What is it with Dreams and Mirrors? – Clémentine Beauvais

It is a Tr. Un. Ackn., in in-the-know editorial and writerly circles, that One Does Not Start a Novel with A Character Awaking from a Dream, Or, with A Character Looking at Themselves in a Mirror.

No.

No.

Especially not YA fiction, perhaps the category whose agents, editors and writers I’ve heard most vocal about those two incipits. Of course, there are Justifiable Exceptions (e.g., your whole book is a mirror-maker re-living the same two hours in the morning, eternally), and of course, there are  precedents. But it’s among the most commonly given pieces of advice I’ve heard about Beginnings. No mirrors, no dreams. 

What’s striking is that, de facto, those two things are indeed exceedingly common beginnings picked by amateur writers. I’ve worked for three different publishers on the slushpile, and Dreams and Mirrors were truly a very disproportionately used incipit. This week again, I was asked to review two writing proposals for YA fiction that both start with a teenager looking at themselves (and describing themselves) in a mirror. 

Ironically, this girl isn't looking at herself in the mirror, but at you. HA!

More striking still, children, teenagers and adults that I meet on creative writing workshops also spontaneously produce texts that begin with Mirrors or Dreams – so we’re not just talking about would-be writers. It seems that this is some kind of storytelling reflex. My own stories from childhood and teenage years are full of such beginnings. I would even go as far as to say that the Dream/ waking up one was my default incipit.

But why? Few popular stories actually begin with either of those tropes. No fairy or folk tale that I know of does, unless you consider Snow White – which doesn’t technically begin with the Mirror mirror on the wall episode. No legend, no myth, apart from, arguably, Narcissus (Justifiable Exception, I’d call it). Classical novels? Anyone? in MG and YA, the trope is present, sure, but not omnipresent - nothing like what feels like the very large amount of unpublished texts that use those kinds of incipit.

Would qualify as Justifiable Exception.

For Dreams, films may be a culprit; I’m not talking about ones like Inception – again, Justifiable Exception – but about the myriad films that use dreams in the incipit to tell a bit about the backstory. Mirrors, for obvious reasons, are not as useful in a visual medium like film.

Saying that it's just a lazy habit picked up from other media is not, I think, the whole story. To me, behind those clichéd YA incipits lie much more interesting (I think) narrative reasons, which I believe are linked to at least three things. First, ironically, to the ‘show, don’t tell’ main approach in contemporary creative writing theory and practice. Second, to the dominance of the first-person or exclusive internal third-person narrative perspective, especially in YA fiction. Third, to a number of generic conventions of youth literature, especially the Bildungsroman-type ‘narrative of initiation’, which remain strong in that kind of fiction. 

I'll have a look at those in turn.

‘Show, don’t tell’

A person looking at themselves in a mirror, and a person awakening from a dream, from a narrative perspective, are actually fairly excellent ways of showing-not-telling in an incipit. They are both examples of indirect characterisation and of setting the stage, which is exactly what an incipit should do. 

Through the Mirror scene, you can present your character indirectly, and their challenges for the plot (‘John looked at himself in the big mirror. Same spotty, gangly teenager he’d seen the day before. And that wasn’t going to change anytime soon, at least not before pretty Eleanor had found herself a new boyfriend…’). With a Dream scene, you can easily give elements of backstory while leaving interpretive space for the reader (‘Footsteps in the mud… the monster was getting closer. John shivered. Again! This time, don’t take her, he implored. Please don’t… RING! 7 o’clock. John awoke with a start. A new day in boring old Yatown, Connecticut.’) 

'To be fair, if your incipits are as sh*t as that, you've got other things to worry about'

 

 

yeah yeah just an example

 I think people who have some literary sensibility are drawn to indirect characterisation and understand perfectly well what an incipit has to do. They could launch into direct characterisation and plot-setting (‘John was a man whose life was very boring…’) but they don’t – because they recognise that this is a terrible type of beginning. The reason why so many budding writers – why we all – hit upon those two solutions is that they are, well, fairly good solutions to show-not-tell at the early stages of a story. The issue, of course, is that they are overused, and have become a mark of cliché, amateurish writing – by no fault of the devices themselves, nor of the writers.

Puzzles of narrative perspective

The second aspect is the narrative perspective of much youth literature, which is, in contemporary times, quite often exclusively focused on one viewpoint. We have an I or a strong 3^rd-person internal narrator, and while that allows for plenty of sophisticated exploration of mental states and lots of interesting play with narrative (e.g. unreliable narration), it leaves very little breathing space for precisely the show-don’t-tell imperative detailed above. 

When you write from that viewpoint, you're drawn to all the strategies that allow for some distance to the focal character. Mirrors are such a strategy from a visual perspective, allowing for reflection – literally and figuratively. Dreams are another, because they happen both to and in the character. (Other devices include the character eavesdropping on a conversation about them, etc.; but those are more rarely incipits). 

which is why the Invisibility Cloak is a brilliant narrative device

So again, they are perfectly logical choices for a category of fiction with such narrative constraints. Their omnipresence in incipits says something about the narrative pact of the novels, too – that they will be mostly about the self, but with some interstices for the reader to make their own interpretations.

Bildungsroman: the static and the latent

Finally, we are writing in a category of literature that is still very faithful to its Bildungsroman roots, namely to the narrative of initiation (Roberta Trites would argue that YA fiction is indebted to the Entwicklungsroman, the tale of maturation, but we can leave that aside here). The Bildungsroman assumes at least one important aspect: change. We need to become aware, throughout the story, that the main character is evolving, most probably from a kind of innocence to a kind of experience, or from normality to exceptionality, or from ignorance to knowledge. 

This means that the incipit has the particularly arduous task of making us aware of a starting state which is both about stasis and about latent development. Namely, we must encounter a character who both has stable properties, and a potential for change. 

potential realised

Both Mirror and Dream beginnings are ideally suited to do that. Mirrors show us a character as they are (stasis), but the explanation is generally about how unsatisfactory it is (potential change); or, less ordinarily, the character might marvel at their beauty and amazingness, but we are quick to catch that this is probably some kind of tragic irony (potential change). Dreams show us a character first as they might change – the dream generally implies a state of instability, of anguish or of lost happiness, etc.; this, we are led to think, will be important for the main object of the quest. Yet, when the character wakes up, they are (generally) shown in the stability of their everyday life, and thus the static qualities are made evident.

Again, a perfectly understandable choice of incipit for a type of text intensely concerned with a journey of development.

HURRAH! LET'S ALL INCIPITS BE ABOUT MIRRORS AND DREAMS THEN!

No, of course I don’t mean at all to say, with all the above, that it’s a great idea to use Dreams and Mirrors just because they are narratively justified. These are good narrative reasons in the absolute sense, but literature is a mobile thing, which is also about context, contingency and convention. Those incipits have become clichés, and that’s an excellent literary reason not to use them unless you play with the convention. But it’s interesting to think about why they have become clichés. They actually get things done quite efficiently that do need to get done.

Plus, there are no rules. My new novel starts, It was a dark and stormy night, and John, awaking from a strange dream, looked at himself in the mirror...

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Clémentine Beauvais is a writer and literary translator. Her YA novels in English are Piglettes (Pushkin, 2017) and In Paris with You (trans. Sam Taylor, Faber, 2018).