Death of the Slow Start

A couple weeks ago, I loaned my lovely crit-partner one of my favorite science fiction novels of all time: The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. This book is a combination of several of my favorite things: sci-fi futures, time travel, the middle ages, and scary diseases (okay, that last one's not actually a favorite thing, but it does make for some high-stakes fiction!).

I was glad to hear that my crit-partner was enjoying it too, but she had an interesting comment about it. She mentioned that she felt like if this book was being published now, rather than back in 1993, a lot of the slower sections would have been cut.

I've heard a few other people mention similar things lately. Some have postulated whether or not Jane Austen's novels would even be published nowadays, due to the slow beginnings that take a long time to build to the narrative. Others have argued that slow-builds are a luxury only permitted in literary fiction, not out in genre-land. In Dan Wells' videos on the 7-point plot system, he mentions something he calls the "Ice Monster prologue," named for the prologue to George R.R. Marten's Game of Thrones (where in some ice monsters stab a few people, before the story cuts to a slow beginning about a boy growing up in a cold northern castle). Wells suggests using something like this to hook readers if the rest of your beginning is going to be slow. On the other hand, I've also heard readers complain about unrelated prologues "tricking" you into thinking a book will be "exciting."

My question is not about the merits of using or not using the Ice Monster prologue. My question is... are slow starts allowed anymore?

I work in publishing. I live and breathe publishing news. I'm not trying to put the industry down. But I wonder if lately things haven't become, through no fault of anyone in particular, a little too formulaic.

Yes, people say that "good writing will get noticed no matter what." They say there are no rules as long as you tell the story well. But they also say "hook the reader right from the start" and "always keep the tension increasing" and "cut anything extraneous."

This is all good advice. Great advice. It has made my writing much better, and I've seen it work in a million YA novels. Everything from the Hunger Games to Heist Society to Anna and the French Kiss. But the slow builds that I have seen are mostly classic novels, older YA novels from the 90s or earlier, or the occasional adult literary novel. If I do find the rare YA novel with a slow-build, it is almost invariably from an author who's already hugely successful.*

Don't get me wrong, I love a quick-start. In medias res all the way, baby. But is that the only beginning we're allowed to have anymore? Do kids really not read books that start slow anymore? Or have we just decided that they won't, thanks to the short attention span of the computer-generation?

I should clarify that by "slow start," I don't mean boring. I mean good writing, good voice, good characters, and everything else needed for a book. I just mean stores that don't start out with frantic page-turning tension. Maybe they have that kind of tension later on, but not right off the bat.

Many aspiring first drafts start out with too much rambling. Too much backstory, too many character details, etc., etc. Those stories do need to cut down the front-end and start with the inciting incident. But what about memoirs? What about character-driven novels? What about quietly thought-inducing novels, what about stories that just cannot be told the way they need to be told if they start with a bang? Is there space for them in the YA world?

I want to say yes. I want to believe that if a book is good enough to be published, it will get published someday, no matter if it obeys the "key to a bestseller" guidelines or not.

But sometimes, I'm not sure I believe that anymore.

* i.e. The Scorpio Races. Loved it. But would it have been published if it was Maggie Stiefvater's debut, rather than Shiver?