Top tips to hook a reader in your first 500 words
The whole Jericho Writers team agrees that, at this year’s London Festival of Writing, our Friday Night Live competition was a little bit special. For a start, it was on a Saturday – but leaving the misnomer aside, we were bowled over by the stellar standard of the entries we received.
Anyone who was in the dining room that night would surely agree that our finalists – although writing in diverse genres – had one thing in common. Their work was accomplished, affecting and intriguing.
A month on, we wanted to reflect on what made our entrants’ best work so impressive and look at some of the more constructive feedback our judges had to offer.
What we loved
Strong opening lines
Giving your novel a killer first line sounds like an obvious thing to do, but it’s not as simple as it might seem. Opening sentences shoulder immense pressure, often doing multiple things at once. They tell us something about our protagonist and the world they live in, hint at events that will be central to the story and strike a tone that will carry through the novel, setting up its genre and style.
We loved finalist Tori Howe’s arch, amusing line: “Our Christmas tree was definitely dead”, as well as Davina Bhanabhai’s devastating opener: “I spend my forty-fifth birthday identifying the dead body of my only child”.
Want to nail your own novel’s first line? Remember that this doesn’t have to be the bit of your book you write first! Hitting upon the perfect opening sentence is the sort of thing you might find easier to achieve in retrospect, when your draft is well underway and your characters and their world are firmly established.
Voice
What makes a strong narrative voice? It’s a question we get asked frequently, and – slightly annoyingly – the honest answer is you just know it when you read it.
Voice was something our Friday Night Live judges commented on frequently this year, highlighting the individuality and authenticity of many entrants’ writing. Sophie Holme’s entry, which made the live final, was a perfect example. Rich with wry wit, the first 500 words of her memoir are also shot through with a melancholy that hints at the darker themes her work explores – among them, the state of psychiatric care in the UK.
If you’re keen to develop your narrative voice, confidence is key. Know, right down to your bones, who your characters are, what the stakes are for them and how what happens in their world will shape them. Then you can tell their story with the sort of authority that resonates with readers – in a voice that, without needing to shout, demands their attention.
World-building... without info dumping
We had lots of fantastical, spooky and speculative entries to this year’s competition – and the best among them managed to establish the worlds their characters lived in without clumsily offloading key information. In her romantasy extract, finalist Isabel Norris made the smart move of drip-feeding just enough facts to let the reader orient themselves in unfamiliar surroundings, striking the perfect balance between providing details and provoking questions.
Friday Night Live winner Kate den Rooijen, in her speculative YA entry, achieved the same effect – allowing readers to conclude that her main character was dying at the same moment the protagonist realised this herself.
Things to think about
'Writing in'
Many of us do this, and it’s a very normal part of the writing process. For the uninitiated, ‘writing in’ is the act of producing scenes, or even whole chapters of a manuscript, whose (often unconscious) purpose is enabling you, the author, to work out who your characters are and what is going on with them.
The challenge is knowing when you’re writing in, and identifying those scenes or chapters as (gulp) potentially superfluous to the story you’re telling. Starting your novel in the right place is a skill – and to some extent it’s dependent on your ability to gauge how much ‘writing in’ content makes it into your final manuscript.
Our very best Friday Night Live entries this year boasted strong beginnings that took readers straight to the heart of action, setting, stakes and character, rather than explaining them. This is crucial for establishing a sense of pace and hooking your reader upfront.
Structure and style
We saw some Friday Night Live entries where judges praised “beautiful writing” but added that “the sentence structures chosen made it hard to follow”. In other cases, there was switching between tenses and points of view within extracts, which our judges found confusing.
Readers also said they found that, in a few cases, the genre of an entry didn’t quite tally with the style it was written in – often because the voice or narrative point of view felt jarring. It’s worth remembering that, if you’re writing a thriller, it needs to feel like a thriller from the very first page. Likewise, contemporary women’s fiction needs to open with a protagonist we can empathise with, in a setting readers will recognise. As one of today’s teenagers might put it: the vibes have to be right.
Over-writing
Finally, it’s no surprise that a small handful of our entries felt a little over-written. When you’re setting your work up to be judged, the temptation to keep embellishing it can be difficult to resist!
What is over-writing? It’s arguably a subjective concept, but it’s about using more words, more imagery and more bells and whistles than are needed. It can also be about making the same point in multiple ways when stating it simply would be more impactful.
Sometimes avoiding over-writing is about using one perfect word instead of five not-quite-right ones: getting to the heart of a feeling or experience in a way that feels true, rather than dressed up or manufactured.
Our advice? Don’t allow complex prose to obscure the point it’s supposed to be making. Ensure your words are meaningful, not just artfully arranged.
Our sincere thanks to everyone who took the time to enter this year’s competition. It was a privilege to read your work, and we can’t wait to see what you come up with next year.