Hi everyone–
You may know that i’m leaving for RT this week. One of the workshops i’m going to be giving is called Conquering the Premature Beginning, Saggy Middle and Flat End! Every writer is challenged by at least one of those three parts! LOL At RT, i’m going to talk about endings. I love writing the ends of books. But actually, my biggest challenge is always the beginning. Getting the start right is so important — and so demanding.
It’s not that I have difficulty deciding where to start the book. That’s usually easy. You start right before a major event — generally where the hero meets the heroine or, in my case, the other hero. Only once did I move the opening of a book. In Deceptive Attraction, a critique partner suggested I show my soccer star playing soccer at the open rather than walking into the bar where he meets the other hero. Bingo. Great idea. I could show him being a superstar and hiding the fact that he’s gay all in one scene. (Thank you Sharon Hamilton for that great idea.)
What I often work and rework in the beginning is how to show the maximum amount about the central character’s problem on the first page. And the key word here is SHOW. No telling allowed. I almost always open my books with dialogue. It’s my thing. So what opening line, and paragraph, and first page shows the reader the character’s problem and makes them want to know more?
It’s even better if i can combine dialogue with some kind of interesting action. Right now, i’m writing the third of my series The Aloysius Tales. The book is called Cataclysmic Shift and it’s about witches. The book opens in the middle of a battle scene between the good witch and the bad witches. Something terrible happens. We learn who the enemies are and what the problem is while the battle rages.
Occasionally, you know where to start to show your main character’s problem, but there’s something the reader needs to know first. Maybe they need to understand that the problem on the first page is not the only problem. There;s a bigger threat. Or maybe, as in the case of Cataclysmic Shift, they need to know that the first point-of-view character is not the main character. That’s when a prologue may be called for.
A reader decides if they want to keep reading the book in the first page to three pages. That’s all we author’s have. As a reader, what kinds of book openings are your faves? What’s guaranteed to make you keep reading? What don’t you like at the beginning?
Thanks so much fro coming by. Stop back. I’ll be reporting in from RT. : )