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    “Which Editor Do You Need?” at the Washington Writers Conference – May 13, 2023

    Please join us on Saturday, May 13th, 2023 for the Washington Writer’s Conference. This event will be held at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center at 5701 Marinelli Road, Rockville, MD 20852.

    Hosted by the Washington Independent Review of Books, the conference includes numerous talks and panels, including “Which Editor Do You Need?”, featuring our very own Ally Machate. Here are the details:

    Get your questions ready for top book editors Ally Machate and Katherine Pickett. In this session, Ally and Katherine will give you the inside scoop on the types of freelance editors available to you, what they do, why you might need them, and how you can make the most of the editing experience. We’ll discuss developmental editors, line editors, copy editors, and proofreaders. There will be plenty of time for Q&A with this dynamic duo, so come prepared. Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of how editors can help them achieve their dreams of publication.

    All the conference information and registration is available on the Washington Independent Review of Books website. Hope to see you there, and be sure to say hi if you attend!

    Plotting Literary Fiction

    In his guest article for Jane Friedman’s blog, our very own Harrison Demchick explains that so many resources you’ll find on writing plot focus on genre fiction and thrillers, which can be confusing if you’re writing a quieter story like with literary fiction. Causation is fundamental in character-driven literary fiction too, but it doesn’t look the same. It’s subtler. It’s quieter. So how do the mechanics of plot relate to plotting literary fiction? Harrison discusses the principle of causation and how it may just be the key to crafting a great character-driven story in the article, which you can read here.

    Most well-written thrillers are going to have a character arc. Understanding that is important in understanding as well how causation drives the character. In most commercial fiction, happenstance is the opposite of causation, reflecting plot beats that occur not due to preceding events but by the whim of the author. Harrison discusses how you can establish the principles of causation and narrative structure in a story in which events are revealed to the reader out of order.

    Many thanks to Jane Friedman for hosting Harrison’s guest post. Jane has a special interest in how the digital age is transforming writing careers, publishing, and storytelling. She believes that rather than taking a dark view of how the Internet era has affected writers’ livelihoods, she is more interested in how revolutionary change can inspire new business models, and how authorship will ultimately evolve. Check out her website for lots of useful content.

    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.

    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.

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