Post #137 September 10 2018

“Start Your Story With a Bang!”

Every story needs to start quickly, ideally with a bang.  This is especially true for short stories, where every word counts.  Why should stories start quickly?  Here are 3 reasons I can think of:

1. Hook the reader.  Intrigue, mystery, a sense of foreboding and a notion that bad things are about to happen…these are all ways to hook a reader right into the story and keep him there.  Before investing the time it takes to read a story, the reader wants to know its worth his time.  We all lead busy lives.  If I’m going to take time off from my busy schedule and read a story, I want a sense that I’ll at least be entertained, learn something I didn’t know, be transported to a far away place or maybe encounter strange and menacing people and live vicariously through them without bleeding or dying.
2. Set the pace.  For better or worse, the start of your story, like any good race, sets the tone and pace of the tale.  It could be fast.  It could be slow.  It could be bang-bang.  This is critical in short stories.  If I start reading your story, I want to know in the first few paragraphs what I’m getting myself into.  Am I in the future?  Am I in danger?  Am I being stalked?  Should I be looking over my shoulder?   What’s going to happen next?  The start of the story sets the pace and provides the reader with some kind of guidance about what to expect next.
3. Make ‘em care.  The start of your story introduces at least one or more characters.  You want your reader to care about the characters, to imagine being in their shoes, to live vicariously through them.  I want my readers to care what happens to these people.  How do I do that?  In a short story, by giving my characters a life, a history and a personality.  Plus I need to do this with just a few well-chosen words.  Even in short fiction, it pays to develop at least a brief bio about your main characters. Making the reader care about your people is easier when the reader can see himself in your fictional people; “Yeah, I’ve done that too.  I’ve gone through that.  Hmmm….”
    
   Below is an excerpt from a recent science fiction story of mine called ‘Cloudchasers.’  I wrote this story earlier in the summer and it’s being shopped around the sf magazine world right now.  See if I’ve followed my own advice in this excerpt….
    

 Cloudchasers

“A delusion is something that people believe in, despite a total lack of evidence.”  Richard Dawkins

 

Aboard FCS Geronimo

High Altitude Venus Operational Cruise

Fifty-two kilometers above the surface of Venus

August 15, 2186 (EUT)

0400 hours (local)

 

On Venus, there are only clouds…to the naked eye.  Cloud cliffs and cloud valleys.  Cloud ravines and cloud canyons.  Cloud bergs, buttes, badlands.  Cloud continents.  Above the clouds is the vacuum of space.  Below the clouds is Hell itself, an inferno of heat and sulfuric acid rain.  And don’t forget the occasional storm.

In the late summer of 2186, as people on Earth reckon time, Geronimo had been on auto-cruise for several days when Doug Fremont and Win Blakely were both startled out of their sleepy daze by the insistent beeping of the wind shear alarm. 

“Emily named this one Estelle,” Blakely noted from his anemometer display.  “Sisters are like that.  Properly known as VS-8…looks like this one’s going to be a doozy.”

“Hey, your sister lives for these clouds…what an imagination.  Unicorns and castles everywhere. Any chance we can steer clear?’ Fremont proposed.  “The last one turned my insides into scrambled eggs.”

“Checking Doppler now…”  Blakely scanned his instruments.  “Jeez, this is one big sucker…covers almost all of Theia and Rhea Mons.  I’ll try to steer around it.”

Blakely grasped the joystick and swiveled Geronimo’s props to starboard.  The huge airship responded sluggishly, buffeted and shuddering from stiff cross-winds.  “It’s like driving into a hurricane.”

Fremont nodded grimly.  Outside, sulfuric yellow clouds were thick and impenetrable. “It’s worse than that…anemometer shows wind speed nearly a hundred meters per second.  I can feel the cross winds.”

A bright flash lit up the tiny cabin, followed by a crescendo of roaring, rolling thunder.  Veins of lightning arced across clefts and gaps in the clouds dead ahead. 

“Are we turning?” Fremont asked.  “I don’t feel anything.  I don’t like the looks of that cloud bank up ahead.”

“Not enough to make a difference.  Estelle’s a monster, and she’s sucking us right in…I’ve got no yaw and not much pitch either.  We’re caught in her outer bands…but I think we can ride her out.  We did it before.”

“Yeah but not with lightning like this.  Every time we pass over Theia Mons, those volcanoes light up the clouds like a Christmas tree.”

