Tag: writing advice

Posted in interviews

Interview with BL Jasper On Finishing a Novel, Querying and Finding an Agent

Posted on by Valerie Lute

First, tell us about your novel. What is the story and what inspired you to tell it?

A Dance of Djinn (working title) is the story of Fern and Dahlia, two circus performers who grew up in the traveling Circus of Reveries. Dahlia is a bookish, anxious witch with PTSD from her mother’s death, and Fern is a charismatic yet nerdy Latinx guy who sees the memories of the dead when he touches bones. Intent on chasing down answers and sorting through past trauma, they’re separated across continents. But behind the scenes, a goddess and a djinn-king are battling for control of their lives.

This story is sort of the “book of my heart.” I’ve spent the last 10 years looking for a circus novel as compelling for me as The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, and I have always had a deep soft spot for djinn. Not like magic lamp genies but the kind based in Islamic scripture and lore, Creatures of sand and smokeless fire. I am also tired of narrative story arcs about two characters falling in love—so I set out to write a book where they were already in love, because what happens after that is so much more complicated, the feelings so much more intense, and the repercussions life-changing.

How long did it take you to finish your novel? What was your writing schedule like? How did you balance work, family, and writing?

I started this novel in July 2021 and finished my first draft in February 2022. About two-thirds of this novel was drafted while I was in craft classes, so I would write a new batch each week to submit, revising it about twice before sending it out for workshop.

I began the novel in Valerie Lute’s Writing the Strange class (from a character writing exercise), then took Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop taught by Michael McComas and continued writing. After that, I was lucky to be invited to a permanent writer’s workshop and continued to get feedback. I did a lot of my drafting in the evenings after my kids went to bed.

I subscribe to VE Schwab’s opinion that thinking about your novel is still writing. I spent a lot of time thinking about this book while cooking, driving, cleaning, and showering. My husband came to recognize the look on my face when I was no longer in this world but in the world of my book. He got used to me jumping out of the shower and yelling, “No one talk to me until I write this down!” 

After more than a year of writing regularly (I’m drafting my third book now), I’ve come to realize that I write best during certain times of day. I usually try to get in about 30 minutes minimum. I don’t do a word count goal, but a lot of times I’ll have a particular scene I want to get through, and I try to sit down with enough time to knock that out, even if it’s bare bones. 

 How many drafts did you write? Did you revise as you go or complete a draft at a time, or some mix of both?

I am what I like to call a “chaotic neutral plantser” which means that I plan (vaguely) about a third of my book, and then once I know the characters and the world, I let them tell me the story. That’s my favorite part of writing– sitting down for a scene and having it go sideways because the characters are being true to themselves, and not what I want for them.

For this book, which was my first, I did a lot of revision as I went. I read back through, perfected sentences, emotion, pacing, etc. before moving on to the next scene. So that left me with a pretty draft when I finished. I read through it a few times, making small edits before querying. However…

In May 2022, I attended the Muse and the Marketplace writer’s conference, which was amazing. I attended a lot of sessions on finding an agent and querying, including First Impressions: How to Hook an Agent/Editor with Your Opening Pages with Amaryah Orenstein, the founder of Go Literary Agency. I also attended a couple of sessions that really changed things for me. The first was a session with Hank Phillippi Ryan on first pages. The second was a craft session on revision as a process by Ann Hood. 

After attending those sessions, I rewrote about half of the book, expanding my second POV character and tightening the action. I realized I had written a lot of “scaffolding” that was great for understanding the characters and the setting, but not so great for moving the story along. This revised draft is the one that landed me two indie press offers and an agent.

Since it’s NanoWriMo, do you have any advice for new writers who feel overwhelmed when they sit down to write or are struggling to find the time?

I love writing prompts to get the creativity flowing if you feel out of practice going into NANO. Even setting a timer for three minutes and either picking a word and free writing or looking at a picture and describing it can loosen you up. When it comes to actually getting your story on the page, I like to remind myself that nothing is permanent until it’s published.

I recently started doing this thing where, when I am trying to bust out a scene, I’ll add something like [INSERT EMOTION HERE] or [INSERT BACKSTORY HERE] or [BETTER ANALOGY HERE]. Sometimes I don’t have the capacity to be a poetic writer or to think of someone’s history on the spot. Sometimes I just need to get out the plot beats, and the magic happens in revision. Other times I sit down to write and the words that come out are perfect, and I never end up changing them. Both methods are valid, and both methods are me. You don’t have to be perfect the first go-through. You can write “Jane was scared.” and come back later to show instead of tell.

