First-Time Fictioneers: The Temporal Cue

I want to quickly cover a beginner mistake I see commonly, prior to the creation of an enduring character or plot. Plot and character fill entire worlds on their own, but there are certain skills very easy to instill which are even more essential than character and plot, like how hydrogen and oxygen are essential to the world, too. Without these elements, the latter cannot yet exist.

This easy-to-remedy essential is called temporal cuing. This is letting your reader know--constantly--where your character is in time and space.  It's important to do this in your very first paragraph, if not sentence. Open any fiction book you own and try to find one that doesn't give a strong sense of time and place in which to locate the character. Otherwise, the reader is floating in an ambiguous soup of internal monologue. Even acts as mundane as sitting up, standing, and walking into another room should be summarized, albeit quickly. This continues to be important in dialogue. Our characters shouldn't be just strings of quotes, as readers eventually lose their sense of physicality in the scene and it becomes unreal: the kiss of death to any fiction. Even the arguments (especially the arguments) should be a thrust and parry of blotted lipsticks, of lighters refusing to flair, and of course, of shrugging, blinking, and pausing.

Even periods of stewing and break-down (especially periods of stewing and breakdown!) need to be tagged with markers like "lounged after dinner," "strode across the river," "glared into the traffic," even "just sat and stared until the alarm clock shrilled." My first novel maintained a huge mistake until its latter stages, and that was a page or two of solid abstraction (oxymoron unintended) to summarize. Your reader doesn't want to be told what the book is about, whether at the beginning or end, no matter how eloquent your grasp of language. Lyricism cannot replace tight prose that supports an intriguing concept. Cleverly told stories are never as good as good stories, regardless of how cleverly told. This is an epiphany I only had this year. I'd struggle over whether or not to cut a pointless but poetic sentence. Functionless? Cut it. People remember stories more often than they remember sentences.