“Hang on…I’m going to try to—”

But Blakely’s words were interrupted by a terrific flash, bright enough to blind both crewmen.  The thunder came an instant later, followed by the smell of rotten eggs…sulfur…and the cabin was quickly thick with smoke and electrical arcs and discharges.  The shock wave knocked Fremont and Blakely out for a few seconds.

It was Fremont who came to first.  He shook his head and rubbed his eyes, thankful for the seat harness that had kept him upright, then his blood ran cold. 

It was clear, viscerally as well as by instrument, that Geronimo was in trouble.  The whole cabin was canted down, at the wrong angle.  Displays flashed nonsense and garbage right in front of his eyes.  He sat up abruptly, ascertained the panel was safe to touch and shook his commander roughly.

“Win…Win, wake up!”

Blakely sniffed groggily.  “What…what happened?”

“We got struck…lightning.  Direct hit.  Look—” He pointed to the panel.  “Main bus A and B undervolt.  Caution and warnings all over the place.  Master alarm going off.  It was a direct hit, Win.”

Blakely was mission commander for HAVOC 1 but he felt like someone had just slammed the side of his head with a sledgehammer.  “What’s with our attitude…we got no instruments.  Everything dropped out at once?”

“Most of the instruments are fried.  Why are we in downpitch like this?”

Blakely released his harness and pressed his nose against the forward porthole.  Outside, he didn’t have to watch for long to notice the outer fabric skin of the balloon envelope flapping like mad, torn, shredded like so much confetti, shedding swatches of Teflon and polypropylene and blackened gear off into the wind. 

“Here’s your answer.”  He indicated the massive and expanding tear.  “Looks like starboard cells A and B, maybe C.  We’re holed.  Lightning ripped a big gash.  Can you check helium pressure?”

“I got nothing on the panel, Win,” Fremont complained.

Blakely sat back in his seat.  “We’re going down.  Can’t you feel it?  I don’t need instruments to feel it.  Butt logic tells me we’re in a descent…and it’s picking up.  We can’t go below forty kilometers.  She won’t hold up.”

Fremont and Blakely stared at each other for a long moment.  Fremont reached for the comm button first, praying that it hadn’t been fried.  He selected High-Band A and keyed the mike on his helmet.

“Fort Bliss, Geronimo…do you copy?  Fort Bliss, Geronimo, do you copy.  We’ve got a major emergency here…Emily, Alicia, come back!”

There was a staticky crackle, followed by chirps and whistles—“whistler waves,” mouthed Blakely.  A clear indicator of lightning in the area.  More gusty crackles, then a faint, scratchy voice came through.  It was Emily Blakely, station crewperson aboard Fort Bliss, several hundred kilometers above them in orbit.

“Copy, Geronimo…say status again.  I couldn’t…copy …last trans—”

Fremont explained, carefully, word for word, what had happened.  “We’re hit by lightning…holed bad.  Maybe more than once.  Everything’s toast down here.  And the envelope’s leaking…big tear starboard side forward.  I can see the shredded fabric.”

Now Win Blakely got on the comm.  “Em, we’re going down.  I’m pulling the plug…we’ll have to powerup Pinocchio and abandon ship.  Fast.  We’ve got no instruments but my sense tells me we’re headed down in a hurry.”

Emily Blakely, safely ensconced in her couch aboard Fort Bliss swallowed hard.  “Copy that.  Win, get out of there.  Light off Pinocchio and get the hell away now.  Don’t waste any more time.  Grab what you can, squirt the rest up to me and get your thick skull out of there.”

“Already underway,” Win came back.  “We’ll re-contact when we’re away on ascent.”

“Copy that.”

Blakely motioned for Fremont to grab whatever data he could, tapes, drives, disks, Geronimo was packed with instruments for research: spectrometers, nephelometers, radiometers, thermocouples galore.

“Here,” he pushed Fremont aside, as the Mission Pilot fumbled with some gear.  “I’ll do it.  Get your butt into Pinocchio and start powering up.  I don’t know what our altitude is but it feels like we’re dropping fast.  Crush depth may not be too far off.”

Fremont acknowledged and squeezed past the Mission Commander, then into the narrow access tunnel leading aft to the ascent vehicle, nicknamed Pinocchio.  Once powered up and checked out, she would detach from the gondola and drop away, then her LOX/RP-1 rocket engine would fire and the ship would arc upward out of the deep troposphere and into a low-altitude orbit around the planet.  A few hours’ maneuvering would put the small ship into position to dock with Fort Bliss.

Fremont was deep into his switch settings and system startups when more lightning flashed outside. 

