At the bottom of the deepest circle of revision hell

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. – Elie Wiesel

We have met the enemy, and he is us. -- Pogo

Finally, on our writer’s quest for redemption from The Seven Deadly First Page Sins (as devised by author/editors Tex Thompson and Laura Maisano), we have reached the end. That’s right, the lowest depths of revision hell. And the good news, once we reach bottom, there’s nowhere to go but up!

In Dante’s version of hell, the lowest circles were occupied not by the most lecherous or violent. Those sins, although deadly, he considered the ones most tied to our earthly, bodily nature. He reserved the lowest depths for the fraudulent, the seducers, the flatters. Those who sinned against our intellect, with the devil at the very bottom. Thompson and Maisano call their writerly version of these ultimate intellectual sins, the sins of indifference. Although the sinners of Dante were without hope, there is redemption for even the worst sins of a writer’s craft. But writer beware – the sins of indifference are the most difficult to repair.

In the interest of knowing the enemy (especially when she is us), Thompson/Maisano name the sins of indifference clichés, confusion and – worst and deadliest of all – boredom.

The problem with clichés is, they once worked so well! Like Lucifer, they originally bore the aspect of angels. Some were quick and easy forms of shorthand that packed a lot of information into small packages. Is that crystal clear? Plain as the nose on your face? Does it make you mad as a hatter? Do we even know what these tired phrases mean anymore? 

Some flattered us into the sins off excess with the lure of genre-specific clichés – endless, and endlessly trite descriptions of magic, romance, or bad behavior. 

image: pixabay

Some will try to insert themselves into any genre. Anyone who wants the full course on writerly sins will need to contact Thompson/Maisano (or have your writing group leader do so), so I’ll only provide snippets from their list of the tired but still filthily sinful “dirty dozen” of opening page clichés: character waking up, character addressing the audience, dream sequence, flash forward to something actually interesting from much later in the story (annoying prologue syndrome). 

Stop! I can hear readers crying. Didn’t Metamorphosis (1915) open with a character waking up? Didn’t David Copperfield (1850) and Catcher in the Rye (1951) open with a character addressing the audience? Didn’t Rebecca (1938) open with a dream sequence (not to mention flashing forward to an interesting event later in the story)? And weren’t they successful, now classic, tales?

Remember though, clichés weren’t born that way. They were tactics so brilliant that everybody and her dog used them. Only not so brilliantly. Notice the dates on those original stories – none of them are recent. And a century after Copperfield, the direct address to readers had become so banal that Catcher had to make a deliberate attempt to subvert it. Daphne du Maurier gets additional mileage from her dream opening in Rebecca by telling us directly that it’s a dream, not pulling any tricks. And though it’s also a flash forward, there’s actually even more interesting stuff in the book than the fate of an old mansion.

And for everyone whose critique group has told them never to open with a character waking up, I’ve got to say that waking up to find yourself transformed into a giant insect has got to be out of the ordinary course of a character’s life. It makes me wonder what Kafka’s critique group had to say about it.

Still, before anyone becomes too discouraged, Thompson/Maisano urge us to be as hopelessly dull and cliched as we like on our first drafts. Then . . . do something else.

“Take your first, second, and third ideas and place them carefully in the garbage!”

Clichés, though, aren’t the only sins of indifference. There’s also confusion (who did what to who and where and when?) Leaving questions in a reader’s mind can be a good thing. Or a bad thing.

Good if it makes the reader wonder what comes next, or whether the character will get what she wants, or even wonder what’s in that strangely shaped, ticking parcel? Questions go bad when the reader can’t picture the scene, doesn’t know who’s speaking, or who did what to whom.

And finally, the baddest of the bad, the greatest writerly sin of indifference is . . . boredom. 

Speaking to a meeting of Dallas Mystery Writers, Thompson warned that there is no way to completely boredom-proof a story. There will always be somebody who just doesn’t get it, just doesn’t care. We can, however, make our stories boredom-resistant, by providing them with a unique character, a daunting task, a strange place or thing, an intriguing mystery or an unexpected reversal. 

There’s not room in the opening pages for us to do justice to them all. Pick one and do it well. And save the rest for the rest of the pages of our book.

(Coming – revision doesn’t always need to be hell. One author/editor finds it the part of writing he enjoys most.)