How To Give Your Reader That "Here We Go!" Moment
On 'The Confessions of Frannie Langton', 'The Matrix' and Crossing the Threshold
In any good story, there is always a moment where the reader feels the adventure begin in earnest and they are tipped down the rabbit hole for good. This is the moment in the cinema where the audience thinks, “Ah! Buckle up. Here we go!”. It is the moment in a novel when the reader relaxes, they have committed to the book, and they know they are in deep now. This moment is sometimes referred to as “Crossing the Threshold”: when the protagonist moves from the “Ordinary World” of their everyday life and into the “Extraordinary World” of the story.
Here is an example from The Matrix:
Neo works at some dull office job by day and does a little hacking by night. This is his every day, his “Ordinary World”. By a strange twist of events, Neo ends up at a club with Trinity who then brings him to Morpheus. He is offered a red pill and a blue pill. He takes the red pill and discovers the reality of the Matrix (that humanity is being farmed by machines and everything he believes to be “real life” is effectively an illusion). He wakes up from this illusion in a gooey pod in a dystopian world. He is then transported to the Nebuchadnezzar, Morpheus’s flying ship. He has now entered the “Extraordinary World” of the movie and his mission to save humanity really gets going.
A Numbers Game
Fun side note: in the average-sized novel, this will be around pages 50-60, in the average movie, approximately minute 20. I invite you to play a fun (and nerdy) game the next time you’re watching something at home: pause the film at the “Crossing the Threshold” moment and note the running time. You’d be surprised how often it is in that 20-minute range. For fun, I just flipped to the moment the young heroine reaches Manderly for the first time in Rebecca. Page number? 68.
Crossing the Threshold
There are countless examples of the “Crossing the Threshold” moment: Wendy’s arrival in Neverland, Jane Eyre’s arrival at Mr Rochester’s home, and Charlie’s arrival at the Chocolate Factory. This moment does not have to be a physical change of setting. In a love story, this moment might be the point at which the would-be lovers start to develop feelings for each other. In The Secret History, I would argue that it is the moment Richard is asked to lunch by Bunny and is brought further into the clique when Henry comes to pick them up.
This is a special moment for the reader and it is one that, if done right, will create that sense of wonder and total immersion that we all crave from our stories.
The Confessions of Frannie Langton
Sara Collins performs this moment perfectly in her historical fiction novel The Confessions of Frannie Langton. At the beginning of the novel, Frannie is enslaved at Paradise sugar plantation in Jamaica. Over the course of the story, she becomes useful to the man that owns her and is taken with him to London.
Here is the moment she steps off the ship in West India Dock, London:
“I’d never seen my own breath before. Hanging off my lips, thick and white as the clouds. Just one of many things I could hardly credit. The rain on my face, for instance, light as feathers. English rain weighs nothing. It’s the air that’s heavy, and always had the seep of water in it… I stood there amid the dizzying clatter of hammers and scaffolds and borrows of bricks that were either crumbling out of buildings or being plastered into them, so it seemed to be a city building itself and eating itself at the same time.” Page 61-62
Collins’s prose is lyrical and thick with historical detail throughout her novel. Her heroine offers the reader a point of view on Georgian London that is at once intriguing and unique. However, there are two things she does that make this Crossing the Threshold scene so successful.
1. Contrast
Collins conveys Frannie’s amazement at seeing her own breath: “thick and white as the clouds.” She subtly contrasts the London rain, “light as feathers”, with that of the heavy, more tropical rains of Jamaica. This contrast continues throughout the passage. While the English rain “weighs nothing”, Frannie notes the heaviness of the air that, “always had the seep of water in it”. Collins likewise draws the reader’s attention to the movement and noise of the continual building up of the city as Frannie notes the “clatter of hammers and scaffolds”. The wonderful simile that London “seemed to be a city building and eating itself” gives both a sense of renewal and an uncomfortable cannibalistic quality. Frannie is very much not in Kansas anymore.
2. New Rules
As the chapter continues, Frannie takes her first steps through the streets of London. Here, she quickly becomes aware of a host of strange new realities, new rules for how this society and the people in it operate differently than those of the Paradise plantation. In Jamaica, her master is white but here his tanned skin makes him appear “brown” and weathered, his skin is so different to the other, paler white people of London:
“Langton was brown here, his skin cracked, like raging leather. And so many of them were poor. Whites toothless and dirty; whites fluttering, like sorrowful little flags, as they pissed into the street. Whites with skin grated raw, and pocked as an orange peel.” Page 63-63
Perhaps the starkest difference is the presence of poor white folk. White people that are in a worst physical condition than Frannie and certainly than the white people she has been accustomed to seeing in Jamaica. Here, whites can be “toothless”, “dirty” and “sorrowful”. They appear ill or “pocked” and they suffer the indignity of urinating in the street. At Paradise, the rule would be white skin = wealthy, healthy and high status. However, here in the new, “Extraordinary World” Frannie finds that this rule is not always true.
Collins’s use of contrast and the introduction of new ways of life is what signals to the reader that Frannie’s story is about to drastically mount in drama and excitement. We settle in, put aside our popcorn and think, “Here we go!”.
Creative Writing Exercise:
Write a scene in which a young person that grew up with their grandmother on a small chicken farm in the countryside, arrives at a grim pub in the heart of a busy city.
Or
Write a scene in which a person in their forties realises that they no longer love their spouse while the pair take a train ride together.
Signal to the reader that their life is about to change forever by using contrast and establishing the new rules by which this character must now live. The scene should be about 1000 words.
Or
Alternatively, you may already have a “crossing the threshold moment” in your novel that you would like to rework using these two techniques to help you.
I hope you have enjoyed this edition of Nudge. I would love to hear how your writing is getting along on Notes so do say, “hello” and feel free to ask questions!