Book Editing Advice, Book Marketing Tips

The Best Way to Start Your Story Type

It’s an oversimplification, but also very much a truism, to suggest that starting a story is difficult. That’s why we’ve devoted an entire four-part series to the challenge of how best to do it. In the last three installments (click here to read Part 1), we’ve discussed establishing momentum and avoiding exposition in the opening pages, and what to do and what to avoid in crafting the opening sentence. These tools are fundamental in capturing the reader from the beginning.

But you’re not just beginning a story. You’re beginning your story.

What does that mean? What’s the difference?

What I mean is that just because the opening chapter of a manuscript captures a reader doesn’t necessarily mean it sets up effectively the story to come. Just because a first-sentence hook is razor-sharp doesn’t mean it establishes the right tone. It’s entirely possible for an opening chapter to be simultaneously excellent and entirely wrong for the novel you’re writing. As a book editor, I’ve seen it happen many times.

So in this final installment in our series on the opening pages, we’re going to look at some of the pitfalls that can make even a well-written beginning an ineffective introduction to your manuscript.

[Missed the previous posts in this series? Start here.]

Setting Readers’ Expectations

The Hunger Games is well-regarded as a great contemporary work of young adult dystopian fiction. But suppose author Suzanne Collins had pitched it to publishers instead as a math textbook.

It’s an exciting and imaginative YA novel, sure. But it teaches you very little about long division. As a math textbook, it would be a near-instant rejection.

That’s a silly example, but it speaks to the point that if you sell readers one thing and deliver another, you’re likely to receive some negative reactions regardless of the actual quality of your writing. Recently, I edited a novel that presented a straightforward Victorian-era drama not only through the first chapter but in fact through the first several chapters. Readers invested in the grounded real-world drama were likely to find it jarring when the arrival of a supernatural being revealed a fantasy novel set primarily in a fantasy world. Yet readers anticipating a fantasy could well be turned away by a story that took an inordinate amount of time even to hint at its genre.

It’s not only about genre. A solemn opening chapter may not represent effectively a consistently lighthearted novel and vice versa. One of the goals of your opening pages is to set up the story to come. If your opening pages seem to set up an altogether different story, whether in genre, subject, style, or tone, then even if you hook your reader from the start, you may also be setting them up for disappointment down the line. They may even feel deceived—a turnoff for many readers, regardless of the quality of the writing.

Narrative Relevance

Sometimes genre and tone may be spot on, but the specific scene with which you open the manuscript proves unimportant to the story to come. Another manuscript I edited recently opened with a scene from the protagonist’s childhood about a treasure she found. The rest of the story was set during the protagonist’s present day, and the treasure never actually became relevant to the narrative or the character. Still another recent project highlighted a character who would never appear or be mentioned again.

It’s not even true only of fiction. I worked on a memoir that opened with a chess tournament. Chess was deeply relevant to the narrative, but this particular match and this particular tournament were not. In time the scene proved unnecessary.

The notion of this happening in time is important. Opening pages without narrative relevance can be difficult to spot in the moment for authors and readers. For readers, it’s impossible to determine whether a scene is important when you don’t yet know the nature of the story. For authors, the story changes so much during the writing process that what seemed important early in the process turns out not to be later on. A well-written scene is still going to capture readers, but a well-written scene also raises questions specific to that scene. The more time that passes without addressing those questions, the more dissatisfied readers will become. So an opening scene without narrative relevance creates significant problems down the road.

Point of View

Another novel I edited years ago had a different problem. While the vast majority of the novel was written primarily from a single point of view, the first six chapters presented six different points of view. The writing through all six early chapters was perfectly good, but by the end of them readers would have been thoroughly confused trying to determine what story, and whose story, they were actually reading.

In a novel or memoir—any story, really—point of view is a tool of focus. So a manuscript that begins with too many points of view—whether in multiple chapters or in a single chapter—is out of focus. That makes it more difficult to invest in a specific character, or even to know who the protagonist is meant to be. Readers are then left confused rather than compelled to explore the narrative to come.

So how do you ensure you set readers’ expectations, keep things relevant, and maintain a focused start to your novel? Here are some tips:

When you reach the end of the draft, go back and reread the beginning. Does it still fit the story you wound up writing?
Seek out a beta reader to read the first chapter alone. What impressions are they left with? An outsider’s perspective can help nail down what you’re communicating and how it differs from your intentions.
Does the first chapter reveal too much? Consider if any future plot points might be in any way spoiled by the content of the opening pages.