I have a friend who is working on her next book. She has kids, a full-time job. Her goal is 300 words a day. And if she keeps it up, she’ll draft a book in under a year. Give yourself grace, and do what you can do.

I saw on Twitter that you queried this novel for 8 months and contacted 102 literary agents. What lessons did you learn from the process? Did you ever need to change your approach? Did you learn anything to impart to someone beginning the process? Were you ever tempted to give up?

There’s this intense rush you get when you finish a book. You want it out in the world immediately, and that can make you do some stupid things. I wish I had held off querying my first book. The number of agents who represent adult fantasy is so small, I really could have put my best foot forward by waiting.

One of the things I’ve learned about revision is that stepping away for weeks or months is key. When you think you’ve got it perfect, shelve it for a month or three. The things you notice when you aren’t neck-deep in your own story will help you make it better.

If I could give querying new authors tips, it’s this:

  1. Agents don’t know what they want half the time. They’re looking for that je ne sais quoi in a manuscript. So sometimes, even though you will perfectly match what they say they are looking for, you get a rejection. Often, it’s not you– it’s them.
  2. The podcast The Shit No One Tells You About Writing is invaluable for querying authors. Fantastic advice. I listened to so many episodes in the car, my kids still ask about it.
  3. Get free advice on your query at the subreddit R/PubTips. Take it with a grain of salt.
  4. Hone your “elevator pitch” to within an inch of its life, and use it to catch agent attention in your query, your twitter pitches, etc. It took me forever to figure out what that is, but if you were trying to describe a book to a friend, in relation to other things they might have seen or read, how would you do it? So for a rom-com it might be: It’s like Emma meets The Great British Baking Show, and the main character is trying to match the contestants in the tent without realizing she’s in love with the baker next to her. You kind of instantly know what you’re in for.

In terms of giving up, I did essentially shelve this project. I had one full manuscript out (with my now agent) and most agents had replied already. I had moved on to querying a second project when I decided to throw out a Twitter pitch into the world for DVPit. This got an agent manuscript request and a small press manuscript request, the small press request turned into an offer of publication, and that turned into a second small press offer of publication and my agent offer.

Posted in revision, writing habits

Why I Write By Hand

Posted on by Valerie Lute

Earlier this year, I talked to Bair Hurley at the Writerly Bites podcast about writing by hand. I write all my first drafts by hand, sometimes my second drafts too. I often recommend writing by hand to my beginner writing students who are afraid of the blank page. When we’re writing on a computer, it seems very formal immediately. Because that Times New Roman looks so neat and perfect in the Word Processor, we want the writing to be perfect too. We start typing, that red squiggly line shows up. Now we’re going back.

When we’re writing by hand, it’s much easier to think of our draft as something impermanent, like a grocery list. It’s notes.

I often teach “Shitty First Drafts” by Anne Lamott, which is a very funny chapter from her book Bird by Bird. It’s all about turning off your inner critic and freeing yourself to write your first draft.

She says, “The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, “Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?,” you let her. No one is going to see it. If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means.”

In my experience, writing by hand can help us free that inner child. We can return to an earlier stage in our lives when we scrawled all over the page with abandon.

For me, the biggest benefit to writing by hand is avoiding the internet. The computer just has too many distractions. I’m one of those people who has all kinds of browser add-ons to limit my ability to use distracting websites. I have one that eliminates the feed of social media sites, and another that sets a time limit. Still, I keep finding new ways to waste time online.

What I have to do is go into a room with no devices, just a pencil and paper. Then I can only think about the words on the page.

I always dread finishing a draft, because then I have to go to my computer and face all those temptations again. Still, there are benefits to having to completely rewrite the story when I type it up. When you have a typed first draft, it’s easy to accept the major choices you’ve already made. Instead of thinking about if that scene is really necessary, you just fiddle around with the word choices. But if you have to type up the whole thing, why spend the time typing up a scene that’s not working at all? Plus you’ll find that you’ll make improvements to the word choice too, without even thinking about it.

Don’t take it from me. A lot of successful writers still write by hand: Joyce Carol Oats, Quentin Tarantino, and Neil Gaiman to name a few.

