Why we’re doing this

---

I’ve decided to post a chapter from my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells., once a week. Partly because maybe writers will buy a book or two, but mostly because, if you’re to believe the reviews left by readers on Amazon, it’s helpful stuff. If you’ve read the book, well, you know that much of it is fun to read, and it never hurts to be reminded of craft techniques.

The opening chapter concerns the evidence regarding the necessity of crafting a compelling first page. Here goes.

It’s harsh out there

Today’s publishing climate is tougher than ever. To get an agent, your work has to stand out from hundreds and hundreds of submissions. For your agent to get you a book contract, your novel has to cut through hundreds more.

Your book has to be polished, diamond-sharp, and a rarity–you not only have to have professional-caliber writing and a great story, your novel needs to kick-start with compelling tension.

You only have seconds in an agent’s hands

Established authors can ease into a story with description and mood (and even they aren’t safe in the bookstore), but unpublished writers face a very different reality—agents suffering through heaps of submissions and looking for reasons to reject while at the same time hoping for a story worth reading.

On her blog, Agent in the Middle, 20-year veteran agent Lori Perkins said this:

“Your novel has to grab me by the first page, which is why we can reject you on one page.”

Dan Conaway, literary agent at Writers House, adds this.

“I know most of what I need to know about a writer’s chops in about a line and half.”

The odds are excellent that an agent will see all the reasons she needs for passing—or for reading more—on your first manuscript page. Just like agents and editors who see rivers of submissions, as a result of seeing hundreds of opening pages for novels, I can tell you that the first page typically foreshadows what’s to come, story-wise and writing-wise. One quick skim usually provides all the reason I need to decide whether I will turn the page or decline the opportunity.

Often I see competent writing that fails to connect because the writer doesn’t get what the novel’s opening must do to hook a reader. Frequently I find a gripping opening pages later—too late. Most often a bog of exposition or backstory—what one writer calls “throat-clearing”—drags the story to a halt.

You still only have seconds on an editor’s desk

Let’s say you do land an agent, and the agent sends your story to an acquisitions editor. The same grim reality opens its maws—an audience of one with sharp, particular tastes who has an agenda that your story may or may not fit, who wants a great story but has a pile of submissions to go through, and for whom quickly finding a reason to pass is a good thing. One slip, and chomp, you’re gone.

You still only have seconds at the bookstore

Okay, so your talent and work and luck pay off and your novel is published. Now it faces the cold, pragmatic reality of the bookstore. Sol Stein, a remarkable publisher/editor/author/playwright, writes in Stein on Writing of his observations in a bookstore.

“In the fiction section, the most common pattern was for the browser to read the front flap of the book’s jacket and then go to page one. No browser went beyond page three before either taking the book to the cashier or putting it down and picking up another to sample.”

What did those readers see in the novels they chose to purchase, and what did they fail to see in the rejects?

You know.

Ask yourself what readers buy novels for. Is it. . .

• Lush descriptions?
• Great dialogue?
• Fascinating characters?
• Deep themes?
  

Nope. Just one thing.

Story

Those bookstore browsers—and the agent and editor before them—either saw signs of a story they wanted to read, or they did not. They either felt compelled to keep reading, or not. That quickly. You do it too, don’t you?

It’s not like when you ask a family member, or a friend, or even a critique group to read your new novel—they have to read your stuff.

No, in the real world, you have a page or two. And if it’s that difficult with a bookstore browser who is on the hunt for a story to read, how tough do you think it is with a jaded, weary agent or a jaded, way-too-swamped acquisitions editor?

As Chuck Adams, Executive Editor of Algonquin Books says,

“You can usually tell after a paragraph—a page, certainly—whether or not you’re going to get hooked.”

To move your book toward the cash register. . .or generate a request by an agent for the full manuscript. . .or make it to an editorial meeting by an acquisitions editor. . .you need to kick-start your story, sentence by sentence, on your opening pages.

To maintain your focus, it wouldn’t hurt to print out the following definition and put it somewhere you will see it when you sit down to write:

com•pel
verb
a: to force
b: to urge irresistibly

For what it’s worth.

Ray

Comments

[Greg]

The real world dilemma, indeed. Picture the elementary school teacher. Life is boring as hell. But soon, an event will take place beyond their wildest dream that will dramatically alter their life forever. But at this point, they have no knowledge of it; they’re just a school teacher.

Now, we could begin with the inciting incident, but that would be REALLY trite and formulaic (he says, shoving finger down throat). Or we could just concoct some tension-filled scene that really has nothing to do with the story (which would be even worse).

I just don’t know. Let’s wait and see.

[glj]

Another alternative is to suggest things to the reader that the characters don't yet know. Tension can be created by the reader having a hint as to what will happen, but protagonist walks right into the sticky situation (think the girl going up into the attic in a horror movie as the audience screams for her to stop). The protagonist doesn't need to know everything (unless your story is in first person, of course).