The more you know about your own manuscript, the better able you are to catch the ways in which your opening pages are or are not effective in introducing readers to the story you mean to tell. So go back, take your time, and ensure that the opening pages are not only compelling and well-written but also the right start for your work.

What’s the biggest change you’ve ever made to your opening pages after completing a draft? Let us know in the comments below!

Harrison Demchick came up in the world of small press publishing, working along the way on more than two dozen published novels and memoirs, several of which have been optioned for film. He is an award-winning, twice-optioned screenwriter, and the author of literary horror novel The Listeners. He’s part of The Writer’s Ally team as a developmental editor of fiction and memoir, for which he’s currently accepting new clients.

The Maze: How to Be Specifically Ambiguous in Fiction

Sometimes you want to add a little mystery for your readers, but are you being mysterious or just frustratingly vague? Harrison Demchick has written a fantastic piece for Writers Helping Writers that will point you in the right direction and make sure you find the right balance between specific detail and ambiguity. In this blog post titled “The Maze: How to Be Specifically Ambiguous in Fiction,” he explains how to be cryptic without being oblique in keeping your writing mysterious. Head on over to their blog and read it here!

One of the cornerstones of effective writing is specific detail. Specific detail is what grounds the action of a scene in a tangible reality. It’s how we enable readers to see our characters and settings—and not only see them, but also hear, smell, taste, and touch them. When you’re imprecise, you’re unengaging, and that’s where you lose readers.

In his article, Harrison answers questions such as: So how do we make that ambiguity compelling? How little information is too little? How much is too much? Harrison also addresses the writing maze, the writing elements of prophecy, authenticity and fortifying the walls of your writing.

Writers Helping Writers is focused on offering support, providing tools for writers, editors and teachers to empower and help them. Go check out his post and learn more about ambiguity in writing. Read here.

How to Write a Great First Sentence and Nail Your Opening

In the process of writing a novel or memoir—or anything, really—no single sentence is more outright intimidating than the first. It isn’t easy to figure out how to write a great first sentence.

You hear it in workshops, college classrooms, writer’s conferences, and how-to books, and for that matter in blog posts like this one written by book editors like me: The first sentence needs to hook the reader. If the first sentence doesn’t engage the reader, why bother with the second? There are millions and millions of other books out there. There are thousands and thousands of other submissions.

That’s a lot for any one sentence to live up to. It’s not difficult to understand why writers agonize over it. But learning how to write a great first sentence and nailing the hook doesn’t have to be scary. It certainly isn’t easy, but here in the third installment of our series on the opening pages, we’ll run through some ideas and concepts to help you determine what to do, and what not to do, to start off your story in just the right way.

[Missed the first article in this series? Click here to get caught up!]

Utilize Action Over Exposition

In the last couple of articles in this series, we talked about the importance of beginning a story with action rather than exposition. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the same applies to the opening sentence, because it applies for essentially the same reason: It’s easier to engage with the momentum of action than the inertia of expository background.

Action could be your protagonist’s hand getting caught in the door of her pick-up truck. It could be a rocket ship blasting off into space. It could be something as simple as sipping a cup of coffee. Utilized as a first sentence, any of these actions, big or small, provides readers a clear and well-defined visual detail that presents some level of narrative. It suggests the existence of subsequent action, which compels readers to move on to the next sentence.

This is even truer if the sentence includes or implies conflict. If your protagonist’s hand is caught in the door, there’s going to be a reaction to that—immediate repercussions to be dealt with. That rocket ship may include less obvious conflict, but maybe the first sentence establishes as well that it’s going in entirely the wrong direction, or that our protagonist should be in it but isn’t. Maybe the coffee in the third example is stale. Whatever the specific detail, it establishes a situation for subsequent sentences to develop.

Exposition doesn’t do that. Sure, you can elaborate on the world, but that background on the universe or town or protagonist isn’t a situation. It’s just a sequence of facts. And facts are useful, but they don’t generate momentum, and that’s what we’re looking for.

Avoid Cliches

The first sentence in a lot of ways is a message to the reader. It’s the introduction to your story, told in your voice, representing your vision. So the last thing you want to do is write exactly the same first sentence as the last twelve authors.

So one of the most important rules for how to write a great first sentence is to avoid the clichés utilized by those who have gone before you.

Clichés can manifest in a few different ways, and some are more obvious than others. For instance, if you’re writing a horror or murder mystery story, you’re probably familiar with the classic first sentence: It was a dark and stormy night. It’s become such a common expression that it’s easy to forget that it was once an original opening by an actual author: specifically, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, in his 1830 novel Paul Clifford.