“Wow,” he muttered.  “That was close.”  He called up to the habitat.  “Win, better get buttoned up quick.  That lightning’s getting worse.”

A voice came back through the short tunnel.  “Almost done here.  Just a few—”

The flash was blindingly bright and it seemed to last for an eternity.  Fremont felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand straight up.  Pinocchio’s cabin glowed an unearthly spectral blue-white for a split second, then the shock wave hit, battering the entire airship like a rogue ocean wave.

That’s when Fremont heard something he hoped he would never hear.

It was a sound of tortured metal, a screeching, groaning, wrenching, scraping sound of metal being rent and torn.  Pinocchio shimmied and shook like a wet dog.  Then Fremont’s blood ran cold.  He stared at the smoking rim of the access tunnel, seeing the first puffs of yellow sulfuric acid fog seeping into the cabin.  He craned forward to inspect the adapter and held his breath, sucking his teeth.

The inside of the transfer tunnel was a smoldering pile of wreckage.  Completely blocked from Geronimo.  Worse, the outer skin of the tunnel was ripped open butterfly style in multiple places, still smoking and the air of Venus’ deadly atmosphere was already filling in…a deadly toxic mist of sulfuric acid and hydrogen chloride.

Instinctively and by training, Fremont slammed the hatch shut and fired the latches.  Then he got on comms back to Blakely.

“Win…listen.  That last bolt…it was bad.  The transfer tunnel was hit.  I just checked inside…it’s wrecked.  Impassable.  Worse, it’s tearing away from Geronimo.  The atmosphere’s leaking in at a high rate.”

For a few moments, Blakely said nothing.  Fremont’s heart skipped a few beats. 

“Win…Commander Blakely--?”

“I heard, I heard.  Okay, Doug…listen up carefully.  We drilled on this.  We trained for this.  Make sure the hatch is secure.  Once you’re sure, separate Pinocchio.  Do you understand me?  Press the SEP button, light off the rocket and get out of here.”

“What?  Are you nuts?  I’m not leaving you up there!”

“Doug, don’t argue—” He stopped when a fierce wind gust yawed them roughly to one side, then whipped the ship hard to the opposite side.  More groaning metal.  More screeching in the tunnel between them.  “Doug, we can’t have this argument.  You know what Mission Rules say.  If one crewman can’t make into the ascent vehicle—”

“I don’t care!  I’m not leaving you behind?”

“Hey, I can ride this out.  I’ve still got some lift to maneuver with.” 

“Bullshit!”

After a few agonizing moments, with lightning and storm conditions getting steadily worse, Blakely practically yelled into his mike. “Doug, we can’t lose both of us.  You’ve got the data with you.  Now GO! Leave!  Get away!  At least one of us has to survive.  Launch now…that’s an order!”

Fremont planned to argue more…we can make this work, I can clear the wreckage away, I think there’s enough room…but a click on his comm made up his mind for him.  Blakely had cut off comms. 

“Bastard!” he muttered.  He dove into the last of his checklist, ripping through the startup sequence, flipping switches and stabbing buttons angrily.  “Always got to be a hero!”  Just for good measure, he opened his own mike again, not knowing if Blakely was still on line and yelled. “I’m not giving up, you know!  I’m coming back…one way or another, I’m coming back and rescuing your sorry heroic ass in spite of you.”

Then, when the whole panel in front of him was green and there were no more caution and warning flags, he blinked and shrank back from another flash of lightning, waited for the shock waves to dampen out, sank back in his seat, eyeing the fierce swirling gusts of yellow and orange outside, and reached out for the SEP button.

His stomach lurched up into his throat when Pinocchio dropped.  Automatically, after two seconds, the rocket lit off.  Doug Fremont was slammed back into his seat by the five-g acceleration and closed his eyes.

In his mind, while all around Pinocchio, the massive cyclone churned and heaved and the rocket bore him upward toward the relative safety of space, he could still see Win Blakely’s grizzled face, full of week-old stubble, his big dog ears sticking out like airplane flaps, grabbing data tapes and disks left and right, eyes blazing with determination as Geronimo’s porthole glass cracked and burst inward in a shower of splinters and shards.

He was never sure if that had really happened or if he had just imagined it.

 

So how did I do, according to my own list of key points in starting a story fast?  Give me a grade.  And remember, the start of your story—literally the first page of your story—is your best (maybe only) chance to grab a reader and pull them into your imaginary world.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on September 17.  In this post, we'll look at audiobooks and the oral traditions of storytelling.

See you then.

Phil B.