I’ll leave you with the words of Stephen King, who switched to writing by hand after years of typing. He said writing by hand “makes you think about each word as you write it[…]the sentences compose themselves in your head. It’s like hearing music, only its words. But you see more ahead because you can’t go as fast.”

Posted in Point of View, Uncategorized

The Difference Between Point-of-View in Books and Movies

Posted on by Valerie Lute

We spend a lot of time consuming film-based entertainment. The average American watches nearly three hours of television a day. This influences how writers, especially beginner writers, imagine the scenes of their novel, memoir, or short story. Without even realizing it, they see the lens of their story like a camera panning across space. The characters become like actors, primarily expressing emotions through their facial expressions.

However, these techniques don’t work as well in books as they do in film. Books instead rely on different idioms, ones that don’t translate well into film. 

Interior Monologue 

Some movies do have a voice-over. You’ve all seen one. Here are the opening lines of the movie A Christmas Story (1983):

Ah, there it is. My house. And good old Cleveland Street. How could I ever forget it? And there I am, with that dumb round face and…that stupid stocking cap.

When a movie has a narrator, the narrator is usually commenting on what is happening on screen. In this case, the adult Ralphie is commenting on the image of his house and his appearance when he was nine years old. Narrators in movies wouldn’t start jumping around in time or talking about something unrelated to the current scene.

But how often are your thoughts perfectly linear? How long can you think about one topic without a random idea popping up? This is one part of the human experience that can be better captured in writing. 

Here’s an example from As I Lay Dying, a novel told through the stream of consciousness of several characters. In this chapter the son Jewel overhears his brother making their mother’s coffin from the room where the mother lies, still very much alive, for the moment.

It’s because he stays out there, right under the window, hammering and sawing on that goddamn box. Where she’s got to see him. Where every breath she draws is full of his knocking and sawing where she can see him saying See. See what a good one I am making for you. I told him to go somewhere else. I said Good God do you want to see her in it. It’s like when he was a little boy and she says if she had some fertilizer she would try to raise some flowers and he taken the bread pan and brought it back from the barn full of dung.

While the narrator starts describing where his brother is and what he’s doing, he immediately starts making assumptions about his brother’s thoughts: “See what a good [coffin] I’m making for you.” Then the narrator jumps back in time. He’s comparing his brother’s actions to something he did as a young child. The mother had asked for fertilizer and the little boy unthinkingly used the bread pan to bring in some dung. The narrator doesn’t explain how these two scenes are alike, it is just where his mind went.

This isn’t the only way a narrator in a book can express more than the narrator in a movie. The narrator in a book can give lengthy judgements, express complex philosophical ideas, or give extensive historical background that would be too cumbersome to work on screen.

Unreliable Narrators

Movies and TV shows tell stories with cameras, and cameras don’t lie. If the camera shows Bud stealing a car, we know that Bud stole a car. However, if a first-person narrator in a short story tells us Bud stole a car, we don’t necessarily know that Bud stole a car, especially if the narrator is mad at Bud for winning over the girl the narrator loved. 

This is what happens in the T.C. Boyle story “Termination Dust.” I went along with the narrator at first, taking his word for everything. I believed him about how bad this guy Bud was and the negative consequences in store for the woman after she follows Bud to his remote Alaskan cabin. I believed the narrator until he bursts into the cabin where Bud and the woman are making love and gives this lame excuse when the dog attacks him:

And I should say here that I like dogs and that I’ve never lifted a finger to hurt any dog that I’ve ever owned, but I had to put this one down. I caught him as he left the floor and slammed him into the wall behind me until he collapsed in a heap.

When I got to this point in the story, I started to question everything the narrator had told me thus far. A person who would treat an animal like that is not to be trusted.

Word Choice and Syntax

In a film, the camera determines our impression of the setting. Whether or now we feel a setting is threatening or friendly depends primarily on the visual techniques of the filmmaker. However in books, the word choice and sentence structure can change how you feel about a location, and it may be in contrast to how the setting physically looks. Here is a bright, sunny day in suburban California, as described by Tom Wolfe in “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.”

…endless scorched boulevards lined with one-story stores, shops, bowling alleys, skating rinks, taco drive-ins, all of them shaped not like rectangles but like trapezoids, from the way the roofs slant up from the back and the plate-glass fronts slant out as if they’re going to pitch forward on the sidewalk and throw up.

