Bad Beginnings
The start of your book is a delicate, beautiful thing.
It has a joyous quality for sure. Something like cracking open an egg, the peep of new sun, climbing on board a train, feeling the flap of a sail, a rope straining at its mooring. You only get that feeling once per book, and it’s worth relishing.
You can go big, if you want to. You can start in the middle of a bar-room brawl, with bottles flying and chairs thwacking. Or you can start with something apparently small, except that the wriggle of a little story-worm catches the reader’s attention and, dammit, they find they’re hooked.
But, of course, there’s another issue with beginnings, a bothersome one. Because agents, blast them, start books from the beginning too and they are very unusual readers indeed. Partly, yes, they’re unusual in that they’re professionals looking for work they can sell. But also, they start reading literally thousands of novels a year. How many first pages does an average agent read? Maybe two thousand. How many actual books does an average agent read? Well, probably roughly as many as you do – or a few more, because they’re pros.
Because agents read so many opening pages, they are deeply – horribly – familiar with the clichés of the genre. That means, they are exquisitely sensitive to badness in openings.
What’s worse is this: the opening of your novel may well be the first thing you’ve ever written. It’s where you’re at your least experienced, not your most. That’s true in general, but it’s also true of this particular story. Midway through your book, you’ll know your characters better, your story better, your themes better, your voice better – everything better.
Which means that when an agent picks up your book it’s effectively an encounter between a Story Opening Super-Analyser and a scarily undercooked Story Writer. Not fair, right?
And look: nothing I go on to say in this email is absolute. You could pick some horrible cliché to open your novel with but, if you deliver that opening in a confident and well-written way, then any sane agent will read on, with interest. For everything I say below, you should bear in mind that there’s almost certainly a classic of world literature that takes the cliché and rebuilds it into something wonderful.
At the same time, clichés feel wrong for a reason. If you can avoid them, you probably should. And with that said …
Dreams
There’s something horribly schoolchildish about any story that starts with a dream, before, two or three paragraphs later, admitting, “Then I woke up.” It feels cool, but cool in much the same way that my kids think that making pots of green goo out of ordinary kitchen ingredients is cool. Once your age hits double-digits, it’s time to move on a bit.
I think there are also two more specific reasons for concern. One is that dreams are totally unboundaried. Not rule-governed. And that doesn’t just break the laws of life, but of stories too. Even kids’ fantasy fiction has rules that govern its fictional world. Opening without rules feels disappointing – the difference between a park kickabout and a World Cup tie.
The other is that, once you get two or three paragraphs in, you play that limp trick on the reader: ha, ha, fooled you, it was only a dream. That yields a feeling akin to disappointment. “You made me read this, on the premise that it mattered, but it didn’t matter. Oh.” I’d gently suggest that this is not a feeling you want anyone – still less an agent – to encounter on the first page of your novel.
Beds
More generally, one agent once told me that a stunning proportion of all manuscripts she read – she reckoned well over ten per cent – opened with a character in bed. She reckoned she’d almost never, perhaps literally never, offered representation for such a book.
There’s nothing obviously wrong with that. You could imagine some Beckettian novel that opens with a character in bed and keeps that character in pyjamas for most of the story. But … again, I think there are two specific issues here.
One is that you don’t want to bracket yourself with the ten per cent of novels that an agent is most inclined to reject. The other is this: why is it that so many authors start with a character in bed and (usually) waking up?
I think it’s that the writer themselves are warming up. They are aware of embarking on something new. Of introducing a new character to the world. So they start at the beginning: the opening of the day. As they move their character through toilet / shower / coffee / conflakes, they limber up, like your pre-gym warm-up.
And: don’t warm up. Or, if you do, don’t do it on page. Don’t do it anywhere that the reader is going to see it.
Poetry & prologues
The fantasy manuscripts we see start with a snatch of poetry by way of prologue. Or if not poetry, then myth, or incantation, or something similar.
And again, you’re going to tell me that Tolkein did this all the time, and maybe he did. But poetry (and myth and the rest of it) is, almost by definition, harder to penetrate than prose. An opening needs to gently lift the reader into your story vehicle and get them drifting away from the bank, the train gliding away from the platform.
Forcing the reader to wade through a couple of pages of (often quite dodgy) poetry is the opposite of that gently lifting model. It’s like you’ve built a low wall in between the reader and the railway carriage you want them to get into.
I talked about prologues a couple of weeks back, and they usually generate the same kind of issue. The definition of a prologue is roughly, something detached from the main story. That means you are having to gently lift the reader into your prologue and then, in the chapter following, you’re asking them to get out of that first vehicle and into another. You’ve just doubled the obstacles in the way of full reader engagement.
Too much, too soon
Personally, I’d vastly prefer a dream-story, starting in bed, and written in poetry, encased in a prologue, than the beast I’m about to describe.
