WHO CARES?
by Donald Maass

Have you ever been reading a novel and asked yourself, “Why should I care?” Have you ever set a novel aside because the answer is “I don’t”?

If you have, then you have experienced a common reader feeling—and a common writing shortcoming. Even novels with sparkling prose, a strong narrative voice, a clever premise, all the goodies, can leave us feeling “meh”. We just…don’t…care.

That can even be true when the characters that we meet are sympathetic, heroic, witty or in any other way attractive. Their troubles alone won’t do it. The effect of a hook opening line lasts only one second. Not even saving the cat will necessarily rescue our sense of indifference. Put the world in peril, put anything at stake, personal or public, and there’s a chance that we still…don’t…care.

Why is that? Is it because this is fiction, and just because a hero wants to save his brother or forgive his father, it isn’t real? It doesn’t matter? Is it because we don’t “connect”—as editors are wont to say in declines—because a given heroine’s life circumstances or problems aren’t the same as ours? Certainly, we read to our tastes. (See Kristin Hacken South’s post on that topic HERE.) However, we can also quickly come to care about, and keep reading about, protagonists whose worlds, lives and problems are vastly unlike ours. Scout. Celie. Frodo.

What then, really, is the difference? If it isn’t a hook, intrigue, voice, heroism, pathos, atmosphere, story questions or any of the other scores of engagement factors that we might pack into page one, then how is it that certain novels snag our hearts instantly, while others utterly fail to woo us onward, pull us deeper, sometimes not even to page two?

As usual, the answer lies in asking the right question. The question isn’t what makes us care, but who. The protagonist? That’s the odd thing. You’d think, but actually who makes us care is someone other than the main character.

To find out who that is, let’s look at the openings of a couple of recent novels.

Look Closely

To help us I’ve chosen novels of three of different types, with varying narrative perspectives and different degrees of narrative distance.

The first is Alix E Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January (2019), a Los Angeles Times best seller and a finalist for the 2020 Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. Set in the early 1900’s, the novel’s heroine—named January—is the ward of a wealthy collector of objects. On the day before she turns seventeen, she discovers a book which tells of Doors between worlds—Doors which may lead to her lost father and Doors which her guardian has been closing.

But all that lies ahead. The opening does not yet present us the plot problem or the stakes. Instead, it is a voice opening: January speaking directly to the reader…

When I was seven, I found a Door. There—look how tall and proud the word stands on the page now, the belly of that D like a black archway leading into white nothing. When you see that word, I imagine a little prickle of familiarity makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. You don’t know a thing about me; you can’t see me sitting at this yellow-wood desk, the salt-sweet breeze riffling these pages like a reader looking for her bookmark. You can’t see the scars that twist and knot across my skin. You don’t even know my name (it’s January Scaller; so now I suppose you do know a little something about me and I’ve ruined my point).

But you know what it means when you see the word Door. Maybe you’ve even seen one for yourself, standing half-ajar and rotted in an old church, or oiled and shining in a brick wall. Maybe, if you’re one of those fanciful persons who find their feet running toward unexpected places, you’ve even walked through one and found yourself in a very unexpected place indeed.

Or maybe you’ve never so much as glimpsed a Door in in your life. There aren’t as many of them as there used to be.

Intrigue is an obvious gambit in this address to the reader. Doors, capital “D”? There’s anticipation, too. You can bet that January is going to go through one of those doors—she does, a blue one in a field—and find herself “in a very unexpected place indeed”. There’s also January’s engaging narrative voice. It’s sweetly artless and, of course, perfectly artful.

It’s hard not to like January. But again, do we care? That’s a different matter. Look more closely. Although January is not in a hurry to get her plot moving, there’s nevertheless an urgency, a grip, to what she is telling us. She could have started anywhere—her missing father, her guardian’s house, it’s many rooms—but instead she starts with Doors. That’s what’s uppermost in her mind. That’s the thing we need to read first. It’s the thing that January wants us to understand…needs us to get…insists that we see for ourselves, and probably we’ve seen Doors ourselves before without realizing exactly what we were seeing.

To put it differently, there’s something terribly, terribly important that January cares about. Us. It is her first priority that her story—especially the Doors in it—matters to us as much as they matter to her. We need to know. Her care is a palpable force, a momentum all by itself that lifts us up like a wave at the seashore, shoving us insistently toward the land.

The second novel is Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere (2017), a New York Times Best Seller and occupant of many best-of-the-year lists, not to mention a TV adaptation. It’s a mainstream novel about an upper-middle-class family, the Richardsons, in Shaker Heights, Ohio, whose story opens on the day that their house burns down, an event which Ng’s omniscient narrator relates to us…

Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down. All spring the gossip had been about little Mirabelle McCullough—or, depending on which side you were on, May Ling Chow—and now, at last, there was something new and sensational to discuss. A little after noon on that Saturday in May, the shoppers pushing their grocery carts in Heinen’s heard the fire engines wail and careen away toward the duck pond. By a quarter after twelve there were four of them parked in a haphazard red line along Parkland Drive, where all six bedrooms of the Richardson house were ablaze, and everyone within half a mile could see smoke rising over the trees like a dense black thundercloud. Later people would say that the signs had been there all along: that Izzy was a little lunatic, that there had always been something off about the Richardson family, that as soon as they heard the sirens that morning they knew something terrible had happened. By then, of course, Izzy would be long gone, leaving no one to defend her, and people could—and did—say whatever they liked.

