By: Eli Moss
I’ve been on an Octavia E. Butler kick lately. Most recently, I finished and was blown away by Dawn. It’s sure to place as a best read of my year; the first fifty pages rank among the best first part of any novel I can think of. Any novelist who aspires to write tight and tense openings should take a look at what Dawn can teach us.
But for those who lack the time, I thought I would sit down and try to extract the qualities that stand out to me about the novel’s first act. Before I proceed, I should lay down a light spoiler warning for part one of Dawn, as the rest of this article cites examples from the text. Familiarity with the text is not necessary to read this article, as I don’t get into anything overly specific—but if you’re particularly sensitive to spoilers, here’s your warning.
With that disclaimer behind us now, let’s think about 3 key principles Butler uses to writing a killer opening:
1. Focus on Emotion. This first tip is a bit of a softball—if you’ve been writing for long, you’re almost certain to have heard the advice to dive deep into your character’s internal experiences. But Butler shows us just how deeply we can embody our character’s emotions. We as readers are so close to Lilith that it’s claustrophobic. Butler is also a master of demonstrating how emotion is as much physical as it is internal; we feel emotions bodily. On the first page alone, we can see the following words dedicated to Lilith’s emotional experiences in this moment: “nightmare sensations of asphyxiation… gasping, shaking… Her heart beat too fast, too loud… fetal, helpless… minute, exquisite pains… physically ill or injured… confined.” These are 23 of the 169 words on the first page in my edition, rounding out to nearly 15% of the page being dedicated to emotion. Granted, emotion may not be this highly concentrated in the rest of the story. But it’s the first impression Butler chose to impart to her readers for a reason—vivid emotions within the character builds emotional investment within the reader. Hence its spot as number one on my list.
2. Focus on the Physical Tension that Supports Theme. Butler follows the well-trod advice of beginning your novel as close to the inciting incident as possible, but I wanted to push beyond that to something a bit deeper. I know for myself, the possibilities sometimes seem endless for which physical tasks my characters should complete before the main plot has gotten well underway. Butler has narrowed down her possibilities by thinking about the themes that will arise later in the book, then getting a head start by introducing relevant motifs as early as possible. Specifically, I see her doing this in Dawn in two primary ways. First, Lilith spends a considerable amount of time exploring her room and feeling grateful for the pitiful amenities provided her, such as a shower. Directing our attention to this exploration of her meager surroundings clearly establishes that Lilith is utterly within the control of the Oankali. Butler could have told us this fact in summary—but no, she constructed a whole activity out of proving to us Lilith’s dependence. By turning this information into the action of exploration, Butler makes it more apparent that Lilith’s lack of autonomy is a major tension of the story. Second is the inclusion of Sharad, the boy she taught during one of her previous Awakenings. Sharad doesn’t serve an important plot function; he’s mentioned only a handful of times beyond his one scene. But through this early scene, Butler introduces readers to the ever-important themes of human connection and motherhood. The scene is energized with tension, and the rest of the book continues to ride that tension till the end. Not all the physical happenings of your book require the cause-and-effect relationships that create plot; sometimes, it’s better to use theme itself as the connective tissue that grips readers and pulls them in.
3. Focus on the Unknowns. Readers know nothing about the story-world when they pick up a new book. So in Dawn, Butler pulls the slick move of starving her main character of all the same information as her readers. As an author, it can be so tempting to fill the beginning of a book with all the backstory and context that leads up to the current point of the story—the dreaded info dump. Dawn certainly has an extensive backstory, and Butler could have allowed Lilith to fill in readers on everything about her personal life and the history of planet Earth that led up to the current situation. But no, Butler hardly touches on this backstory at all. We pick up a few crumbs—for instance, that some group attempted “humanicide”—but certainly nothing substantial. Instead of indulging herself with these static background details, Butler keeps Lilith—and thereby her readers—busy with a lack of information about the present situation. As Lilith strives to understand her situation, each knowledge nugget feels rewarding because she’s gone so long without it. In this way, Butler is able to feed us a consistent stream of worldbuilding details without fatiguing the reader. The character becomes the vehicle for information acquisition, and the reader emulates the character’s reaction to the information, handily avoiding boredom.
Butler sure knows how to keep her readers glued to the page. It’s a hard skill to master, but by focusing on these three principles—bodily emotion, thematically relevant action, and information control—writers can engage their reader’s hearts and minds.
And here’s the secret: I’ve applied these principles to the opening pages of a novel, but I never said they apply only here. Next time I’m stuck in my own writing, whether it’s a short story for my creative nonfiction class I can’t quite crack or a soggy middle of the novel I’m drafting on my own time, I have three more tools in my revising arsenal. You do, too.
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