Alternatives II

In which I imagine a different way to launch Ship of Fools

Welcome back to Glass Half Full and thanks for reading! Today’s post is a stab at a different way I could have started Ship of Fools. I’m hesitant to post it because I’m not actually as wishy-washy about the novel beginning as this makes me sound. Put this down as idle speculation in hindsight. Although, if you have any ideas about a different, faster-paced structure for Part I, I’d be glad to hear them.

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Last week I presented a deleted scene from Ship of Fools and talked about the different reasons I nuked it. Today, I’m going to continue the theme of alternative ways of telling this story and consider a more action-packed approach to the novel’s opening.

But first, a bit of background. When I set out to write Ship of Fools, I had already written the most “commercial” novel I had it in me to write, and that was Ada’s Children. That previous novel started out with an action-packed prologue, followed up by an action-packed opening scene in Chapter 1. I had kept the story as tight as possible (for me), and each of its parallel story lines had what I felt were powerful and satisfying climaxes. All of that had failed to find any interest in the trad publishing world.

So with Ship of Fools, I told myself I was going to write exactly the kind of novel I wanted to write, one closer to those of my early literary hero, Thomas Pynchon. (But not too close to them, because who can really approach the level of knowledge it takes to write such maximalist, all-over-the-place novels as Gravity’s Rainbow? Certainly not me.) It was going to have a lot of characters and a lot of inter-related themes. Standard ideas of story structure went out the window. If an intriguing digression popped into my head, I threw it in. An old trope I could twist into a new shape? I threw that in too.

Take, for instance, “Streets of Laredo,” a favorite tune for my philosopher-cowboy, Slim. He whistles it softly in times of boredom or stress. Late in the novel, he’ll have a conversation with a British character about the tune’s roots in an English folk song, “The Unfortunate Lad.” What does this have to do with anything else in the novel? Not much! I do try to shoehorn in a reason for the discussion, but this is one darling that an editor would encourage me to cut. (But hey, at least it’s not a multi-page setup to a bad pun, which Pynchon pulled off in GR.)

With that as background, it will come as no surprise that Ship of Fools doesn’t start off anything like a popular novel should. It opens with a prologue in which two cowboys, Slim and Shorty, discuss philosophy around a campfire. The prologue ends with a little cliff-hanger with some trucks driving nearby and the cowboys going to investigate. Then we don’t hear from them again until Chapter 16.

Is this any way to hook a reader? If it works, it might only be through humor. My wife loved these two characters and thought they were hilarious, so I decided to start with them. In addition to the humor, the conversation introduces the central theme of the novel: our current epistemological crisis. (Another option was to start with one of the several Flat-Earth Interludes. This would also introduce the theme of the novel, but with humor that might only land with followers of the flat-earth debunking community.)

Chapter 1 kicks off the story proper. We’re aboard the cruise ship Anóitoi, and we meet the novel’s protagonist, Liz Dare, who’s covering a floating conference of conspiracy theorists. This is the first night of the con, and everything in Part One of the novel happens in the space of a couple of hours at the opening reception. There’s obvious conflict and some humorous observations between Liz and the conference participants, most notably Sarge Marshall, a flat-earther and one of the con’s organizers. There’s some funny banter, and a bit of conflict, with the one other “normy” attendee, rocket tycoon Lonnie Ester. If anything’s pulling the reader through this chapter, it’s again going to be the humor. What’s Liz’s goal? What’s the problem she’s trying to solve? Not much clue yet.

There is just the hint of a problem, in reference to a problematic article Liz wrote the previous summer. People keep asking her about it because she sounded both more dismissive than usual of the crackpot theory it covered, and simultaneously as if she halfway believed it. That article is the reason Sarge Marshall invited her to cover this cruise: he thinks he has a chance of convincing her the Earth is flat.

Chapter 2 starts a series of flashback chapters in which Liz meets Ben Himmelstein, who has evidence of the most outlandish moon landing hoax theory Liz has ever heard. I’m rather proud of the absurd nature of this theory, and I hope the humor will again pull the reader through the two chapters in which he lays out this theory. Events take a darker turn as Liz tracks down proof for the theory and learns that someone really doesn’t want her pursuing this story. Soon she feels as if she’s a protagonist in a spy novel.

These flashback chapters alternate with chapters aboard the Anóitoi in which we meet characters with various conspiratorial or anti-science beliefs: the afore-mentioned Sarge Marshall, who seems to have something more than this conference up his sleeve; flat-earther Clive Cuddleshanks, who has an invention he claims will show the sun and the moon in their “true positions”; and Reverend Paul Lee, a good-hearted Young Earth Creationist. Paul is accosted by a group of Nazis, who will keep rearing their ugly heads throughout the novel. We also spend a chapter seeing this milieu through the eyes of Lonnie Ester.

The intrigue of the flashback chapters comes to a head in Chapter 10, then the situation on the cruise ship take a surprising turn in Chapter 11. That’s really the inciting incident for the novel, at least as far as Liz’s story arc is concerned. (Thus, Part One successfully answers the question What makes today different from any other day?, even though the inciting incident doesn’t happen until around manuscript page 60.) From here, the various characters will spin out in their own arcs, some of them intersecting with each other and then flying apart again, coming back together only at the very end, 50 chapters later.

Will readers hang on long enough to reach that inciting incident? Was there a way I could have started the novel with the inciting incident closer to page one? One way of doing that popped into my head the other day. It’s an overdone technique: start in medias res, then use a flashback to fill in the necessary plot points and character development to bring the reader up to speed. I really don’t want to do that, but in the next section, I’ll present a scene showing how that might look. Then I’ll look at all the reasons not to do it.

