You never get a
second chance to make a first impression, we're told when we're young.
When writing fiction for children of any age this is good advice to
remember. With the lure of the Internet, fast-action video games, and
reality-based television, it's often tough to get kids to sit down and
read a book. As writers, it's our job to craft an opening to our book
or story that will grab the reader's attention and not let go. And your
very first reader is the editor you hope will buy your work.
So what
do editors look for in openings?
"A fresh concept," says Stephanie
Lurie, President and Publisher of Penguin Putnam. "An authentic voice.
Humor or drama. A definite point of view. Intrigue—a reason to keep on
reading. The old adage `begin your story as close to the climax as
possible' remains true."
"I look for either
a stimulating scene that raises a lot of questions to which I'm
interested in finding the answers, or for a compelling voice that
invites me in instantly," says Emma Dryden, Executive Director at Margaret K.
McElderry Books/Simon & Schuster.
Just what will capture an editor's
attention is often hard to characterize. "I hope for a concept that
grabs me. I want to be immediately immersed in the story. And that is
something that is difficult to define. Usually, it's something personal
and powerful. Something that gives me a glimpse into character or
story," says Lissa Halls Johnson, Book Producer for Focus on the Family.
Nicole Geiger,
Publisher of Tricycle Press, searches for, "Something that grabs me for
myriad reasons, such as wonderful phrasing or unusual subject or
because now I'm curious. This
is highly subjective, of course, as is all writing."
An
Investment
Writers and
editors agree that the idea behind a strong opening is to convince the
reader that the rest of the story is worth the investment of time that
a reader will have to make.
"I want the reader to go on reading,"
says Nancy Werlin, author of Black Mirror (Dial) and the Edgar
award-winning novel The Killer's Cousin (Delacorte). "I want to throw
out a mysterious hint or two of the depths and mysteries lurking ahead.
I want to intrigue. Mostly I do this by immediately getting the reader
to ask questions, and by evoking some strong emotion as fast as I can."
Werlin does just that with this opening from Black Mirror:
Have you ever been in a
state of pain so intense, it was like a living creature wound tightly
around your rib cage and shoulders and neck?
The reader is
compelled to turn the page and find out what could possibly cause such
pain and how the main character will resolve the situation.
Cynthia Leitich
Smith, who writes from a Native American point of view, says that she
often strives to shift expectations with her openings. "The vast
majority of Native American children's books are historicals or
retellings. Those few set today generally take place on reservations.
This is so much true that publishing anything else generates
commentary. My books have contemporary Native themes, and are all set
in small towns, suburbs, or big cities. So, I sometimes use a first
line or paragraph to shift expectations and establish context."
A good example is found in the opening
of Smith's book Rain Is Not My Indian Name (Harper):
“That night, Galen and I jogged under
the ice-trimmed branches of oaks and sugar maples, never guessing that
somebody was watching us through ruffled country curtains and
hooded miniblinds. We should've known. Small town people make the best
spies."
Linda Sue Park,
the Newbery award-winning author of A
Single Shard (Clarion),
believes that the "first line should engage and/or intrigue and the
first paragraph should begin to establish character." She continues,
"Three of my four novels begin with a line of dialogue. I find this to
be a useful trick. It helps avoid the
pitfall of beginning a novel with back-story. Instead, writer and
(eventually) reader are right in the middle of something. It also
starts that process of establishing character. With Shard,
early drafts began
with a scene of Tree-ear scavenging chicken bones and sucking out the
marrow. I wanted his poverty evident right from the start. I liked the
scene, but it was missing a crucial element: the relationship with
Crane-man, which for me is the backbone of the entire story. So I
reworked the scene to include both Crane-man and hunger. The chicken
bones were saved for another meal."
Disappointing
Starts
Often writers will
spend considerable time on their openings only to find that when they
get to the end of the book, the book has changed in such a way that the
opening no longer works. Writers shouldn't be afraid to use an opening
as a jump start to their story but they should be equally unafraid to
toss away those first few openings in search
of the perfect opening.
"The once upon
a time approach is too old-fashioned and cliche these days to be
wholly successful; writers should try to be as imaginative as possible
and need not feel all descriptions of time, place, and character need
to be addressed in the first sentences of a story," says Dryden.
"Many writers
start their hooks way before their story actually begins," says Dian
Curtis Regan, author of the popular Monster of the Month Club books.
According to
Lurie, a common mistake writers make with their openings is to "begin
with a downer, e.g.: 'Emily was bored. A long summer stretched ahead of
her, and there was nothing to do.' The reader will be as bored as
Emily. Why should we keep on reading? I would much rather read a novel
that began: 'Emily sat in the middle of the steaming sidewalk with five
dog leashes wrapped around her legs. Her ears rang as four dogs barked
furiously at the Dalmatian that was running off. "Why did I go into
this business?" she asked herself and wondered what she was going to
tell Marguerite's owner tonight."' Lurie continues: "Or they try to say
everything in the first sentence, e.g., 'Thirteen-year-old Carol
McCully's brown eyes flashed as she threw down the pen her stepmother
had given her on the day her father remarried."'