[Jami Gold]

Greg,

Yes, but if the teacher hates the boredom and wishes for something more, there's your gap. Show his reluctance to enter the classroom for yet another day, show his internal monologue ("Would his entire life boil down to 'Mr. Jones, I hav'ta go to the bathroom' every 5 minutes?"). In other words create an implied story question.

[Kelley]

Greg, I think I have a similar dilemma. My chapter 2, I think, is much more tension filled that my chapter 1, but my story has to start with what happens in chapter 1. So I'm stuck trying to find a way to hook the reader with chapter 1.

My chapter 1 will be flogged here soon, too. And I don't think it's going to be pretty. I wish I could have submitted chapters 1 and 2, but I didn't want to cheat. :)

I can't wait to see yours and what Ray offers as advice to you. I think it will help me.

[Greg]

glj, thanks. Yeah, that's kind of how it starts now --- attempting to create story questions through coincidental foreshadowing. But I don't think it's enough, cause there's still no tension.

Jami, thanks again. Yeah, I can see where that would work, except that he doesn't really hate it. He likes it. And he has another sideline for entertainment and excitement. His problem is that his wife passed away a few years earlier (necessary to plot) and he's still depressed, cause he loved her dearly. I have an alternate opening that employs that angle. But that's drawn from the second chapter, and if I open with it, there's a whole lot in the first chapter that will somehow need to be worked in as backstory. And I'm just not sure how well that'll work, because it could really slow the pace.

I dunno. We'll see. For now, I think I'll just set it aside. There's still half the book to write. And two more volumes after that. (groan)

[Greg]

Hi Kelley,

Yep, sounds like we're in exactly the same boat. (grin)

Eh, there are openings somewhere in there that will work. We just need to find 'em.

[Jami Gold]

Hi Greg,

Apparently, I'm like a dog with a bone today. :) I keep thinking that there has to be some way to make this work.

Hmm, okay, I don't know what the overall story is going to be, but if it was about him learning to move past his wife's death, then I'd show something about how his current depression affects him. Is he taking on too much at work to keep himself busy? Does he semi-rudely rebuff a co-worker inquiring about how he's doing?

Again, even if you don't mention *why* he's acting that way, is there some way to introduce an implied story question?

Okay, I'll shut up now. :)

[David Greer]

Greg:

Have you visited amazon.com and read the first pages of books in your genre? I think you'll find the solution to your problem there, in a tried and true trick authors have used for millennia.

For example, Louise Erdrich's The Plague of Doves (which reaped her the 2009 Pulitzer prize) begins with a prologue--written in the omnipresent viewpoint--in which an unidentified man is about to shoot a baby to death when his gun jams. Two pages later, the viewpoint shifts to the first person and the narrator begins an exposition on his great-uncle, a Catholic priest, in 1896.

In the prologue, however, Erdrich leaves the reader with the nameless man, gun now repaired, poised over the crib. Does he shoot the baby? We won't know until we read the novel.

And therein lies the lesson: Use the moments that lead up to the climactic scene as the prologue, pull the viewpoint up to the omnipresent, strip away the characters' identities, and don't resolve the scene until the end of the book.

[Greg]

Well, okay. (Hey, this is fun… and very helpful.) Here’s the basic outline: average guy, late forties, widower of a couple years, teaches middle-school science, and is a Naval Reserve Officer, wins the lottery. Huge lottery. After some thinking, decides to use the money to go where no man has gone before – Mars. And he finances, in part, the first manned mission to the Red Planet. The first half of the book is ‘how’ and the second half is doing it. And, this all takes place within this decade using actual existing off-the-shelf technology and systems. That is, all the science is real, only the plot and characters are fictional. The fundamental thesis of the story is, this could actually be done, today. All we need is the right person with the means and motivation to come forward and say, “Okay, I’ll do it.”

So, where do we begin? At present, I have it starting, before the lottery win, in his classroom of 8th graders, and a discussion about why we haven’t gone to Mars. The alternative is following the lottery win and sitting by his late wife’s grave, talking to her ghost about what he should do with the money (cause he doesn’t have anyone else to talk to). An earlier version involved a 20-year flashforward prologue and a 20-year flashback beginning. It was interesting, but really awkward. (That prologue and first page were flogged back in early May. The first page of the second volume was flogged near the end of May.)

It’s a long, complex story. Should easily go over 300,000 words, and that’s just the first volume.

[Greg]

Oh, and of course there’s a whole lot more involved: interesting characters, the politics of why the government doesn’t want to do it and why NASA isn’t going to do it, international treaties regarding who controls Mars, a child born on the planet (the first and only Martian), blah, blah, blah.