How Charlotte McConaghy successfully breaks writing rules in the opening of Wild Dark Shore

Like The God of the Woods, Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore occupies a few different genres: it’s literary fiction, signaled by its elevated writing style and close attention to character; it’s eco-fiction (sometimes labeled cli-fi) by virtue of its premise; and it has the life-and-death stakes and surprise twists of a thriller. The short opening chapter encapsulates the balance, especially the way McConaghy breaks conventional writing rules.

I think rule-breaking will only become more important in this new age of AI-generated content. Large language models (LLMs) are designed to follow rules, to supply the most expected word, the most conventional beat. To show you what I mean, let’s start by looking at an AI-generated version of Wild Dark Shore’s inciting incident: A mysterious woman washes ashore on a remote island; she has nearly drowned and is found by a man she doesn’t know. It’s a dramatic premise, with life-and-death stakes.

Here’s what the AI tool delivered:

Technically, it’s quite accomplished and follows standard writing craft advice. The passage uses deep POV to show us what it feels like to drown via specific details and strong verbs. It even signals a theme—the cruel indifference of nature—in the final sentence. But the writing is generic and predictable, and the theme is too.

So what does McConaghy do that’s so different? Here’s the entire short first chapter, which is titled with the POV character’s name, Rowan:

These sentences wake us up, surprise us, and echo with layers of metaphorical and thematic meaning that prepare us for the complexity of the story she wants to tell. Let’s walk through the passage slowly now to see how McConaghy achieves these effects and which writing rules she breaks.

The AI-written passage dramatizes the drowning itself—the character kicks and fights, then gives up. The focus is on the external action, and the immediate tension centers on the question of whether the character will live or die, the highest of high stakes. The passage uses seventy words to describe the drowning.

McConaghy, in contrast, uses three, condensing all of the energy of the drowning into a phrase at the end of her first sentence: “as I drown.” She lets the single strong verb carry the force of what’s happening and uses tense to carry the drama. Rowan is drowning, on the precipice between life and death—all of the fighting, kicking, resignation is compressed into the one word “drown.” The drama of this scene, McConaghy is signaling to us, is not located in the high-stakes drowning but in something else altogether.

The first clause of the sentence, “I have hated my mother for most of my life,” may give us a hint. It is an arresting statement, perhaps even shocking. We are in the ocean with Rowan, but we are also being pulled deep inside her mind, perhaps seeing her most significant inner wound. After the surprise of the first clause, McConaghy uses “but” as a hinge to bend the sentence in an entirely new direction, from backstory to frontstory: “but it is her face I see as I drown.” She ends the sentence with that powerful word “drown” and follows it with a scene break, giving the word extra time and white space to resonate.

That first sentence offers surprise, but it also opens up a rich story question about Rowan’s past: Why does she hate her mother? While the frontstory question—will Rowan drown?—might seem to be more gripping, it’s answered right away. (And readers who start the book having read the book description know the answer too.) So McConaghy provides us with a second question we can carry forward into the book, a story within a story. Note that the AI passage, on the other hand, provides absolutely no clues about the past of either character in the scene—they are seemingly blank slates.

We’ve already touched on exceptions to the show, don’t tell rule in my post on worldbuilding in Death of the Author, and the first chapter of Wild Dark Shore gives us another one. McConaghy doesn’t begin with a prologue that takes us back to Rowan’s childhood, showing us why she hates her mother. Instead she compresses the emotion into a telling beat that she attaches to the high-stakes action she shows. This technique is one to remember for any kind of backstory material you need to introduce. Condense the material down to its essence—an emotion or an effect on your POV character—and announce it early in your book, saving the more detailed exploration for much later. (In the case of Wild Dark Shore, we don’t find out until chapter fifty-five why Rowan hates her mother.)

Moving forward to the “waking” sections of these passages, we can see that the AI-written version is doing a lot more showing than McConaghy’s. Notice all of the verbs: pain shoots; water forces; the woman coughs, turns, breathes, opens her eyes, sits up, stares. The man kneels, watches. By contrast, the man in McConaghy’s scene does nothing, and the woman, Rowan, does one thing: she sees. All other verbs in that scene are used to tell us what’s happening inside Rowan’s mind rather than show us what’s happening on this remote beach.

I’ll say more about that telling in the next section, but let’s focus for a minute on the man. The AI-written passage shows the man in action first, as the “dark shape” cutting through the water. We get three further details about the man: his hair is dripping wet, his eyes are the color of the ocean, and his expression is unreadable. The first two details are doing some work in the passage: The wet hair confirms that the man was the “dark shape” and that he is responsible for rescuing the woman. And the eye color provides a metaphorical link to the “indifferent” ocean, which may connect to the theme. However, neither of these details tells us anything about the man himself, nor do his words since he “says nothing.” Even when the AI passage shows us a glimpse of his face, it is literally unreadable.

