The Black House," start with this long paragraph about the city where "The Black House" is and the history of the city.
So, there's not one way of doing things. As long as you are finding a way, either through the prose, or through—I'm going to come back to this idea of lines of action, Trisha Heisman's lines of action—to begin to give a hint of conflict, a hint of tension, and I think your reader can pick up on even the small things, and then you can keep building on it. But again, there's not just one way of doing it. And that's one of the things that comes back again and again. Needless to say, I would encourage folks to look at the blog, first few pages, read some essays in order to see the wide range of approaches that writers can take and find possibilities of your own, experiment with things, see what's going to happen.
[00:33:51] Matty: I think that's always interesting, also, to listen to beta readers or read reviews or whatever to hear what other people's reactions are to, like starting a story with a long scene description, which as you're saying goes against most of the advice, but you might find that people are commenting that they're gripped by that, and that would be good input to have.
[00:34:11] Art: I had a time; this is my own kind of—this is not a first few pages essay but a story. I'd written a story, which was eventually published, called "Mrs. Marple and the Hit and Run." And I remember writing it for a reading. I'd written it originally for a reading, and it was long; it got long. It was 10,000 words long.
I was just going to read the first portion of it. And I read it to my then-girlfriend at the time, and my brother, and I could tell they were falling asleep. It was bad. I eventually cut the story, rearranged where the opening was, and cut the story from 10,000 words to about 2,500 words. So, I cut 75 percent of it out, and it was published in that way, but much stronger from having gone through that process of, "Let me try it first of all with some description, with some narration," and then it's like, "No, no, no, I got to start someplace else." I got to start someplace else. So, tinkering.
[00:35:00] Matty: Yeah, and I think that's the kind of thing that people who are writing novels have some leeway that people who are writing short stories don't because every once in a while, I'll kind of indulge myself by putting in a scene that tickles me and I think will tickle my readers too. And sometimes I actually get feedback that it's true, that I would never keep in, like, it's probably a darling I should kill, but I'm having so much fun with it, and then it turns out my readers do too. And I think you can do a little bit of that in longer work, whereas you probably can't do it in shorter work.
[00:35:29] Art: Yeah. Yep. Yep. Absolutely.
Advice from veteran versus first-time writers
[00:35:32] Matty: So, I think this takes us to the last tip, which I love, which is veteran writers versus first-time writers offering advice. What have you learned from The First Two Pages in that area?
[00:35:42] Art: Sure. You know, I mentioned Kate Ellis having a recent essay about her story, and actually, the story is "Happiness is a Warm Gun." But I'm also running an essay from the same anthology, by Kristopher Zgorski and Dru Ann Love, two bloggers whom many of us know and love, who are writing together their first piece of published fiction.
And so I've got their essay, and in the essay, Kristopher says, "We realize that we're new. We don't need to be offering advice to anybody on this," and yet, the insights they had into the creative process were terrific. My point: veteran writers obviously have a ton of experience, and we look at them for authority.
And I've been very fortunate that writers who are big-time established writers have been generous with their time, contributing an essay to the blog. I've had Martin Edwards and Peter Lovesy and Andrew Taylor, to mention three people who've won the CWA Diamond Dagger award for lifetime achievement who have contributed essays to the blog.
I've been generous with their experience, but I also find myself learning something from those folks, like Chris and Drew Ann, or like Sarah Cotter, or like Lisa Matthews, Lisa Q. Matthews, who are first-time writers who are being like, "Here's what I discovered, here's what I thought about." They're bringing a lot of enthusiasm about new perspectives, a lot of discovery.
And the excitement of discovery to kind of what they're doing with short fiction, and I think that we other writers and we readers can learn from that, as well as we can learn from the professional veteran writer, so to speak, and so there's excitement to have that range. It's like in the classroom as well.
I learn from my students. Some of the things they do will oftentimes excite me in new directions, whether it's process or product or a detail or something like that. So always know that you can learn from many directions.
[00:37:34] Matty: Well, one of my bucket list interviews is going to be Stephen King, and the question I'm going to ask him is, what advice have you published that you now wish people hadn't taken so much to heart because they think that if they follow it, they're going to enjoy your success? Like, are adverbs really that bad?
And the thing that always makes me think about it when I'm reading one of his books is that I've got to believe that Stephen King's editor pretty much lets Stephen get away with whatever he wants to. And, that he'll go on these long, tangential stories about, and then we put on a play, kind of things.
And I love that kind of stuff. And he gets to do it because... You know, the book would be only 300 pages if he didn't, but now it's 450 pages, but he's Stephen King, so he can do it. But I don't think he would say, "Feel free to write these completely tangential subplots." And, I just sometimes wonder if he thinks, "What have I created?"
Because there are all these people who are like following the Stephen King way, but he was known as Stephen King, and I don't think he would have given the early Stephen King that advice.
[00:38:40] Art: Yeah, you know, that is so true in many ways, and there's a couple of directions I could go in with that. I think I'm not going to.
[00:38:48] Matty: No? Please feel free if you'd like.
[00:38:51] Art: Well, I mean, it's a matter of, you know, practice what you preach to some degree. But also, I mean, Stephen King is brilliant in so many ways, and we go with this idea of how you think about craft and what you might advise somebody who is struggling to get a story right is different from what somebody might be able to do once they learn the craft. I'm a take it out of writing, you know, Pablo Picasso can draw a few lines and they look really, really good.
And somebody out there is going to say like, "Well, my four-year-old could do that," but the four year old doesn't have the background and the learning to understand why this line, why that line, what this line does. And there's something that is sort of magical about, you know, about an artist in whatever field who has learned so much and then can do something different with it.
David Foster Wallace is, this is where I was hesitating to go. David Foster Wallace was, you know, obviously a brilliant writer, and he's got these long sentences and digressions and he's got footnotes and he's got asides and he's indulgent in so many ways and yet if you take a look at it, it works. When I've had students in the past, increasingly less these days, when I first started teaching, I had students who were just enamored of David Foster Wallace, and they tried to do that in their own work, and it didn't work.
[00:40:23] Matty: But if you listen to Wallace, as I did just the other day, talk about here are some suggestions for writers to follow. He's not just glibly filling the page with junk and free writes. He's really carefully constructing all this stuff, and I think that's something that writers will skip. Practice what you preach, yes, and it's not always about don't use the adverb, but use the adverb well, or use the adverb when you need to, and there comes a point where Stephen King can use an adverb, and I apologize, but it's, I love that. I'll have to percolate on that.
[00:41:02] Art: Yeah, there you go, there you go, bring it back, percolate it.
[00:41:05] Matty: Yes. Well, Art, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much for sharing your best lessons from The First Two Pages, and please let the listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and The First Two Pages and everything else you do online. Great.
[00:41:18] Art: Sure, my website is arttaylorwriter.com. The First Two Pages is a page on that website, part of the blog on that website, so if you go to arttaylorwriter.com, you'll actually just scroll down and you'll see The First Two Pages down there. It also has links to BK Stevens' website, which is still available; again, she passed away in 2017. But the archive of those original first two pages is at her website that's linked from mine on each and every first two pages essay. Check it out.
[00:41:51] Matty: Thank you so much.
