Hello everyone! Welcome to some occasional in-depth writing advice. I thought I’d start at the beginning (a very good place to start) with how to open your novel. It can be a real pain to start writing. The blank page fear is at an all time high and your delicate, perfect idea is about to be exposed to the elements. And what’s worse, the opening of a book is SO IMPORTANT. We all know that. We can all imagine a reader picking up a book, leafing through it, reading the first page, being gripped, deciding whether or not to continue…
The thing is, this places a lot of pressure on the first page. YES OBVIOUSLY it has to be good, obviously we have to work on it, but it’s very easy to get carried away and start in the wrong place. I see three main mistakes with rookie writers’ first pages, and they’re all about ordering and placement.
1. Starting too early. This is a classic. Make sure that, when you start any story, something is actually happening, and that something is meaningful to your protagonist. Unless you have an incredibly compelling reason to ignore this advice,, do not start your novel with someone waking up and going about their morning routine. No! I’m sorry but that is probably boring! Yes yes you want to establish character - establish character through action! If you need to, write out their morning routine for your own benefit and then cut it.
2. Starting too late. This is something I personally struggle with. I really internalised the first piece of advice and kept starting my stories way too late - already too far into the meat of it. If you start the book with your character already bravely hacking away at a dragon, there’s really nowhere for the story to go (ASSUMING it’s a story about bravery and vanquishing dragons, of course. If it’s a story about a knight finding his soft side and turning to pacifism, this would be a great opening).
To understand this - consider Harry Potter. What is Harry Potter about? A boy wizard learning spells and making friends and battling evil at Hogwarts! Cool, and when do we GO to Hogwarts? NOT UNTIL A THIRD OF THE WAY THROUGH. We don’t start there. None of the books do! We start in the ordinary world, demonstrating how tedious it is to be a boy who is not a wizard and has to live in a little cupboard. Now, things still happen - Harry magically lets a snake out of a cage at the zoo - but they are NOT the main business of the premise. It took me ages and ages to get my head around, but that image you have in your head of what your book is about - a girl runs around Victorian London solving crimes, a boy slays dragons, a non-binary knight opens a dragon sanctuary - that is NOT where you start. That image is what’s happening AT THE BEGINNING OF ACT 2 (just after what I’m calling The First Decision, for this model). That’s when we get to what Blake Snyder calls “The Promise of the Premise”. This opening is for showing a character in their ordinary world.
3. Going too fast. This is closely related to my last point. Some novels start in the right place and then crack through to the inciting incident immediately. We need to sloooooooow down and take our time here. This is where the plot beats should fall in a standard length book -
Setup - 0 words
Inciting Incident - 8,000 words
The First Decision - 20,000 words
The Midpoint - 40,000 words
The Second Decision - 60,000 words
The Finale - 70,000 words
The Resolution - 75,000 words
So you can see, we’re not getting onto the Hogwarts Express/resolving to solve the murder of our sister’s boyfriend/going to dragon slaying school/attempting to get seed capital for our dragon sanctuary for another 20,000 words. We’re not even going to be told we’re a wizard/realise our sister’s boyfriend has died in mysterious circumstances/have our house burned to a crisp by a dragon/meet a cute dragon in the woods and realise they’re misunderstood for another 8,000 words!. We need the time to set up the status quo before we show how it will change.
Essentially, stories are about CHANGE. They are specifically about a protagonist who will undergo an internal change as the result of an external struggle. That’s it, really. That’s all fiction. It doesn’t matter whether that external struggle is a killer death robot or a sexy farmhand who won’t sleep with you or you need to find a magic key or solve a murder. You have an adventure and as a result you change. And that’s why the setup is so important - it’s vital that we clearly see who this character is before they start changing.
If you’re a paid subscriber, post your first 500 words below and I’ll leave you some feedback x