McConaghy, on the other hand, never shows us the man’s face directly. The details we get are deeply filtered—told—through Rowan’s hazy consciousness. The man’s features are first positioned as not her mother’s features before we are told what they are: “rough and wind-bitten and scratchy.” Unlike the AI-chosen details, these details hint at a past. This is a man who has spent years outside in rough weather, and he’s perhaps a man who has stopped paying attention to his appearance.

Both showing and telling have their uses. Choosing one or the other might be less important than ensuring whatever you are showing or telling has heft and meaning and matters for your characters and your story.

After providing the details about the man’s face, McConaghy gives us this sentence: “It is what I’m looking at when the sudden arrival of pain overcomes me, and I know the image of him will forever be as one with this pain.” As a copyeditor, my radar always pings when I see a vague pronoun like it—could it be replaced with something sharper, more concrete and specific? In this case, a renaming of face or features? Likewise, I will often suggest cutting a word like looking since if we are in deep point of view, as we are here, readers already know the narrator is doing the looking.

Here’s what a trimmed version of the sentence would look like: When the sudden arrival of pain overcomes me, I know the image of him will forever be as one with this pain. Why didn’t McConaghy make this edit? What work do those seemingly trimmable words do?

First, the original version keeps us focused on the face, which is the referent of both “it” and “what.” Second, the original hammers home that we are in present tense by including three extra verbs when compared to the trimmed version: “is,” “am,” and “look,” in gerund form. Third, the sentence stretches out the moment so we almost viscerally experience the brief pause between the narrator seeing the face and feeling the pain. It takes a few seconds more to read “It is what I’m looking at” than to read the single word “when.”

But perhaps the most interesting verb structure in the sentence is “will forever be,” which reaches into the future. Only at this point, after the near drowning is over, does McConaghy give us a few details about what Rowan experienced: “Whenever I see this face I will remember the burning sting of being dragged upon rocks and flayed open, left raw, I will feel the bursting pressure in my chest; the sensation will be so vivid it will be like it’s happening all over again.” The verbs that viscerally describe the narrator’s physical sensations are in gerund form as adjectives (“burning,” “bursting,” “drowning”) or in past tense (“dragged,” “flayed”) and attached to verb constructions that pull us forward into the future, into the story to come: “Whenever I see . . . I will remember . . . I will feel . . . the sensation will be so vivid . . .” (my emphasis).

Before you cut what seems like a spare word for the sake of economy, consider what work it’s doing, rhythmically, thematically, or temporally. A single word might stretch a beat, hint at a theme, or draw our attention to the present, past, or future. (This is an especially important reminder for us copyeditors!)

While the AI passage does hint at one theme in the reference to the “indifferent” ocean, it’s an obvious one—humans versus nature—and doesn’t provoke much curiosity. McConaghy, by contrast, shows us that she’s going to be exploring the two dualities that are perhaps most core to the human experience: love and hate, and life and death. Nature is there too, of course, but it’s treated as a given. (As we’ll see in my post on the structure of the novel, she uses nature as just one of many forces that drive her plot.) Through her language and imagery, she conveys that the lines between these dualities are perhaps not as clear as we think.

The scene opens with a hate the narrator can’t escape, grounded in the face of her mother. The scene closes with a pain the narrator can’t escape, grounded in the face of this “wind-bitten” man. His face is “a return”—to the pain, but also to that earlier hate? Yet before there was hatred for her mother, was there also love—the helpless, inevitable love of a child for a parent? Does the last phrase of the scene, the sentence fragment “A drowning,” hint that Rowan will find love too with this man?

Notice, too, the phrase “wake from drowning” in the middle of the passage. A person can wake from a near-drowning and be alive, but to “wake from drowning” implies awakening into an afterlife following a death. The line between life and death might be hazier than we expect in this novel, especially when we move to the realm of psychology, feeling, and metaphor.

Stylistically, McConaghy keeps the passage anchored to the image of the face, making that noun the subject or antecedent of almost every sentence. By the end of the brief chapter, the face is a complex metaphor, connected to both life (“a return”) and death (“a drowning”), and to both love (“forever be as one,” “bursting pressure in my chest”) and hate (the initial image of her mother’s face). The AI passage shows us an unreadable face, but McConaghy’s passage tells us about a face that is almost freighted with too much meaning.

We’re not sure what kind of story we are going to get when we turn the page, but we know that it is going to involve two characters with complex pasts who are going to confront the biggest transitions and emotions we can experience as humans: life and death, love and hate. McConaghy accomplishes all of this in just 118 words. And in those 118 words she deliberately breaks a number of conventional writing rules, de-emphasizing her high-stakes hook, telling rather than showing, complicating rather than simplifying, and foregrounding multiple complex themes. The AI-written passage follows the conventional rules, but ultimately says very little.

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