It's Latin for "in the middle of things." Today we might say, thinking of action movies, "Cut to the chase!" It's the most effective way to snag your reader's attention. And that is what we all want, right?
I've been reading essay after essay this Fall and this is something I continuously advise. It seems like such a big mystery, but it's not. It's actually surprisingly simple. I'll show briefly how it's done.
I'm assuming you have a draft written. Take a look at it. 9 times out of 10 it's going to have lots of introductory material--just like your teachers require for essays in your English classes. This is exactly how to bore your reader ! We need to capture our reader's attention.
Eventually you get to a point where the explanation stops and something happens. Say you go some where, meet some one, the first day, etc. This is where you should really start your essay. Get out that wicked red pen and cross out everything that comes before (but don't get rid of your intro completely, we'll make use of some of it). Everything that explains things. Everything that tells (TELLS!) the reader what you think, who you are,,etc. That's the stuff we need to eliminate. Now we can start where the action is.
What Qualifies as action?
To be bluntly obvious: It's where something actually happens. It's not making the plan for the trip; it's knocking on the strange door of your host family. It's not being picked to open a a new store in a faraway city; it's showing up to an empty building early in the morning and having to work with strangers to get that store operational on time--usually too little time.
I read an essay last night that was about working in a research lab over the summer where rats and mice were used to experiment with different drugs that would, with luck, save human lives. The first part of the essay was your standard boilerplate intro about getting the internship (what an opportunity!) and a little on possible ethical dilemmas in using lab animals. I'm more than half a page down when finally something horrible and gory happens: a rat's spine is crushed. It's horrific. It made me cringe. Guess where the essay should start? Right there! Vertebrae by vertebrae--gut wrenching and memorable. If the writer started there I'd be completely engaged from moment one.
But, My Action is All Internal
You don't have something gut wrenching and gory? What about something someone says to you? What if all the action is internal, in your mind? Then I would look for the climactic moment when the change/thought occurs and start right before that. Don't worry about your audience “Not Getting It.” We can fill them in once we've got their attention! It's no use explaining anything if no one is listening.
If there is absolutely no action anywhere, you're not writing a narrative. Or you're just completely avoiding the topic: yourself. Oh, you're too boring to have a story? There are ways around that. There are techniques that can make nothing entertaining. (If you have any doubt, watch an episode of “Seinfeld” and see how they can make nothing—the topic of every episode—hilarious.)
So get back to your essays and start searching for the moment when something happens. Make that your opening!
And don't forget to keep your old draft with all of that introduction stuff you crossed off. In my next note I will discuss what to do with that introductory material.
No comments:
Post a Comment