Equally disappointing, says Johnson,
is that authors often "start in a place of inactivity—the character
waking in the morning, or something equally as slow. The only time this
works is when the action is going to toss the character out of bed.
Then, you have the conflict of peace versus chaos shown quite quickly.
The peaceful lying in bed is actually an intrinsic part of the story."
Picture
Books versus Novels
Dryden speaks of
the differences between openings in picture books and novels. "An
author has more time to work out story, character, and plot in a novel,
so a novel can afford to open more slowly than a picture book. A
picture book doesn't have time to waste—and a picture book audience is
impatient—so the first line of a picture book must instantly grab a
reader of any age and it must instantly set up something critical about
the story and/or the main character."
"In a picture book," adds Lurie,
"every line is key because there are (or should be) so few words. The
first page of a picture book should introduce the character and perhaps
start to set up the situation. In a novel, the author has a little bit
more time to intrigue the reader, set the mood, describe the scenery,
etc., but if the character and situation aren't interesting on the
first page, chances are good that the reader won't continue."
"Every line, every
word, is incredibly important in a picture book," says Geiger. "There
are only a few hundred words, after all, or perhaps fewer. But there
are also pictures to help carry the show, and the first line might be a
single word (picture hooks as prose poem, for instance). A first line
is possibly more important in a novel because that's the only tool the
author has to draw in the reader." She adds, "with picture books, if we
have to change the first line significantly, why are we buying this
book?"
Evolution
Writers and their
editors don't always agree on the perfect way to open a story.
"In my first
novel," says Werlin, "my editor wanted to excise my first chapter and
start with chapter two. This was a novel with three alternating
viewpoint characters, and essentially she was asking to pare it down
to two. She won, because after a while I decided she was right. But she
didn't ask to change the way I had written chapter two's opening, and
on all other books, she has never once questioned my choice of an
opening scene, paragraph, sentence."
But Park stresses
the importance of clear communication between the writer and the
editor. "For The Kite Fighters, my editor thought the opening did not
establish setting quickly enough and she asked me to fix this. We
discussed this over lunch, where I was not taking notes, which may have
been what led to a complete misunderstanding. I took a month to
radically overhaul the first chapter,
taking the brothers off the hillside where they were flying kites and
putting them in a session with their tutor. She wrote back with
(carefully controlled) dismay, saying that she much preferred the
original opening and what she had meant was to put a single line at the
start: 'Korea, fifteenth century.' So that is what we ended up doing. I
did the same for Shard. For historicals, it is the easiest way to
establish setting immediately."
Many writers go through an
evolutionary process with their openings, often finding their true
opening buried within the existing story.
Werlin's The
Killer's Cousin, opens:
My name, David Bernard Yaffe, will
sound familiar, but you won't remember why—at least not at first. Most
people, I've found, do not. I'm grateful for that. It gives me some
space, however brief. However certain eventually to disintegrate.
"I didn't find the opening until the
third draft of the book," Werlin says. "The key was understanding that
David wasn't just observing the action (as I'd thought earlier) but was
hiding some secret of his own as well. I didn't know what that secret
was, exactly, as I wrote the new opening—which came to me like a
miracle at that point—but the knowledge of it lurking beneath the
surface of the story acted as a guide to me as that draft leaped much
closer to the book's final form. I literally pinned the two pages of
the new prologue to the wall above my desk as an emotional guide as I
wrote that draft; I knew I finally had the tone and mood I needed."
Werlin continues, "For Black Mirror,
I found the opening paragraph—which sits alone, without a chapter
number or header of any kind at the beginning of the book—in the very
middle of my first draft. I plucked it out and stuck it up front, where
it had no context. Pure instinct; I didn't know at first why I wanted
it up front but I did. I had to write my way into this ruling emotion
before I could find it, but then I realized it was the overwhelming
mood of the book. This opening asks a question directly of the reader,
involving him or her, and I think it also makes the reader wonder why
it is that the speaker is in so much pain. The subliminal description,
too, is of a snake, an invisible boa constrictor, and I wanted that to
be horrifying but contained (because invisible)."
Werlin cites some basics for winning
openings: "a secret the reader needs to discover, concrete details, a
strong voice, and emotion, which for me is almost always some variant
on emotional pain, fear, or anxiety."
Some lucky writers find openings the
easiest part of the writing process.
"My openings are the best part. They
often come as pure inspiration, a total gift," says author Susan
Heyboer O'Keefe, who penned this opening to the novel My Life and
Death by Alexandra Canarsie (Peachtree):
None of this would have happened, I
suppose, if 1 had a normal hobby like skateboarding or hanging out at
malls. But I don't do things like that. I go to
the funerals of strangers.
"The hard
part," O'Keefe says, "is figuring out what to do for the rest of the
book.”
For
information about reprinting this article, please email
reprints@susantaylorbrown.com
Back to the top.
|
