The Saga of the Hook-less Beginning
Since many of us New Kids seem to be dealing with revisions this week, I thought I'd throw my experience out there to commiserate. Like many others, I have always struggled with the beginning of my books. Where's the best place to start the story? What will be the most interesting? Where do I start in order to get across information that is essential and yet hook the reader so that they'll keep reading?
Ah, it seems like I have struggled with these questions foreevveerrr. Or, to be more accurate, I've struggled with them since I began writing novel-length fiction. My current (mostly finished except the beginning) novel has been giving me problems for years. When I was in graduate school, this particular novel was to be my thesis, and I must have gone through six versions of just the first 3 chapters. Once, I even had the idea to write the whole novel through the POV of a character wholly unrelated to the events of the story. She was going to be a narrator who was physically present and interviewing all the characters in the novel about what had taken place many years ago (the actual plot of the story). I thought it would work as long as I could figure out a way to integrate her into the story line so that she wasn't just a narrator device. I thought it would give the story a more literary flair. I wrote a good thirty to forty pages and sent them off to my advisor, only to be told over coffee that it just didn't work. Specifically, the narrator just didn't fit in the story. So back to the drawing board it was for me.
Eventually, I went with a very conventional, straightforward narrative style for the submitted thesis. My advisor said she enjoyed it and it obviously passed the criteria for a fiction thesis, because I got the degree.
Unfortunately, when I started submitting the novel to publishing professionals, the beginning continued to plague me. My query letter got me through some doors, but the pages were being rejected. So I revised. And revised. And finally started getting requests for partials and fulls from the opening pages. Hurray! I'd made it past the next hurdle. Still, my full requests were going nowhere. I had a couple offers to re-read if I made some changes (all very general), so I tried to revise. But I was still unhappy with the beginning. It wasn't fast enough for my taste--didn't hook the reader immediately. I went back through the beginnings of novels that I found memorable, and soon realized that the great majority of them were from thriller writers like Michael Crichton. Well, so I like action in the beginning (kinda like a guy, I guess :( ) . Was that the end of the world? No, but it wouldn't be easy in a Regency set story where the bad guys don't show up until chapter 4.
I told myself that it would just be too hard and too campy to make an action scene with real bad guys start the novel. Instead, I opted for a scene where the heroine runs away from the hero while on horseback, and tried to manufacture conflict and action--I thought I had enough to at least hook people. To some extent, I was right. Those beginning pages got the ms read, but there were still no offers and some were pinpointing the beginning as a main problem.
Then I decided to submit the beginning to be critiqued by a publishing professional who'd be attending my local SCBWI conference. The opening ended up being critiqued by Brian Farrey of Flux, who helped me a great deal. Lo and behold, his main problem with the pages were that there was no real action happening. He easily saw that I had tried to manufacture an action sequence, but in the end, it was just one character running away from another who hadn't done anything heinous to her.
Thus, my new resolution: to open the novel with a genuine action scene with genuine stakes for everyone involved. Will this be out of place in a young adult Regency? We'll see. But if it gets people to start a young adult Regency and keep reading to the end, well, then I'll know I succeeded.
Have you ever had this on-going problem? How do you write your beginnings so that they satisfy both your sensibilities as a reader and the market you're trying to sell to?
4 comments:
Beginnings... I share your struggle.
Someone at my critique meeting told me I probably need to write the first two chapters and throw them away. Then start where the story gets interesting. The meet. The action.
I have a novella that I'll be playing with with weekend to see if changing up the start makes a difference.
Great post.
My current faery guardian WIP is causing me grief with the opening. I've restarted umpteen times, but with a very similar beginning. My EP finally asked, why start here? What's the reason for this beginning? And I realized it was simply that I liked the way it started, but it wasn't really where the story began. I've put it aside for awhile to work on something else, to give me time to mull over exactly where the story truly starts.
I have a little bit different experience with writing beginnings, as I tend to write my beginning before the rest of the story happens in my head.
I do think that a little action at the beginning of any book is good. Appropriate for a YA, of course, but would be interesting anyway.
Bottom line for me, is do what feels natural to you. There is nothing more awkward than reading the beginning of a book where the author is obviously trying too hard, and not doing what s/he is really strong at.
Thanks gals! Good to know I'm not alone :)
And I agree, Rebecca. You don't want it to seem like you're trying too hard, but you still want it to be interesting. And I actually kind of did the same thing. I started writing the story before I had any of it plotted out and I'm sure that was half my problem. And then once I did write the whole story out and had it plotted to my satisfaction, I still wasn't really able to fix the beginning to my liking. Oh well. At this point, I really just want to finish it so I can submit it.
Back to work! :)
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