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she-posts-nerdy-stuff · 22 days ago

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Six of Crows' Chapter One Breaks All The Rules (and it should)

Tags - @thestarscanalwayslookatus @ladyartichokie @torrell-reads @glassesgirlies

Before I begin I want to preface this with a reminder that there are no actual rules that a writer or author is required to follow in the construction of an opening chapter, and what I refer to as ‘rules’ in the title and in this essay is more so just the most typical broad strokes that a) writers are expected to cover in their opening chapter and b) readers have down to naturally expect in the opening chapters.

Anyway with that out of the way let’s chat, because the subversion of expectations in six of crows chapter 1 is done fantastically and I want to talk about it.

One of the classic things I’ve heard about advice for writing your opening chapter in my own writing journey has been that the first 5 characters introduced in your story should all be very important to the plot, and this is mostly about not overloading the reader with a bunch of names that they don’t actually need to remember or care about and starting with an enticing pace to the story. If we disregard the offhand mentions of Joost’s unnamed mother, his friend Peter, and his unnamed siblings, the first 5 characters we are introduced to in Six of Crows are as follows:

Joost Van Poel, Anya, Councilman Hoede, Henk, and Rutger.

All of these characters will be reported dead or close to it before the end of chapter three: Anya’s body is found washed up in the harbour, Hoede has been removed to the country with his family in the state of permanent waiting that will lead him to death, Henk and Rutger are either in the boathouse dying or have already died and been removed, and Joost dies in the boathouse in chapter 3. This subversion of expectations sets up for the tone of the rest of the duology incredibly well, because this is an ongoing theme throughout with hints that look like foreshadowing being subverted for something else that was hidden deeper in the foreshadowing being the real plot (I wrote one of my first long analysis posts on this, it’s called She’s Treating Us Like Marks: Leigh Bardugo’s Use of Red Herrings in Six of Crows and I think it’s linked in my intro post but if it isn’t then I can tag anyone who’s interested). The impact this has on the reader to subvert their expectations is particularly interesting, because as we read this chapter with no knowledge of what’s to come we immediately start to form opinions and biases about the characters that we subconsciously assume are going to impact our enjoyment of them and their story - I’ve seen a lot of people online making jokes about how ready they were to ship Joost and Anya, only to have them taken away from them so quickly. This also opens up some really interesting thoughts about Joost and Anya that I’ll get to in a minute, but this is exactly what that chapter is trying to do - and we know that because, despite how little we know about them, these are well-written characters. If chapter one had been condensed into a short prologue that featured an officer watching a Grisha being forced to take parem and immediately taking some kind of possession over the minds of the people in the room and all of them presumably dying then, yes, it would be intriguing. But we as the reader wouldn’t have felt nearly the kind of loss, nor been intrigued by the wrong-footedness of the experience, in that the way we are, because ultimately what’s so ingeniously brilliant about this chapter is that Bardugo makes us care. I can’t know the word count, but on the audiobook chapter one is 26 minutes long. In 26 minutes, Bardugo introduces us to brand new characters, fleshes them out, gives them drives, goals, personalities, layers and dimensions, and then kills them. And you care.

You care because you know that Joost is new to the stadwatch and desperate to prove himself but isn’t enjoying his job as much as he thought he would, because you know that he used to be picked on by his brothers and now he’s being picked on by Henk and Rutger in a similar way, because you know that he feels diminished by even his own mother, because you know that he’s got a growing crush on Anya and is young and idealistic, already imagining marriage with a girl he hadn’t yet asked on a date or ever made laugh, because you know that his friend is named Peter and they talk about crushes together, because you know that he doesn’t come from the upper class of this society you’re just being introduced to for the first time but that he hopes to win the favour of its higher-ups to further himself in life, you know that his love language is gift giving and he constantly spends the little money he earns on presents for Anya, you know that his drive is justice but that he fails to see the flaws in the system because it isn’t one that’s hurt him and you therefore begin to understand the flaws of his character and see how his relationship with Anya, who has been hurt by the system, could stand to help him learn and grow. You care because he feels real. In a single chapter, we learn more about Joost than we even realise until we actually think about it for long enough.