He wrote it. You didn’t.

Taken out of its historical context, that sentence actually has a lot going for it—it certainly sets a tone—but we’ve heard it a million times. If you start your novel that way, the agent or publisher or reader is going to close the book right there.

But what if you start with a sound effect?

It could be brrrrrrring, like the ringing of an alarm clock. It might be the chirp chirp of an incoming text message. Sounds like these are known collectively as onomatopoeia, and a lot of authors utilize them for a first sentence that suggests immediately action or movement. The theory isn’t bad. It’s just that someone else had the same idea first, and at this point a sound effect will probably do you more harm than good.

Another very common introduction—sometimes in the opening sentence, and sometimes elsewhere in the opening paragraphs—is a description of the main character, often in a mirror. Like the sound effect device, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the concept other than its familiarity. And familiarity breeds contempt.

That’s a cliché too. Best not to open with it.

Don’t Overcomplicate It

Above I described “it was a dark and stormy night” as the opening sentence of Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford—but actually, that isn’t entirely true. The entire first sentence is as follows:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

Presented in full, this sentence contains some of the positive characteristics about which we’ve been speaking. It certainly describes action, and the potential for conflict in the severity of the storm. Yet it’s also a long sentence composed of numerous clauses describing the setting from a variety of different angles. It hooks the reader, but also provides ample opportunity to lose them.

This sort of thing was not uncommon in classic Victorian literature—another famous example is Charles Dickens’s “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” which is but a small fraction of the first sentence of the 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities. But in the present day this sort of elaborate first sentence is a far less palatable approach.

When figuring out how to write a great first sentence, some writers will ask too much of their hooks, describing multiple beats of action in quick succession or describing a single moment or object in inordinate detail. If that results in too complex a sentence—even a run-on sentence, or any phrasing that proves difficult to follow—then instead of hooking your reader, you might instead leave them behind.

So you want to be original. But you also want to be precise. Keep an eye out for too many commas, or too many “and”s, or any ambiguity in the writing that might muddy the waters of the action you mean to convey and the story you mean to tell.

That brings us to our last point.

Don’t Forget the Second Sentence

The goal of the first sentence is to convince readers to read the second—but the second sentence is there too. If your first sentence includes too much, write another. If the second sentence is not enough to contain the idea, build the paragraph.

In other words, the task of hooking the reader doesn’t fall upon the first sentence alone. That’s why this series is about opening pages. Learning how to write a great first sentence is important—critical, even—but only if you’re able to match it with a second great sentence, and a third great sentence, and so on are you going to keep readers engaged throughout those pages. And only then is the reader truly hooked.

What’s your favorite first-sentence hook? Let us know in the comments below!

And don’t miss the next installment in this series, where I’ll explore the factors that influence how different story types can most effectively begin, and tell you how to start your story.

Polishing Your Work for Publication – Mt. Diablo California Writers Club, Nov. 13, 2021

Our very own Ally Machate will be sharing how to “Polish Your Work for Publication” via the California Writer’s Club – Mt. Diablo Branch Meeting on November 13^th. Join us to explore the most common problems that plague written works and identify simple yet effective ways to resolve them.

Whether you plan to self-publish or publish traditionally, understanding how to get your manuscript perfect or as close to perfect as possible is very important. Ally will explain why it is essential for your manuscript to be correctly formatted and well written BEFORE submission. She will also discuss identifying and resolving common issues that impact manuscripts, such as ineffective nouns and verbs, inauthentic dialogue, and passive voice. Ally will also include why it’s essential for all writers, especially beginners, to seek objective feedback on their work and tell you how to get it.

The Mt. Diablo California Writers Club Branch is dedicated to educating members and the public, via speakers, workshops, and special programs, in the art and craft of writing, publishing, and marketing their works. They encourage members to dedicate themselves to their writing, support each other’s work and publishing successes at all levels and embrace a positive spirit of cooperation

The meeting will be offered virtually and in person. Click here to register.

How to Improve Your First Chapter by Eliminating Hidden Exposition

One of the most common questions novelists have is how to improve your first chapter. And one of the biggest pitfalls in the opening pages of a novel or memoir is exposition. Most exposition comes in the form of explanation or back story—often a dump of information (aka an “info dump”) that, though intended to help readers understand the story, actually keeps them from the story you’re trying to tell.

That’s why we focused the first part of this series on beginning instead with action—because scene and story are often the opposite of exposition.