SPOILER WARNING: What follows will obviously spoil the surprise of what happens in Chapter 11 as the novel is currently structured. If you haven’t been reading along so far and think you might want to, I encourage you to go back and read those 11 chapters, then come back here. Or, if you’re already up to speed with Ship of Fools or just don’t care about spoilers, read on.

This guy looks more stumped than I really am, but he provides a good separator before the spoilers below. (Credit: www.pinclipart.com.)

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The lights of the Anóitoi grew smaller as the helicopter lifted Elizabeth Dare up and away to who-knew-where. Antarctica, if she could believe Sarge Marshall. The zip-ties binding her arms behind her back cut into her wrists. SOP, according to Sarge’s security guy, Mike, though he’d given her an “apologies, ma’am” as he’d tightened them down. The AR rifles the other goons sported — also SOP, even though Sarge kept saying, “No one gets hurt, right?” Next to her, Lonnie Ester struggled futilely against his binds. In the seat opposite, the Buddhist monk, Dawa Tenzing, appeared calm, his eyes closed.

How had she gotten here? She wished Sid, her editor at The New York Times, had never sent her on this assignment to cover Sarge’s Conspira-C Cruise, a floating convention of flat-earthers, moon-landing deniers, 9/11 truthers, and more. It was refrying the beans. She’d already covered one of these floating conventions of the conspiratorial-minded, the devotees of the bizarre and the outlandish and the unbelievable, back when she’d been an independent blogger and myth-buster. Even then, she’d been called a CIA spy and worse; now that she was with the paper of record, she’d expected the abuse to be even harsher.

But the cruise had barely begun when Sarge had invited her for a meeting in his stateroom. Lonnie was already there, looking terrified, and then one of the security guys brought in Tenzing, who’d been “lurking around.”

Then Sarge had explained what this was all about: He was taking the pair of them, by force if necessary, to Antarctica — or to the Ice Wall that Sarge believed ringed the edge of the disk-shaped flat Earth. She was supposed to report the truth to the world, while Lonnie, one of the richest men on the planet, would provide insurance that the UN troops guarding the Ice Wall wouldn’t blast them out of the water. Tenzing was simply unwanted baggage. When Mike offered to toss him off the boat, Liz realized how serious their predicament was. At least Sarge kept intoning that “no one is going to get hurt.”

But was the invite from Sarge where this mess really started? No, it was that assignment from last summer, the one with the outlandish theory about the moon-landing “hoax,” the one that had taken her into the California desert. Not that far from Area 51. The strange events of last summer, ranging from the little town of Tecopa to NASA’s archives in DC, had led inexorably to this moment: Liz a captive of the most paranoid person she knew, watching her only link to her normal life recede into a tiny pinprick of light in the blackness of the Pacific Ocean.

From there, the story would loop back to Liz’s meeting with Ben Himmelstein. In this structure, it would make sense to start at the beginning and tell the story straight through to Liz’s kidnapping. I’d have to add a linking chapter in which Sarge reads Liz’s article and decides she must be coming around to his own conspiratorial way of thinking. Maybe even present the problematic article itself. (I’m still contemplating writing this up as bonus material for the novel.)

There are a couple of big problems with this approach. One is that starting in medias res works better when we already know the characters. TV shows get away with this in the middle of a series, once the characters are well established. I sometimes use the approach to start a new chapter: get right to the interesting bit, then go back and fill in the more pedestrian details of how the characters got there. But when the reader doesn’t yet know anything about the character, starting out with that character in peril risks the reader simply not caring. I’ve picked up too many novels that start with a lot of action and no character development and I always put them down. So why would I use that approach here? (Even though I used this approach in Ada’s Children, so go figure.)

The other problem is that, as currently structured, the tension should build up between the ship-board, present tense chapters and the flashback chapters. That’s the beauty of alternating POVs. There’s a little cliff-hanger every time we cut away from Liz’s increasingly dangerous investigation of the moon landing hoax theory. There are even a couple of cliff-hangers in the cruise ship chapters as the situation gets stranger and Sarge’s plans become clearer. Each chapter is pretty short, which adds to the pace.

If I put those chapters in chronological order, then the cliff-hangers wouldn’t work and I’d probably smash several of the chapters together and do a lot of condensing. Maybe the entire flashback sequence would be smushed into two chapters. It seems like it would have less narrative drive, rather than more. And the chapters aboard the Anóitoi, which feature five different POV characters, might come off as a lot of head-jumping when strung together.

And here’s a final reason to reject this faster-paced, more linear approach: it promises something the rest of the novel will never deliver. It’s not like the rest of the novel is a linear story. As currently written, there’s a lot of jumping around in Part I, just as there’s a lot of jumping around between story arcs in the rest of the novel. What the reader gets in the beginning is what the reader can expect throughout. Promise made, promise delivered. It’s just a matter of finding the readers who like that promise.

So no, I probably won’t change how Ship of Fools launches itself. This exercise has shown me how difficult, and even wrong-headed, any other approach would be. The story contains a lot of different arcs, and maybe this is the best way to get them all moving, even if it’s a slow start compared to other novels. Although, as I said above, if you have any other ideas, please leave a comment!

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Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this exploration of story structure, please give it a like, a share, a restack, or a comment. And if you really enjoyed it, I hope you’ll buy me a coffee or upgrade to a paid subscription.

Come back on Friday for Chapter 38 of Ship of Fools, “A Serious Woman,” in which Slim tries out his detective skills, with limited success.