My least-favoured story opener is with highly extreme emotion of any sort. Often some horrible situation (a prisoner under torture), but really any sort of extreme emotion, conveyed with a plethora of emotional superlatives.
The reason why this doesn’t work is that stories have the quality of new social situations. You’re meeting characters for the first time. If your best friend had a terrible heartbreak sob story, you’d be prepared to listen to the whole thing, dishing out biscuits and tissues as needed. But if you had just for the very first time met a new parent at the school gate and you got the same excessively tearful download, you’d just want to pull away.
A reader doesn’t care about an emotional drama for its own sake. They care because they care about a character. And that means learning them, building them, creating the knowledge that will generate sympathy.
That’s the ‘too much’ error, and it’s a particular bogeyman of mine. But there’s a ‘too soon’ error as well.
That error is giving away your punchline much too early. You have a world where gravity can be rubbed away via a smartphone app? Or memory works only for twenty-four hours? Or your character, a woman, is working, disguised as a man, on board an old three-master?
Then great! I love it! What great ideas!
But don’t tell me about them. Not on the first page, nor even the third, nor anywhere in the first chapter. Yes, of course, you scatter tantalising clues. A coffee machine that has to be pulled down from the ceiling. Reminder post-its on the mirror. Some odd piece of behaviour by a ‘seaman’ apparently remembering a husband.
The clues are what tantalise. They’re what drag a reader through the story. Once you deliver your punchline (“An anti-gravity app! 24 hour memory!”), that particular sequence of clues carries no more force. For sure, other things will come along – you’ll start introducing the full Technicolor complexity of your story – but we’re talking about openings. If you want to get the reader into your story-vessel and pulling happily away from shore, then those tantalising clues are a brilliant way to maintain engagement. In time, as the reader bonds with your character, you won’t need the clues any more. But during this first chapter, don’t give the game away too early. Use the clues, delay the punchline.
***
That’s it from me. My overcomplicated week last week has floated into the past. The first yellow crocus nosed into the garden this morning. It’s probably regretting its impulsive decision: early February on an Oxfordshire hill is a bit unkind, even for croci. But what the heck, m’deario, and what the heck, my dearies? Where one crocus boldly goes, spring will surely follow.
Til soon.
Harry
Hi Harry, I’ve just done an 800 word opening chapter and having read your article today, I’m confused. Have I produced an ultra- emotional piece which is taboo for you. Or can I get away with it. Basically I’m introducing my main character as a child, but next I skip forward 6 years where the main story starts. Could that opening stand as a dreaded prologue???
I’d be grateful for your comments.
The Highlands of Scotand.
The Year is 1867
Willie Farrell was only twelve years old, but today was the end of his childhood.
No more chasing his sisters, gleefully making their lives miserable, pulling their hair.
No more running off into the woods to make a swing or trying to stalk a deer.
No more making a bow and arrows, building a fire or trying to hook a fish with his home made rod.
No more being scolded by his mother for being mischievous.
Play had been suspended; his loving antagonists gone.
Today was all about cholera and malnutrition.
Today he’d seen his second death in as many days. Two more than any child should endure; nightmare images of creamy textured faces that couldn’t answer back. Blank eyes that didn’t recognise him, but stared into a black nothingness. Bodies that refused to move when gently nudged. Bad memories now locked away, ready to resurface on a rainy day.
He’d watched for one agonising week, the relentless progress of the disease as it strangled his family.
A gut-wrenching stench of diarrhoea pervaded every nook and cranny of the room. It hung in his nostrils, a permanent reminder that putrefaction had taken its first tentative steps.
After the first few days, the decline of his sisters and mother had been rapid.
First came the dehydration, then the sunken eyes and dry mouths.
Next, the skin with its bluish pallor, cold and clammy.
His elder sister, Lizzie was the first to go, quietly and with no pain. She slipped into a coma and within a couple of hours was gone; forever.
Her flight may have been painless, but for Willie the onlooker, the mystery of death was nothing but horror and heartbreak.
The following day it was Pearl. One minute she was fighting hard, the next she too had succumbed to a coma. She quickly drifted into oblivion, the finality of it causing Willie to panic; stone cold fear. He never wanted to die.
John Farrell, grasped his son’s shoulder firmly.
“It’s alright to cry, lad.” he said gently, “she’s gone. You’ll never see her again. Better say goodbye.”
Willie wept, “Why did she have to die, Pa?”
“I don’t rightly know, son. Life is just a confusion of events. You can’t put them in any order.”
He cursed aloud. “Those damned shellfish. If only I’d known.”
John had unwittingly swapped some potatoes for seafood that somebody had brought from the coast.
He’d given them to his undernourished womenfolk as a treat and now they and some of his other neighbours were suffering the same fate.
The blue death, that’s what it was called.
