So much subtext in that one little phrase that I immediately stopped and wrote it down. What GOLD was in that phrase and it has changed forevermore how I write.
When you are told to get in LATE and leave EARLY you suddenly realize how much isn’t needed in your fiction. Why have your hero standing at the door of his home thinking if he should propose to the heroine—have the scene start at her door.
Benefits of getting in late?
INSTANT TENSION.
If you start the scene, it’s like coming into the middle of a conversation and if intriguing enough, your reader is going to want to find out what is happening. There is DRAMA in arriving late to the party.
Think of it this way: you are running late and burst into the plaza just as the bride and groom are pronounced man and wife. You are the maid of honor.
Oops.
That scene would not have had the power or the potential for a great deal more conflict if we had started back with the maid of honor in her car, buried in traffic five miles long. We don’t need the backstory to APPRECIATE the tension.
What about leaving early? No one wants to leave a fun party early. No one wants to walk off the dance floor in the middle of their favorite song as they stand in the arms of their hero. And if you did leave at that moment, it would be cutting the moment short. The same is true for your reader, lost within the pages of your book
Again, there would be tension, but ALSO there would a hook.
We all want to keep our readers reading. Whether at the end of paragraph break or at the end of a chapter, we want to keep the readers flipping pages. It is so important to keep them going through the story as Sherrinda pointed out earlier this week.
When you leave the moment early, you are giving your reader an incentive to keep going to find out when that thread is going to be picked up again.
Another place where get in late, leave early has benefited me is tightness and word count. When your story is viewed through the blinders of this one little phrase you will start to realize that much of your beginning scenes are merely SETUP. Driving, primping, internal exposition, rehashing past scenes, all the little “filler” scenes we put in because we think are needed are not necessary.
So the next time you pull up your document and look at each of your scenes, think of this: can I get in later? Can I move the entrance of my character farther into the moment so it is more dramatic, grabs more attention, adds deeper tension?
And can you leave early? End an argument by walking out, end a scene, chapter, whatever at the moment least expected. Have your character say a zinger of a line and then CUT. Stop. Leave the scene and you’ve got a hooked reader.
Keys to performing these methods would include: cut a lot of the internal exposition that rehashes what happened before, include more action, more dialogue, let your character speak through their actions—and save those moments of introspection for a later, more appropriate time.
Just thinking in “getting in late, leaving early” will completely change how you write and how you edit. You can always go tighter.
Always.
Are your brain cells not just churning now? Thank you Rachel Hauck! J
