Try this: take your opening scene, maybe an interaction between your MC and a small group of his students preparing for this mathematics competition.... whatever it is you're imagining. Work in the background info you just told us and allow your characters to show it to us. Maybe have a more senior student say something like, "I was on that team in '28. We were this close to making it to the finals. If I hadn't bungled that quadratic relation.... what a stupid mistake!" It can take a little longer to work in the info that is important, and makes you decide what is truly truly important because too much background makes your characters sound like info-spewing robots, but the effect is much improved, in my estimation.

Still no hook here for me. Closer, though.

Jayson Merryfield

Surabaya, the Asian city strewn across seven mountains rising from the sea.
I came here from Canada seeking an exotic port city only to find a rigid human system of automata, seeking the curves of a Picasso only to find a lifeless blank piece of graph paper. The students could no more see their hilltops as mathematical surfaces to be integrated than they could envision themselves escaping the class system that treated them like papers to be filed in drawers.

This opening isn’t great and it is stylistically idiosyncratic not to mention grammatically incorrect, but it communicates the setting without a list, suggests a conflict, sets up for a theme about math, and describes the social structure...

Being a lover of all things mathematical, I just hate to see a story about mathematics get passed by.

Well, first, 'Dangerous Education' is an intruiging title.

And Bill said well much of what I feel.

I think you have a similar challenge to the one I faced some while ago, able to write clear technical reports, feeding information in a structured sequential fashion. While this is a style that works in business, it's ... well, boring in fiction. Fiction writers seem to follow the drama, the action -- or with your mountains, as Bill suggested, the beauty.

I speak as a fool, trying to learn myself, but maybe you could try this: tell us what the POV character sees, thinks, feels - but not what he knows.

Maybe, 'It was an uncomfortable hard seat, high in the bowl. I cursed the wind as it whipped over our mountain top and made my eyes water. I could barely see the students parading excitedly in the stadium far below me. Why would anyone build a university on a mountain top, I wondered - and why had I come here from my beloved Canada?'

Maybe at this point someone sitting nearby could interrupt his thoughts with a conversation about whether they'll win it for the third time, and he could correct their English thereby feeding in that he teaches English instead of telling us.

Or something like; it's your story of course.

Part of the problem is this. I want to lull the reader into a false sense of security. I want the reader to think, gee, this country has a really great government, low crime, eager young students. Then gradually insert in the background things that make the reader uneasy.

There is a movie (Wait Until Dark???) directed by Nicholas Roag that seems to be an almost idelic story of a family on vacation in Venice. But in the background, we see police fishing bodies out of canals, a headline about a serial killer on the loose -- all in the background, while the foreground is peaceful and serene. Then, WHAM!, you get hit up aside the head with a brick.

Maybe, replace this....

quote:

---

“Kevin, your English is perfect, as usual. But you didn’t answer my question.”
“Sir, I regret my mind was on other things. In one hour, I take part in the International Mathematics Competition.”
A barely perceptible stir passed through the class.

---

...with this...

quote:

---

"Kevin, your english is perfect, as usual, but you didn't answer my question. Perhaps if your mind was on the task at hand and not the Mathematics competition, you would have answered me correctly."
A stir passed through the class, hearing me mention the competition.
"I apologize, sir. It is in an hour and... I admit, I am a little distracted."

---

This is getting much better. Each pass polishes a fair bit of the grime off, and I'm starting to see some gleam shine through.

The math competition isn't for me a hook because while I have an affection for math I can't imagine how a math competition could be exciting to read about.

Why is the math competition important? It will tell a lot about the country if it's not just 'we want to win and show the world how great we are' and is instead 'we have to win or my family will starve.' If this is already your idea, maybe show that these students are really nervous, more so than would be normal. We need to see something minor that's off or hints of something being wrong to draw us in.

Perhaps something closer to:

quote:

---

“Kevin, tell us something about the American system of government,” I asked, trying to get my English as a Foreign Language class focused.

Kevin jerked and looked up at me. “America is a very powerful government. It is the richest government on earth. Someday, I would like to go to America.”

“Kevin, your English is perfect, as usual. But you didn’t answer my question.”

“Sir, my regrets. My mind was on other things. In one hour, I take part in the International Mathematics Competition.”

A nervous stir passed through the class.

---

Or perhaps have the teacher ask him to describe his government instead of America's government, and he spouts off a short description of the city or university's location.

I'm amazed at how complaisant I was about my writing before I came here.

Sorkin would begin with a character, give us a reason to like that character, and show us that that character was in conflict and trying to do something about it. He would withhold the nature of the conflict for a later scene. Character always comes first, but the character must be a) likable and b) active.

Wolfie, good luck with the "y". Chip Delany was sitting in my living room when he opened a package from his publisher which contained the book Driftglass. His name on the cover was spelled Delaney.

Why the tears, though? That threw me. Threw me a big curveball. I never pictured Kevin as a big weeper in the previous revision's we've read. I enjoyed the narrators response to him, allowing his student an opportunity to save face (spotlight on the local culture) and telling us about the pollution (spotlight on world-building).

The description of America is a little generic, though - it doesn't hint to a future setting at all. Not even the pollution does that, as some chinese cities are horribly polluted today. I'm also not quite getting the hook here yet. It's there, faintly, for anyone interested in a foreign language teacher, or crying boys I suppose. I just don't know that, where you've chosen to start the story, there is a good way to hook us in the first 13. You're starting a slight bit distant from the central issue of the story. The characters are going to have to be your hook, and this gets us closer to them.

If you can answer some of this in the next page that follows, I'd say you might have got it down.

quote:

---

Perhaps Kevin was overly nervous about the International Math Competition coming up in an hour. I offered him a chance to save face.

---

The Aaron Sorkin moment for me here was when I asked: who is hurting? The answer was: Kevin. If he does not win the competition, his whole nation will loose face. But he has such an inflated opinion of America that he has trouble imagining beating an American.

To allow him to loose control in a classroom, I had to make him younger, thus the change from college to high school.

Is he really under that much pressure? Think about the high suicide rate among students in many countries that have very strict educational systems.

I think I've fiddled with the opening as much as is good for me. This entry into the story is certainly better than the one I started with. It has made the next two or three scenes easier to write. I'll let you all know when the story is finished.