The poor man who’d unknowingly brought the contaminated food had been almost beaten to death by aggrieved crofters and he’d already been driven out of the community.
Willie turned to see his mother, lying next to her dead daughter.
“Don’t touch Ma,” warned John, “you may catch the same disease.”
Willie was scared. A short while ago, he’d noticed the wrinkles that had appeared on her skin and touched her damp hand. He just wanted to comfort her.
John knew that the life of his wife was ebbing away. He choked back his grief, determined that Willie would not see her end too.
“Go and take Rab and pray for your mother’s soul. I fear she’ll soon be with your sisters in heaven.”
Willie hesitated.
“Go son, and take care of your brother”
Over the past week Willie had gained a shadow. He was waiting outside the cottage. Rab was six and had been ordered to stay away, innocent of everything that had happened.
“Willie, when can I go and see Ma and Lizzie and Pearl.”
“Come on wee Rab. We have a job to do.”
He led the child to the big fir that stood at the bottom of the garden.
“On your knees now, we must make a prayer for Ma.”
“And our sisters.”
Willie didn’t know what to say. Their sisters were already dead. Should he tell him so? No that news had to be for his father to break.
“I think we should pray for all our family, Rab. Pa included.”
The two dropped to their knees as they’d been taught and made childlike incantations for mercy.
Willie was angry.
They’d prayed earnestly every day.
Why had their pleas fallen on deaf ears?
They’d been brought up to trust in God.
Why hadn’t he saved their sisters?
Was he about to steal their mother too?
Just then an anguished cry filtered through the air.
“Is that Pa?” whispered Rab, frightened. He grabbed Willie’s arm.
Willie felt his spine tingle. It wasn’t a tingle of excitement. It was an acknowledgment.
He knew that his mother was gone.
There would be no going back.
Today, he’d achieved manhood.
Oh Harry, you are killing me here… I wrote my novel as a new writer and them discovered that opening with a dream is bad form – even though the novel is based on dreams. So…I re-write…and guess what? No dreams but the main character is in bed! Does it make a difference that she is not waking up, but suffering from anxiety-induced insomnia? Should I possibly start with her outside the bedroom, and then flashback to her intense frustration? It is a large part of setting her up.
I suspect Harry might persevere, you never know. I think his point is that agents won’t. He’s right. My opening lines cheekily referenced this dream business with the protagonist angrily denouncing the futility of having optimistic dreams of happiness or love. Not at all real dreams, waking or sleeping, beds or bedrooms. . An agent at the YFW opened by saying “you do know you shouldn’t open with dreams don’t you.” So steer clear I say. Because even though the agent wasn’t, in this case, much help, he was trying to be helpful. Think what an agent with no inclination to help and a large pile to sort might think😁
My thriller starts with a violent attack that my antihero violently thwarts. Too much too soon even for this genre? Hmm…revisions may be required before my next query blast.
I would have thought thrillers are allowed to start with a pretty punchy episode – the problem would be if the expectations thus created aren’t sustained, or the incident is peripheral to the main plot. It works for James Bond movies.
Though there aren’t many thriller writers more successful than Lee Child and the ones I’ve read all seem to start with Jack Reacher wandering into a small town and noticing something a bit odd.
Harry, I need you.
How can I get you to read my opening chapter?
Thank you for all your great blog posts! They always make my day.
Cheers, Jane
Oh sod it. Two thirds and 60k in, I agree I have a better handle on first chapter now I know what the book’s about. So I have just written alternative chapter one’ and just reading Harry’s post, it looks like I’ve inadvertantly written a prologue. Am presently high up, at eye level with Moroccan seagulls in Mogador (no kidding) above the ramparts of Game of Thrones and Welle’s Othello so NOT inclined to start again today. At least not the same book…. I’m off to the souk to get me a goatskin notepad bag so I at least look like a writer….hah!
Another excellent read. I totally get your point about having a character waking up in bed… but don’t all the best blues songs start with ‘Woke up this morning…’? Or is that an urban myth?
More seriously, I’m gratified that you suggest scattering clues through the opening pages – I think that’s what I’ve done. Mine is certainly not the sort of story that’s going to ‘start with an earthquake and build up to a climax’.
You know, in the end, it’s hard to make general rules. For everything I offer in these emails, there’ll be exceptions that brilliantly & dazzlingly break the rules. I know that’s a cop out, but it has the virtue of being true anyway 🙂
Hahahaha, not a cop out Harry – just life! You did get me thinking about my intro, and moving it out of the sleeping area will allow me to focus more on the character as opposed to the setting.
Daphne du Maurier did not have the benefit of your advice about dreams when she began Rebecca. ‘I dreamt I was at Mandalay again,’ quoting from memory.
Simon Raven didn’t know not to start with beds. ‘I kicked my catamite out of bed.’ Or it may have been Anthony Powell. It’s a long time since I read them.