The smell of the first page

Today and for the next few weeks, we’re all about openings.

That’s in honour of our new self-paced video course – free to Premium Members – called The Ultimate Start. The course aims to get your novel off to a bang … and to introduce you to our ever-fabulous Ultimate Novel Writing Programme tutors. Each module of the course is presented by a different Ultimate Novel Writing Programme tutor. If you’re even half-curious about the course, you should definitely take a look. Lesson one is now live with new lessons dropping on Mondays. 

This is also a good moment to mention my webinar next week (29 Jan) on Elevator Pitches, which is free and open for all to attend. (Info here.) Most people think about pitches as something you consider long after the text is complete – a marketing sticker you glue onto an already-finished product.

I don’t think that’s especially helpful, however, because really the marketing concept needs to be baked into the book from the very start. You need to think of the pitch less as a marketing slogan, and more like the condensed essence of the book – a blueprint. And if you get that right, then everything else flows – from text to marketing slogans, and from cover design to query letters.

Those two themes – opening pages and novel blueprints – combine very sweetly in this insight:

Your opening pages need to offer a glimpse of the heart-of-the-heart and the soul-of-the-soul of the book.

It’s OK (actually, it’s good) if the glimpse is oblique or cryptic. You can trust that readers will smell it anyway, like a truffle buried at the root of a tree. And if you have a perfectly designed blueprint / pitch with everything neatly lined up behind it, then that opening page will also cohere with your title and your book cover and the blurb on the back … and so the scent of that opening page will be reinforced before you start.

Now all this sounds a bit woo-woo, I know. (It’ll be a lot less woo-woo if you come to my elevator pitch workshop.) But here are some examples:

Fiona Griffiths, Book #1, Talking to the Dead

The pitch: “Murder story, involving a detective who used to think she was dead.”

Excerpts from Chapter 1

“Beyond the window, I can see three kites hanging in the air over Bute Park. One blue, one yellow, one pink. Their shapes are precise, as though stencilled. From this distance, I can’t see the lines that tether them, so when the kites move, it’s as though they’re doing so of their own accord. An all-encompassing sunlight has swallowed depth and shadow”

…

“I’m going to be a policewoman. And just five years ago, I was dead.”

The last bit there is a direct invocation of pitch: Here’s someone who is clearly alive, but she used to be dead. That, very succinctly, is the paradox at the heart of Fiona’s  existence.

But the opening paragraph does something similar. The kites move (so they’re ‘alive’), but there are no lines tethering them and all depth and shadow has vanished, so it’s as though the kites have become stencils – mere copies of kites, not real ones. Are these kites real or just painted copies? It’s not clear. That’s the same basic paradox, but in oblique form.

Fiona Griffiths, Book #2, Love Story, with Murders

The pitch (series): “Detective who used to think she was dead” – as above

The pitch (book): “Love story – with murders (!)”

Excerpt from Chapter 1

“Penry opens his hands in what’s meant to be a spreading gesture, only they never get more than about eight inches apart. It’s as though the ghosts of his handcuffs are still there.”

The “alive or dead?” theme is instantly mirrored in the “captive or not captive?” image here.

The love story with murders bit is perhaps a bit less well captured (my bad), except that this opening scene has two proper friends (=love) discussing a recent prison suicide (=murder), so both things are entangled right there on page 1.

Fiona Griffiths, Book #3, Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths

The pitch (series): “Detective who used to think she was dead” – as above

The pitch (book): “Detective (with pre-existing identity confusion) goes undercover.”

Excerpt from Chapter 1

“I bite down onto my thumb, hard enough to give myself a little blue ledge of pain. I let my mind rest on that ledge, while the scenario in front of me plays itself out.

‘And these are all employees? Contracts in place? Bank accounts in order? …’

‘Yes. They are all contracted employees. We have their contracts. Their bank details. Everything. But two of the people – these two,’ he says, circling two names on the spreadsheet, ‘these two don’t actually exist.’”

Again, you have the ‘Does it exist or doesn’t it?” question popping right up in the first chapter. And the thing about biting down onto the thumb is speaking directly about a kind of mental ill-health – not in a loud, shouty way, but still: an unmissable indicator.

Now, if I’m honest, I think that the second and third examples here are missing some central image that tells us what the book is going to be about (as opposed to the series.)

In Book #6 of the series (where the theme was theft and fakery in the world of Dark Age antiquities), I had one of Fiona’s colleagues build a dinosaur out of office stationery, which she then exploded with a crossbow, also made from office stationery. She then says:

“And that’s how we are ‒ me, Jon, the bones of the fallen ‒ when Dennis Jackson [Fiona’s boss] comes in.”

And that’s a perfect image: the fakery, the death, the long-ago past – the perfect way to tease the reader with what is to follow.

And it’s not just a tease: it’s a promise. You’re effectively saying: “You smelled something in the furniture of this book – the cover, the title, the blurb, the slogans – that hint at a blueprint you simply can’t resist. This first page / first chapter promises you that I, the author, understand that blueprint and will deliver it … and it’ll be every bit as enticing as you expect.”

How could any reader not respond?

In short:

1. Know your blueprint – understand in absolute clarity the purpose of your book. Why are you writing it? What makes it special? What is the heart-of-the-heart of your book’s appeal to the reader?
2. Make sure that those themes glitter beneath the surface of those opening pages. Make sure that you wink at the reader and reiterate that opening promise.

Yes, you have to do other things too (settings, character, a hint of story), but hinting at your themes early on is a key piece of delivering a totally coherent and utterly irresistible package for the reader. Do jump into that course on opening pages – especially, if you want a little taster of the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme experience. And do come to my workshop.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / opening pages

No normal Feedback Friday this week. Instead, I want you to do Megan Collins’s homework from The Ultimate Start course. That homework is this:

Look at your opening 500 words and post in the forum here. Ask if your peers can guess your genre from this opening. Post to the forum, then read and comment on the thoughts of at least two of your fellow writers. Can you learn anything from their observations?