Once more, intrigue is a gambit. A six-bedroom house is on fire. Story question: Did the youngest Richardson daughter, Izzy, set the fire, as people in Shaker Heights presume? There’s also a solid sense of place with Heinen’s grocery store, a duck pond and a street grandly named Parkland Drive. People in Shaker Heights obviously like to gossip, too, so maybe that’s a point of identification? I mean, where in the world isn’t there a community glued together by gossip?

But do we care? Houses catch on fire every day. There are lots of families named Richardson. There are plenty of youngest daughters who may be a little off the rails. I’d argue that it’s not the house on fire, nor the too familiar operation of the town gossip mill, that gets through to us. Like I say, we can get those without Ng’s novel. Nor is exactly the omniscient narrator’s wry take on Shaker Heights. It’s that the narrator is at pains not to present the plot points, nor even (yet) any characters, but rather a highly pertinent fact: We human beings think that we know why things happen, but actually we don’t.

In other words, the narrator has a point to make. It’s important enough to open the novel. It’s a point that matters greatly to the narrator and the narrator wants it to matter greatly to us. We have to grasp it before the story begins and the narrator cares whether or not we do.

The third novel is Amor Towles’s The Lincoln Highway (2021), a #1 New York Times Best Seller, following the author’s previous A Gentleman in Moscow (2016). This is not a find-the-lost-father novel, but rather a find-the-lost-mother novel, or at least that’s how it starts. It’s 1954 and eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is returning from an eighteen month stretch at a juvenile work farm where he was sent for involuntary manslaughter. Emmett’s mother is long gone and his failed-farmer father is recently deceased. Emmett intends to collect his young brother and head west to find their mother by following the Lincoln Highway—the first transcontinental highway—and the clues left by their mother as a series of postcards sent in the days after she left.

Again, all that lies ahead. As the novel opens, we don’t know anything. Towles works in the grand storytelling tradition of authorial narration, bringing us close to the novel’s various characters but from the outside, telling us about them instead of pretending that we’re dwelling inside them as in close third person. At the opening, the omniscient narrator is behind the story’s wheel…

June 12, 1954—The drive from Salina to Morgen was three hours, and for much of it, Emmett hadn’t said a word. For the first sixty miles or so, Warden Williams had made an effort at friendly conversation. He had told stories about his childhood back East and asked a few questions about Emmett’s life on the farm. But this was the last they’d be together, and Emmett didn’t see much sense in going into all of that now. So when they crossed the border from Kansas into Nebraska and the warden turned on the radio, Emmett stared out the window at the prairie, keeping his thoughts to himself.

Hold on now, isn’t this a textbook example of an inactive opening? What’s happening? Pretty much nothing. Emmett isn’t speaking, just staring out the window and shutting out Warden Williams. Oh, there are mild story questions: Warden? “…the last time they’d be together”? There’s some story set up which the author is, for now, judiciously and wisely withholding. Okay, fine.

But do we care? Emmett’s not exactly a winning protagonist, not yet. Warden Williams, though, is a bright note. He tries to draw Emmett out. He’s kind. He cares enough to try, and that’s the point. The novel’s narrator could have opened with anything but that’s the narrator’s choice, and not by accident or luck. You could say that the author is setting the novel’s tone, and I suppose that’s true enough. But it’s also true that there’s something else that the author cares about, and it’s not just his main character, Emmett, since so far we know little of him except for his sullen silence.

No, there is something else that the author wants us to see: that there is kindness in the world, for in that kindness lies hope which, as it happens, we’re going to need as Emmett’s circumstances darken and his journey takes a gigantic detour in the wrong direction. Hope. It’s important that we feel that and hold onto that feeling. It matters to the storyteller. It’s going to matter to us. It matters more than anything else, so much so that it’s the feeling with which the novel begins.

Conclusion

So now we’re asking the right question. It’s not what causes us to care, but who: the novel’s narrator.

The narrator has something important for us to see, a point to make, a feeling to hold onto. It’s important not in a plot sense. We’ll get to the plot later. It’s not even important in a storytelling sense. There are plenty of hooky tricks to catch our attention and perhaps, if it’s our kind of story, to keep us going.

No, what we’re drawn in by, the reason that we begin to care, is that the narrator cares, greatly, and conveys that on the page. Why? For us. So that we have something important to see, get, or feel. The narrator does not presume that our hearts are locked in. Why should they be? There’s really no reason in any novel…that is, until the narrator gives us one. And BTW, that principle holds true through the rest of the story too.

Who cares? The narrator. And when that care is urgent, underlying and palpable, we are lifted by that wave. We care too.

Are we going to care about your WIP? That depends. What does your narrator care about, especially on page one?

Donald Maass (he/him) founded the Donald Maass Literary Agency. in New York in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019). He has presented hundreds of workshops around the world and is a past president of the American Association of Literary Agents (formerly AAR).