The long list of nouns in this sentence has a dizzying effect. The length of the sentence makes it hard to catch one’s breath, which is also reflected in the choice of adjective, “endless.” All these techniques, along with the simile about the building throwing up, make it clear that this is a hostile alien environment, despite being a normal Southern California suburb.

Internal Sensations

A film can show you a character’s face and body language better than a book can. A great actor can make even a sparsely written character come to life. However, books have an advantage when it comes to revealing the internal sensations of a character. 

The Ben Lerner short story “Cafe Loup” takes place in the brief moments while the narrator is choking to death. A film could show a person choking—his face turning colors, his rigid hands coming toward his neck—but it would be impossible to convey in the visual medium what choking feels like. As the narrator’s friend begins the Heimlich maneuver, this is what he experiences:

Aaron was behind me, his breath on my neck, trying to figure out where to put his hands. Instead of my life “flashing before my eyes,” a series of odors were doing whatever the olfactory equivalent of flashing is, all of them intensified by the fact that I couldn’t inhale. Childhood cut grass (nothing is a cliché when you’re dying), the sulfur of strike-anywhere matches, asphalt after rain, fresh paint in a room whose windows are open in the spring, movie-theatre popcorn, the sexual smell (that is, the vaginal smell) of a woman who broke my heart in my late twenties, hyacinth, watermelon candy (in the throat of Mrs. Sackett’s student?), my first cat (Felix), grilled peaches at my brother’s in Seattle […] as Aaron performed his first ineffectual thrust, tears finally in my eyes, haloing all the tabletop candles, my little aleph, little star, my asterisk, and even as my peripheral vision began to contract and my ears started to ring and I was begging my daughter to forgive me in my mind, I was surprised—and surprised that I was surprised, that in my last moments on earth, as I was flooded with terror and love, I had the mental space to note how the world failed to conform to my expectations of it…

Conclusion 

Sometimes I see beginner writers use techniques from film in their stories—montages that slice a bunch of scenes together, or dialogue that is said to be inaudible to the reader. In literature, these techniques don’t make sense and only create confusion. But when an author uses techniques that are especially for the written form, they can create a unique artistic experience that no movie can imitate. The best way to learn these techniques is to read—read widely and frequently.

If you’re looking for more techniques for bringing your story to life, subscribe to the blog or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

Posted in setting, the novel, Uncategorized, writing prompts

How to Write A Setting With Personality

Posted on by Valerie Lute

“The setting was like another character.” Have you ever heard someone describe a story this way? What is it that makes some settings feel alive, as if they were a person and not just a landscape? It takes more than just writing vivid description. Today, I’m sharing three ways to give your settings personality.

Setting is Responsive

My favorite instruction on writing setting comes from The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House. In her essay, “Place” Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Caroline, shares what makes setting come alive for her.

I cannot abide a story told to me by a numb, empty voice that never responds to anything that’s happening, that doesn’t express some feeling in response to what it sees. Place is not just what your feet are crossing to get to somewhere. Place is feeling, and feeling is something a character expresses. More, it is something the writer puts on the page–articulates with deliberate purpose. If you keep giving me these eyes that note all the details–if you keep telling me the lawn is manicured but you don’t tell me that it makes your character both deeply happy and slightly anxious–then I’m a bit frustrated with you. I want a story that’ll pull me in. I want a story that makes me drunk. I want a story that feeds me glory. And most of all, I want a story that I can trust. I want a story that is happening in a real place, which means a place that has meaning and that evokes emotions in the person who’s telling me the story. Place is emotion.

Dorothy Allison, “Place”

In other words, in order for a place to feel like a character, the other characters should display an interactive relationship with it.

Allison goes on to say, “Place is where the ‘I’ goes. Place is what that ‘I’ looks at, what it doesn’t look at. Is it happy? Is it sad? Is it afraid? Is it curious?”

You have to know your main character’s personality well. This is especially important if you have a first-person narrator, since everything is being filtered through that character’s opinions.

Writing Prompt

In Allison’s essay, she makes a list of single lines of description that summarize her feelings toward various cities she’s visited. They are as follows:

  • Central Florida is despair.
  • New York City is sex.
  • California is smug.
  • Boston has never gotten over Henry James.
  • Seattle and Portland lie about their weather.
  • Iowa City is one hotel room and a chlorine stink away from the suburbs of hell.

