Starting Out
Here are 7 things this Reader has learned about Beginnings:
You need to gain my trust.
The opening pages are where I decide whether I am in reliable hands. Be consistent. (No matter how experimental.) Who where when what. (But not the why…see bullet point 2.) This means giving the reader a storyteller they can latch onto and recognise. This means placing the reader somewhere specific they can imagine without stumbling over too many blank spaces or confusing spatial elements. Somewhere that you make solid and real to them (however fantastical), but without lingering over details that are unnecessary and distract from what is most important to the story.
Don’t tell me the story before I live it.
This is crucial. What you want most of all is for your reader to lean in, to want to read on so that their curiosity is sated. If you tell us everything up front, we will sit back, we don’t really need to finish the story because we know it all or we can make a good guess at the ending. This includes telling too much about the inner world of the character and any back-story info. Let me discover the story with the characters, as they do. They don’t know what’s going to happen, often there are large gaps in what they understand about who they are, their past and their future. Let me figure out what I think about the characters by spending time with them and observing their actions, and their reactions to events. Even when using an omniscient narrator (who does know everything), to be an engaging storyteller that narrator needs to proceed on a ‘required information only’ basis, in order to keep our readers’ heads full of questions, and our hands turning the page.
Set the ground rules.
There are so many different ways you can tell a story. One point of view throughout. Changing points of view in alternate sections. A narrator who speaks directly to the reader. A backed-off view. All of these are wonderful choices, but it’s in the opening pages you need to signal to us at least some of the ground rules. So, if you are telling the story from a point in time where all of it has already happened (past tense), then settle into this at the start. Then the readers can relax. (There’s nothing to say you can’t then in a later, separate section, switch to telling the story from the present - because now the story has caught up to the present moment in time, perhaps - but remember to take the reader with you and create a clear designation between the section of the story that’s in the past and the section that’s in the present.) Similarly with point of view, whatever choice you make, establish this view clearly and consistently in the opening pages. Let us sit with it for a while, so we can feel comfortable and trust you. Alternatively, if you are going to switch around a lot between different points of view, or use omniscient, don’t leave it too long before making those switches, before zooming out of close-up into another head or the omniscient narrator viewpoint. I often get sent manuscripts where the writer has started telling the story close-up from one viewpoint, and then about forty pages or so later (enough for me to have embedded into this view of the world) suddenly starts dropping in thoughts or opinions from a completely different viewpoint. This is very jarring for the reader! So whatever you want to do, establish this structure early, and with very clear demarcations when you come to the introduction of a new viewpoint.
Plunge me in.
Like a parachutist onto a strange new land, drop me into the first scene. Put me with characters in a place where something is happening. You are doing one of two things in the opening scene/chapter: establishing what is the norm for this character or characters, so that we will understand the weight of the changes when they come, OR giving me the moment when this particular story begins, the Inciting Incident that forces the character into action, if he/she wants to regain the balance of their life. Don’t spend time explaining. This is not the time for big, back-story flashbacks. It should quickly become evident to a reader why you have dropped me into this life at this moment.
The trigger needs to be on the page.
In other words, the Set-up is not the Story. A forest fire might have burned a whole town to the ground, leaving your protagonist with nothing, grieving the loss of his entire family. But if that happened before the book started, it is NOT the Inciting Incident. And you will need another one. The inciting incident starts this particular story and we need to live it alongside the character. So that we can feel it. So we can observe the choices they make, based on what they want and how they decide to pursue it.
Beginnings are supposed to be rewritten.
There is no way you will know everything about a story before you have reached its end. No matter how much preparatory outlining you may have done. And this is good! You want to be surprised as you write. There is nothing more story-killing than forcing a story to stay fixed to a plan when it is plainly losing the will to live. Be open to what you haven’t yet thought of. But this will mean that when you return to the beginning, there will inevitably have been shifts. You may realise you didn’t need to start where you started, the story actually begins later. The characters may have altered hugely as you wrote, and now you need to readjust them at the beginning to fit, or to make them less of the person you’ve now realised you want them to become, so we can see the change happen.
Excite yourself.
This is the most important. Especially in a first draft, but also in revision. Delight yourself. Write sentence by sentence. Don’t know what’s coming. Listen for a sentence, write it down, listen for a second that springs from the first. Don’t second-guess. Surprise and delight yourself. But stay with the story. Let the story come from the story. And keep doing this, all the way through.