But not all exposition is as obvious as an info-dump. In my time as a book editor, I’ve discovered that some exposition is subtler and harder to find. For that reason, it’s possible to run into the trap of exposition even when you do start with action—because some action is exposition in disguise.

So what is this hidden exposition and how do we find it? In the second part of our four-part series on nailing the opening pages, we’re going to determine exactly that.

[Missed the first article in this series? Click here to get caught up!]

Is It Structural Exposition?

Recently, I edited a young adult fantasy novel that focused on scenes and action from the very start. The first scene had the protagonist in her garden in the aftermath of an uncomfortable confrontation with her parents. Later scenes had her interacting with a fairy and exploring a fantasy world.

That sounds exciting. Yet in execution, it was actually exposition.

How is that possible? Well, the answer is in what story the novel actually meant to tell. The primary action focused on the protagonist’s interactions with a strange new arrival while struggling with a dangerous enemy. But these latter characters weren’t introduced until more than 150 pages into the manuscript. That means that our inciting incident—the plot beat that sets into motion the chain of cause and effect we call rising action—didn’t come until very late.

Nothing before that was actually the story. It was only setup for the story. There was no developing conflict or building narrative. So in terms of narrative function, all of this was exposition—just exposition in the form of scenes.

It’s important to consider how this happened. The author from the start had a story she wanted to tell—but she also wanted to explain how the status quo with which we begin came to be. So she started writing backwards, adding more and more information before the story. This new content, though, was never incorporated into the narrative structure. The inciting incident never changed. We never established developing narrative on the basis of cause and effect. We simply received more information.

As a book editor, I’ve seen this before. I worked with another talented author a few years ago who wrote a romance in which the romantic pairing doesn’t even meet until after page 70. The reason was exactly the same: In setting up the status quo with which the story begins, she wrote backwards and added numerous chapters and scenes. The author was savvy enough to avoid obvious exposition, but because the new action preceded the obvious inciting incident, it still read in the end as exposition.

So how do we avoid this sort of hidden exposition? The key is remembering what a story really is:

A story begins with an inciting incident that disrupts a character’s status quo.
Beginning with that inciting incident, a story is built upon cause and effect, each plot beat the effect of what precedes it and the cause of what follows.
This causation defines rising action, which encompasses the majority of a narrative developing toward a climax.

If the action you’re writing precedes the chain of cause and effect that develops plot and conflict—and if it carries on for multiple chapters—then there’s a pretty good chance it’s actually exposition.

And remember as well: Your status quo is a starting point. Though of course it depends on the story, often it’s not necessary to go in-depth on how the status quo came to be.

Is It Character Exposition?

There’s another form of hidden exposition that is less severe, but also more common.

When introducing characters for the first time, authors often describe the character—not only in terms of physical appearance, but also characteristics, personality, and perhaps history with our protagonist. While this is all very useful information, it also often precedes the action of the scene in which they’ve appeared. Frequently this description is followed immediately by action or dialogue—action or dialogue that reads as redundant because it shows the same information that has just been told.

Of course, we know that it’s preferable to show versus tell. Show, don’t tell is not only a fundamental principle of writing, but also central to the concept of beginning with action rather than exposition. But the introduction of new characters is one of the most frequent ways in which we’re inclined to show and tell—or perhaps tell and show, as telling often comes first. And while narration is a useful tool in explaining character, action and dialogue—that is, scenes—are fantastic at revealing character.

Characters are defined best by the choices they make and the things they say and do.

So let the scene reveal the character. Use narration to fill in the contextual gaps. Some exposition will always be necessary, but as long as it supports rather than supplants the action—as long as we keep moving forward into narrative—we’re not actually bogging the manuscript down in exposition.

It’s All About Momentum

Effective opening pages are about momentum. When you introduce a character through narration, then essentially repeat the narration through action, the redundancy stalls momentum. If you include pages and chapters of action before we reach even the start of the story, that too stalls momentum. Even if readers aren’t confronted by a block of expository text, if they’re being kept from the story you mean to tell, then they will stop reading.

So show your characters—and take the time to identify your inciting incident as well. If you’re several chapters in and you aren’t there yet, and if you’re still telling readers about the characters who occupy your world, you may have some hidden exposition to resolve.

Have you encountered examples of exposition disrupting the momentum of a story? Let us know in the comments below!

And don’t miss the next installment in this series, where I’ll explore what makes a truly great first sentence.

Are you ready to publish? Get your free checklist and practical, helpful content monthly.

The Best Way to Start Your Story Type

Setting Readers’ Expectations

Narrative Relevance

Point of View

The Maze: How to Be Specifically Ambiguous in Fiction