And you can apply all these same thoughts to Anya, a character who’s POV were never given and whose appearance in the book is briefer:

Anya was a naive, younger girl tricked by the system into selling herself into slavery without knowing what she was doing, a woman who had been forced by circumstance to remove herself from her past and yet also a whimsical, happy person whose favourite gift from Joost was a cheap tourist map of Kerch where there were monsters drawn in the water and the winds were “depicted as fat-cheeked men”, she smiles easily but laughs rarely, she has been hurt by Hoede, she has a strong sense of justice, protecting people who cannot protect themselves is of high importance to her (see the kitchen boy whose thumb is ordered to be cut off by Hoede) but being a Healer instead of a Heartrender made it hard for her to stand up to anyone until she had parem.

And although you could do it in less detail, we arguably know a lot about Hoede and a little about Henk and Rutger too. If you look at it just in this condensed scale, as a group of characters to get to know just about as well as you can do so organically within the timeframe and then have them snatched away from, chapter one is a warning: I made you care and then took them away, you know I won’t hesitate to do that again. And we care way more about the crows, so that makes our fear of losing them the way we lost the early characters way higher and adds, even if its subconscious, to the tension carried throughout the high stakes of the duology.

The other important character we meet in chapter one is Emil Retvenko, whose name is not mentioned after his meeting with Joost until the opening chapter of Crooked Kingdom. Joost’s conversation with Retvenko is a massive part of how we get to see his flaws; despite having openly stated that many Grisha unknowingly sold themselves into slavery at the end of the Ravkan civil war and that there are rumours Retvenko fought for the losing side of the Civil War, Joost is judgemental of him and tells him that the price of the broken window will be added to his indenture.

I could talk a lot more about Retvenko but then we’d be venturing into Crooked Kingdom chapter one territory more than Six of Crows so instead I’m gonna turn back to Joost and the other key moment that we get to see his character flaws on display and that is when he’s watching Anya being forced to take parem and the guard being ordered by Hoede to cut the boy’s thumb off. I’m just gonna transcribe the moment from my audiobook for you here:

I should stop this, Joost thought, I should find a way to protect her - both of them. But what then? He was a nobody. New to the stadwatch, new to this house. Besides, he discovered in a burst of shame, I want to keep my job.

This tells us not only so much about Joost, but so much about the world he lives in - and I’m going to use this to segue into my next point: the opening chapter of six of crows also subverts our expectations in how it deals with the setting.

Another key aspect of the opening chapter is introducing readers to the world, whether it’s a second world fantasy or contemporary fiction we have to undertake where the book takes place and why that’s important. Whilst it’s true that many stories can be told anywhere, and we see it in folk and fairy tales that have many renditions throughout different cultures, there are always key differences influenced by the setting that they take place in. Our main settings in Six of Crows are the Barrel and the Ice Court, with our “home” setting being the Barrel as where our characters live and where they aim to return to after the journey’s end in a typical story structure (home, call to action, hero’s journey, climax, aftermath, return home and deal with what’s changed).

The Barrel is mentioned once in this chapter, when Joost says that he imagined being in the stadwatch would mean chasing down criminals in the Barrel rather than wandering around a rich merchant’s house grounds, but what we are actually initially introduced to is one of the mansions from the Geldin District. Joost is most likely middle class, based on context clues, and we learn about the upper class section of Ketterdam through the eyes of a boy who wishes to be part of it (he likes to look through the windows and pretend that it’s his house, but actually he’s only even been inside a couple of times). We learn about the classism of this society very quickly by seeing it from the inside out, and then being thrown directly into the parley and the very different world of our main characters in Inej’s POV in chapter 2. This is really cleverly done, because despite the sudden changes between both setting and cast of characters, we go into the parley with an absolute wealth of information about Ketterdam that we wouldn’t have otherwise possessed.

I’m gonna stop here bc I’m tired and it’s getting late but I would like to talk about the worldbuilding another time, it’s just that if I get into that here and now then I want to get into it within specific different contexts because I read shadow and bone after I read six of crows and although I loved the way the worldbuilding was set up in Soc there’s an interesting discussion to be had there because I’ve heard others say that they didn’t feel they would have understood the worldbuilding without the prior knowledge from s&b and I just think that if I start talking about that now that I’ll never stop so that can be for another time if anyone would like to read it.

Thanks so much for reading these ramblings, I hope they were interesting!! <3

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