-->
"Yeah, yeah--that's all well and good, but when do I
get to start writing?"
Right now.
[Silence]
Not so easy, is it?
This may be the most difficult part of starting a book: your
first opening.
A lot of people stress about the start to their book for
good reason: it's arguably more important than ever to hook a reader in the
first few pages. Amazon and other retailers allow people to "Look
Inside" the book at the first several pages. If they don't like what they
see, you can imagine they'll just move right along to another, more interesting
book.
Believe me, I know. I asked a buddy of mine to read a rough
draft of what will eventually become the Debt
of Souls series of books. The first comment he made was, "You kept
saying the same thing over and over again for the first ten pages, but after
that, it got a lot better."
You know what? He was absolutely right. A lot of folks get
bogged down in the academic mindset of describing every...little...thing in a
room in excruciating detail. My first
attempt at a short story back while I was in law school was ten pages of a guy
waking up, followed by me cataloguing his apartment as he brushed his teeth and
showered. I know--really original!
The same goes for non-fiction books; no one wants to read a
dry summary of the rest of the book up front. After all, if you boil the book
down to a few bullet points, what incentive is there to read the rest of it?
Here are a few tips on how to avoid these common pitfalls.
Non-Fiction: Know
Your Audience and Start With an Engaging Anecdote
I'm still plugging away on a non-fiction book about wine. I
could have gone on some flowery rant about how wine is the drink of the
"civilized person," but my goal is to write about the opposite; how
someone who thinks that wine is for snobs can come to enjoy and appreciate wine
without all of the brow-beating and condescension usually associated with it.
I should know; I used to be one such person, until [aha!] my
first trip out to Napa. I quickly dashed out the story of the first time I had
an educational wine-tasting out at Cakebread. There's a protagonist (me), a
villain (a snobbish fellow tour-goer), and a surrogate for some of the wine
knowledge I wished to impart (the wine professional in charge of the tasting).
In so doing, people hopefully get a chance to see a bunch of things; that I'm
not fond of wine snobs, that I'm all about opening up wine to a broader
audience, that I have some expertise and facility with wine-related terms, and
that I'm setting an at least partly humorous tone from the get-go.
Think about starting your non-fiction book similarly, even
if you have to fudge facts a little (but just a little) to make the story fit
your purposes.
Fiction: Action,
Emotion, and Intrigue
I was an avid Lost
watcher back in the day. I tore through the first season DVDs in a matter of
days while killing time studying for finals. I couldn't believe how hooked I
was; whenever each DVD was finished, I drove over to Blockbuster for the next
disk (yes, yes, if you're under twenty-five, you likely have no idea what I'm
talking about. Just imagine that you actually had to go somewhere to get TV and
movies back in the day instead of downloading it immediately. I know: we were
barbarians.).
Even though the ending was ultimately a huge let-down, Lost drew everyone in with a combination
of action (Plane crash! Pilot is dead! Trees sucked out of the ground!),
emotion (Character-based flashbacks! Ooooh, they have to do with what's going
on on the island!) and intrigue (What killed the pilot? Why does it sound so
weird? Why is this John Locke guy so creepy?).
I think my openings have gotten better with each successive
story. In Jesus Was a Time Traveler,
I was still a bit verbose, chewing through a bit of backstory in the first
chapter, though I stand by it because it's absolutely what the narrator,
Phineas Templeton, would do.
Hack was a little
more straightforward and to the point; an old guy gets bad news in a hospital
right away. By chapter three, he's made a big, life-altering decision and is
caroming around in an enormous old car without any regard for pedestrians in
his way.
Rogue is probably
my best yet: a man, waiting in another man's apartment for some unknown reason.
They have a conversation. "He" is upset (who is "he?"). There's a big day the next day, a lot is
at stake, the two men are friends, but they fight (why?). It's basically the penultimate scene of the book up front;
then the book goes back and catches the reader up to that point until the third
act. It's an old trick called a framed narrative, that's been employed by
writers for ages; find an intriguing scene toward the end of the book, put it
up front to create mystery, and work up to that point.
If you get too much into a character's surroundings, unless
there are active chainsaws being dangled from the ceilings and swung from one
side of the room to the other as a character desperately tries to dodge them,
you probably need to fast-forward to another scene for your opener. Once you
have a solid, action or emotion-packed scene, then you can go back and determine if your initial
description-laded scene still fits later on in the book; odds are that it
doesn't.
Sit Down and Write
I'm going to be honest: unless you're some kind of freakish
prodigy (it is possible, but
unlikely), you'll look back one day on your first opening and think, "Man,
I really could've tightened that up."
That's perfectly fine; writing is a constant learning
process. It's okay to experiment a bit with your openings until you get one
right.
The important thing
is that you try. No book was ever written because someone kept mulling over
problems with an opening in her head. Especially for your first book, any
opening will be "good enough." By "good enough," I don't
necessarily mean "publishable;" rather I mean "good enough" to get you writing.
Once you have something down on the
page, everything gets a lot easier,
and you can go back and cut-and-paste as necessary.
Do you have any specific tips for starting books? Anything
that gets those words to flow onto the page just
a bit easier? If so, leave them in the comments.
Previous Posts In This Series:
#3 Tools of the Trade ("What You Need to Indie Publish Your Book For Cheap")
Next Time: Write More Per Day
D.J. Gelner is a fiction and freelance
writer from St. Louis, Missouri. Check out his books, available at his Amazon
Author Page and on Nook, iBooks, and Kobo. Follow him on twitter (@djgelner) or facebook (here). E-mail
him directly at djgelbooks@gmail.com.
Labels: Fiction, Indie Publishing, Non-Fiction, Reading, Writing
