It was a dark and stormy night….
That sounds like a great, scary opening for a book, doesn’t
it? Or maybe not. There are certain things that are so cliché,
they are almost guaranteed to send your work straight to the slush pile.
The first few sentences of your book can sometimes make or
break your chances of getting it published.
That is a lot of pressure on a few short sentences. My first bit of advice is to ignore what I
just said. Don’t get stuck writing and
rewriting your first sentence, or paragraph or page. Move forward, and then move forward some
more, and by this I mean to keep writing. Editing is the time when you can go back and
fix everything that is wrong with your manuscript. If you don’t write forward, you won’t have a
manuscript to fix.
Once you have completed your manuscript, go back to the beginning
and look at that first page with fresh eyes.
Some people like to let the manuscript sit and stew for a week before
they go back to edit it. Other people
can jump right in. Do what works for
you.
When editing the beginning of your novel, here are some things I
have learned along the way:
1. Start in the middle of the action. You want to hook the reader into your
story. Find a place that is exciting,
and begin there. The first book I ever
wrote will probably never be published or ever read by another human
being. It was bad, but it was a learning
experience. It taught me that
starting in the middle of the action can often mean deleting the first few completely
unnecessary pages (or in my case, chapters) in order to get to the point where
your book really should start. Look at
your manuscript with objective eyes, and find the true beginning.
2. Don’t start with piles of backstory. Let your reader get to know your protagonist
slowly. Seduce and entice them with
little snippets of information that make them want more. Backstory is important, but it doesn’t always
need to be shared. I find it very
helpful to answer a long list of questions about each of my characters before I
write my books. I want them to be firmly
established in my mind before a word goes on paper. That doesn’t mean I need to share that entire
backstory in my book. Some of that information has nothing at all
to do with my plot. And some of it is
personal – between my character and me.
Not everything has to be shared, and not everything has to be shared at the
very beginning. Keep your audience
guessing a little.
3. Don’t start with a dream, or your character
waking up from a dream. This is an
easy way to slip in backstory or foreshadowing, but it is also an easy way to
get your manuscript sent straight to the slush pile. It’s been overdone, so don’t use it. Also, don’t go through a long, exciting sequence
of events, and then later make your character find out that it was just a
dream. Not cool.
4. Watch for mistakes. One of my friends in college was trying to
get an internship in a very competitive field.
She wrote a wonderful essay, and asked me to look at it after she had
already sent it in. That was a horrible
thing to do to me. I had edited many
things for her in the past, and I wished she’d come to me sooner rather than
later. The essay was beautifully written
and very well researched, but she had a major grammatical error and a misspelled
word in the very first sentence. She
didn’t get the internship, even though she was extremely well qualified. If you try to send in a manuscript with
mistakes in the first sentence, the same thing will happen to you. You won’t get published. Typos and small mistakes can be forgiven, but
not if they are in your first paragraph (or even your first page). Be diligent.
5. Looking in a mirror. This is kind of the cheater’s way to
describe your character physically. Find
a better way to let your reader know she has flowing blonde hair, or he has
rock hard abs. Ducking under the crime scene tape was easier for me than it was for
Jack. He was more than a foot taller than me, and I was wearing my highest heels. I pulled my blonde hair into a pony tail,
slipped into a blue hazmat suit that matched my eyes, and pulled on some latex
gloves. “I’m ready to go.” See? I
just made that up. It took exactly two
minutes and no mirror was required.
6. Let them speak. Make sure you allow your characters to
talk. Dialogue is important. If you don’t see a lot of white space as you
scroll through your manuscript, that might indicate there is too much
narrative. This holds true from the
beginning, although be careful about starting your story with dialogue. This can be tricky. If your reader doesn’t know your character yet,
they might not care about what they have to say.
7. Introduce your characters, but not
formally. Can you remember some of
the writing you did as a child? My name is Joe. I have two brothers and one sister. I have a dog.
My best friend is Tommy. He is
nice. When you are introducing your
characters to your readers, don’t slip into third grade writing mode. You will not get a gold star.
I’ll stop at seven, since that is a lucky number, and today
is the day after St. Patrick’s Day. And a little luck wouldn’t hurt, especially if it was a dark
and stormy morning, with an icy rain so thick it covered the windows with a frosty
glaze….
That is a much better beginning than “a dark and stormy
night,” and it also happens to be true (from where I sit in Pennsylvania, at least). Good
luck and happy writing!
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