With the first 50 pages of my most recent project being right now in the hands of a publisher, I have been thinking a lot about beginnings. In particular, I wish I had spent more time revising the opening page, opening paragraph, opening line of those first 50 pages. I want my writing to hook that publisher from the very start, and I don’t know if I pulled it off.
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So I’ve been very interested by a couple of recent podcasts over at Writing Snippets, in which the hostesses consider the beginnings of successful young adult novels, both classic and contemporary. They argue, and I agree, that the contemporary novels work harder on hooking the reader from the very first sentence. Although I really like the way the classic stories begin. To me, they seem less gimmicky. Their hook is just great prose. People keep turning pages because these books are just a pleasure to read.
I’ve long thought that this is the hook that I want to use. I don’t want to resort to cheap tricks. But if I turn a critical eye on my own work, I can see that I don’t really grab the reader’s attention until they’re five or ten pages in. And I can’t count on my readers hanging around that long. They have lots of other books to choose from, and I can’t blame them for picking one that has an arresting first line / paragraph / page.
I need to stop viewing awesome openings as illusions designed to fool the reader into buying an inferior good. Maybe that’s how it is for some authors, just like how pick-up lines and first dates are for some people. But for me, I should think of my first line / paragraph / page as a way to communicate to readers that I am willing to put in the time and effort to really polish my work and make it fun for them to read. Instead of a deception, it’s a promise that that the rest of the book will be this good. And in a way, I’m setting the bar for myself before I jump into the rest of the book. And I want to set that bar high.
With all that in mind, here’s an opening paragraph which I wrote as a joke. And now my goal is to write a short story, beginning with this hook:
“You, the reader, reading this right now, are in terrible danger and only this book can save you. If you don’t read it, you will be killed by a gang of Nazi biker mummies with machine guns. But if you do read it, you will be a famous TV millionaire and everyone will love you. And you will win the Olympics.”
I’ll keep you posted!
