I’ve decided to write a novel set in 1961, about Bela Rigó, a sixty-seven-year-old Hungarian immigrant to the U.S. who wins a Michigan bowling alley in a poker game and thus becomes a business owner for the first time after spending most of his life working for someone else. Then Bela discovers he has a son by a woman he had an affair with in Germany forty years ago. As Bela gets to know and love his son, he discovers that his son is a former Auschwitz guard on the run. Now he must be willing to sacrifice everything in order to help his son get away from the urbane, Uzi-toting Nazi-hunter who has tracked him down.
Here’s the entire preface:
I’d never given much thought to how I would die — though I’d had reason enough in the last few months — but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this.
I stared without breathing across the long room, into the dark eyes of the hunter, and he looked pleasantly back at me.
Surely it was a good way to die, in the place of someone else, someone I loved. Noble, even. That ought to count for something.
I knew that if I’d never gone to Forks, I wouldn’t be facing death now. But, terrified as I was, I couldn’t bring myself to regret the decision. When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, it’s not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end.
The hunter smiled in a friendly way as he sauntered forward to kill me.
Whoops! Silly me – that’s the entire preface to Twilight by Stephanie Meyer. How’d that end up there?
But, now that I look at it, is there anything in that preface that rules it out as a preface for my novel? Do we know that the narrator is Bella, a teenage girl in the 21st Century, rather than Bela, a male senior citizen in the early 1960s? Do we know the dark-eyed hunter is a vampire, rather than a Nazi-hunter? Do we know that the dream far beyond the character’s expectations is romantic love with a sparkly vampire, rather than owning a bowling alley? Do we know that the character is willing to sacrifice herself for her vampire boyfriend, rather than sacrifice himself for his Nazi son? Do we know that the long room the characters are in is something other than a bowling alley?
My point, obviously, is that this preface is so devoid of details that it’s become very generic. I think Meyer was so focused on not giving away the plot of the book in the preface that she stripped out anything specific, to the point that it becomes artificially detached in its point of view. Since I haven’t read the rest of the book, I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing the main character knows exactly who “the hunter” is, and does not refer to him as “the hunter” under normal circumstances. And as she is waiting for the hunter to attack, she would not think about how she was going to die “in the place of someone else, someone I loved”: she would think about the specific person she was willing to die for.
A preface like this is a form of false suspense, in which the narrator deliberately withholds known information from the reader and in effect says, “Nyah, nyah! I know something you don’t know.”
Now, clearly Twilight sold very well, so a preface like this doesn’t prevent a book from becoming a runaway bestseller. But I doubt very much that this preface is what caused the book to be a bestseller – unless you think my bowling-alley-owner story would also have been a bestseller with this preface.
In my opinion, a preface (or prologue) that uses a tense scene from much later in the book in order to try to hook the reader is a gimmick that signals a lack of confidence in the actual beginning of the book. If you feel the need to start the book that way, I think you should look instead at how to make the real beginning of your story more interesting.
P.S. No, I’m not really planning on writing this novel. I was merely using it to illustrate the point.
