Gangplanks and doorways and bridges, oh my!

A few months past, a writer* I know shared some thoughts with me about the pitfalls of openings:

An excellent teacher I had many decades ago likened the first sentence--or sometimes the whole first paragraph--to a gangplank on a ship. You need it to get aboard but once you sail away you can leave it on the dock or dump it in the ocean. IOW that opening sentence or paragraph is often merely what we--the writers, not the readers--need to get started. And the problem with gangplanks in writing, of course, is that sometimes the gangplank becomes as big as the boat.

Recently, I decided this was true of more than just beginnings. It applies to every scene we write. I'd just finished one and printed it off to read for the first time on actual paper. Normally, that's the last step before passing it along to my first reader (my husband). I discovered, to my horror, that I'd written a four-page (single-spaced) gangplank. The reader was like to die of vertigo or excessive fatigue, or else lose his balance and drown before ever making it aboard ship.

Yeesh. How did that happen?

Part of it was me being rusty and unsure. Part of it was me trying to set the scene before blowing it up. (Well, not literally, but it's true I was trying to get all the furniture arranged and the pictures hung and the chessboard in place before entertaining the duke.)

And yet (I argued with myself), all this information is necessary. The character, Miren, is on a journey in questionable company. They are taking her to the lair of their master. Said lair must be described. Certain objects and people in the lair must be introduced. Miren's experiences upon arrival must be catalogued to some degree. Her thoughts and impressions must be examined. All this has to happen before the first words are spoken between herself and the lair-master.
Or does it?

Probably not. So I'm rewriting, or at least planning to rewrite. And before I do that, I'm meditating on the best way to enter the scene. Which brings me to gangplanks, doorways, and bridges.

For me, the scenes that tend to flow most smoothly during the writing process are the ones that I enter through a doorway.

Doorways can be anything--a brief description, a line of dialogue--but the hallmark of a true doorway is that you step through it right into the heart of the scene. There's no putzing about in the shrubbery or hanging around on the front porch--you're in the room grappling with conflicts.

Gangplanks, as my friend described above, are what we write to find our way into a scene because we can't locate the door. It's perfectly OK to write gangplanks; it's not OK to keep them. You can usually tell a gangplank because it serves no purpose other than to get you on the ship. But once you're on board (in the scene), you find that the ship doesn't need it to sail. In fact, it's dead weight.

Bridges, on the other hand, are permanent. In fiction, they should be functional (impart information, get the reader from one place to another without leaving him hanging in space, act as a stepping stone from a lesser conflict to a greater one) and they should be short. And all the other rules of good writing apply, of which there's only one and that's don't be boring.

Upon further reflection, I decided that I had actually converted what was initially a gangplank into an elaborate suspension bridge. And the scene on the other end was in permanent dry dock.

So the next time you finish a scene, take a good look at how you got into it. Is it a doorway that whisks you right into the middle of things? It is a bridge that lets you step gently but swiftly from one conflict to the next? Or is it a gangplank that can safely be dumped once it's no longer needed?

(*novelist, editor, and former war correspondent Rafe Steinberg. The year was 1947, the class was a fiction seminar at Harvard, and the teacher was poet John Ciardi.)


The ledge hung over a space wild and fathomless, and he no longer had wings. The threads that bound him to the life he had known had fallen short of this windswept place. Without them, he did not remember the way back.

And what of the door?

He slid his hand along the gleaming gold again. He knew then, without knowing how, that here he stood on the cusp of time, a place where past and present and future cast mingled shadows—the threshold of what had been and what was yet to come. And the door, with the indifference and utter patience of the inanimate, waited for the circle to be joined.

(from The Knife-Giver, ch. 25 "The Shadowed Threshold")