Sweating the Opening

Work is progressing on my first book.

I decided to write the first chapter or at least he beginning of the first chapter and then tweak it mercilessly. This will serve two purposes.

First it will (hopefully) provide an attention grabbing first page and second set the tone of the book for the following chapters. Looking back on the work so far I believe the former goal has progressed while the latter may require more careful work to formulate the tone.

All books need to have an attention grabbing first page. Thus makes sense when you think about the readers. Unless you draw them in early you could bore them. If this happens in the bookstore they will put your book back on the rack. If this happens after they buy the book the reader might put the book on the shelf to gather dust forever. The best thing you can hope for is if your book is re-gifted.

For the beginning writer there is a more important reason to write an attention grabbing first page and a killer first sentence. To get published.

Think about it. You spend a year or more of your life sweating over each page. Your characters become real to you. You laugh and cry with them. You rewrite all of your chapters a number of times honing your story. Your blood, sweat and tears are contained within those pages. This is your masterpiece, the next great American novel.

Then you send it off to a publisher and start the waiting game. The publisher has no idea of your brilliance and to make matters worse is understaffed. They want to find the next promising author but all they see is a big stack of manuscripts. Someone has to through them all. Something has to make your book stand out.

Reading articles and blogs about this process you find out that the first hurdle is to get the reviewer to read past the first sentence and then the first page. Some books do not get past the first sentence and many not get read further than the first page. So it pays to really hone in the first sentences of your story. Sweat every detail. Grab the reader’s attention.

You could try to write an emotional first sentence, paragraph, and page about a woman staring out a picture window weeping. She is standing there thinking about her life and her situation to set some context for your story. She could reminisce about her cold husband, how he has treated her and the kids, and how he cheated on her many times. She could lament about how she gave up the best years of her life for him and what is left for her now that she is older. Then she has a glass of wine and falls asleep on the couch.

Or you could have her jumping through that picture window and have her run into the woods being chased by her knife wielding, jealousy enraged, black belted, husband. This is the exact same guy as above but he is reacting like this because she went to lunch with a male friend from work and he spotted them laughing together at Burger King. Luckily for her when he finally catches her she is a professional kick boxer. Or maybe a mountain lion jumps him. Or maybe an alien beast.

Maybe I over did it. But can you see what I am driving at? Which story draws you in faster? Which one would you like to read if you are having trouble sleeping?

So to start my story I wrote three scenes and about 2,500 words. I then proceeded to submit my work to anyone who would read it including an online writer’s web site. So far I have revised this beginning four times and now it is down to 1,600 words. That is another thing about writing. Good revisioning usually means less words. In effective writing less is more. So even if you have enough words to qualify your work as a book, probably you do not really have them.

But even now I am not done yet. I have another group of writers I meet with locally who are looking at my opening. They are all better writers than me so they will have even more suggestions. Now we are at five revisions. At some point the revisions become somewhat pointless. But I am not quite there yet.

My book desperately needs a good opening. My protagonist almost dies twice in the first 500 words. I have to cross my fingers this is attention grabbing enough.

More to come.