Using Dorothy Allison’s sentences as a model, write single sentence descriptions that sum up the feelings you have about each of the cities and neighborhood where you have lived.

These lines make great opening sentences for stories or essays. Vladimir Nabokov began one of his short stories, “Spring in Fialta is cloudy and dull.”

Setting is Personified

So far we’ve talked about how characters react to settings, but sometimes settings have an agency of their own. In the following passage, Jeanette Winterson introduces the setting in the first chapter of her novel The Daylight Gate.

The Forest of Pendle used to be a hunting ground, but some say that the hill is the hunter—alive in its black-and-green coat cropped like an animal pelt. […]

There is still a tradition, or a superstition, that a girl-child born in Pendle Forest should be twice baptized; once in church and once in a black pool at the foot of the hill. The hill will know her then. She will be its trophy and its sacrifice. She must make her peace with her birthright, whatever that means.

Jeanette Winterson, The Daylight Gate

Notice how she describes the hill like a creature, wearing a coat cropped like an animal pelt. Then as we go on, the hill begins to act, not just look, like a living creature. It knows the girl, as much as she knows it.

When nonliving things are described as if they had the qualities of something alive, this is called personification.

In this particular novel, we might suspect that there is something supernatural or uncanny about this setting that is giving it its agency. But even if your setting’s personification is a mere metaphor, it can still be effective in making it more evocative to the reader.

Writing Prompt

Your setting is alive. Write a scene where the setting has a message that it wants to communicate to a human character. How does it get its message across? Also think about your human character’s emotional response to the situation.

Setting is Defamiliarized

There’s an old saying that it’s the job of a writer to make the ordinary feel strange and new. This is called defamiliarization. The passage below describes a place that many of you should be familiar with, but does it feel comfortable and ordinary?

If there is a river within a thousand miles of Riverside Drive, I saw no signs of it. It’s like every place else out there: endless scorched boulevards lined with one-story stores, shops, bowling alleys, skating rinks, taco drive-ins, all of them shaped not like rectangles but like trapezoids, from the way the roofs slant up from the back and the plateglass fronts slant out as if they’re going to pitch forwards on the sidewalk and throw up.

Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

Here we have the suburban sprawl typical of southern California, but the description makes it feel anything but typical. Everything is slanted and irregularly shaped. The buildings are ready to vomit.

It is described in a way that makes the readers feel like they’re dizzy themselves. This isn’t just because of the word choice; the long run-on sentence is used intentionally to make the reader feel overwhelmed.

Whether or not the reader feels comfortable with your setting has nothing to with whether they know the place in real life. It’s all up to your words and sentence structure.

Writing Prompt

Write a scene where an alien visits a setting that is familiar to people living in the West in the 21st Century. It might be a supermarket, a highway, or a school. How does this setting feel outlandish, strange or unfamiliar to your character? What words and sentence structures capture this feeling?

The character doesn’t literally have to be a space alien. They could be an escaped circus animal, time traveler or anyone else you can imagine.

Wrapping Up

Now that we’ve learned about ways to give our setting personality, it’s time to think about how you might want to apply this information to your work in progress. You might want to double-check descriptions you’ve already written in your novel or memoir. Is it doing at least one of the following?

  • Showing something about your main character’s personality and how they relate to the world around them.
  • Creating a sense that the landscape is alive through its interactions with the human characters.
  • Disorienting readers with surprising word choices and sentence structures, giving them a sense of newness.

If it’s a “no” to all of the above, it may be that your setting is, pardon the pun, fading into the background. Revising with what you know now will make your setting an active character in its own right.

Need more advice on making your writing come alive? Follow this blog on Facebook or Twitter! I look forward to writing with you again.

Posted in the novel, Uncategorized

How to Write A Gripping Opening Line

Posted on by Valerie Lute

First impressions are everything. If you don’t hook your readers from the start, they might turn on Netflix or start doom-scrolling on Facebook. There are plenty of other things for people to do besides read your novel.

But don’t worry! Today we’ll learn how to find a hook for your novel so your readers won’t be able to put it down.

Examining Opening Lines

Let’s look at some opening sentences and see how they are working. I selected these by pulling famous novels off my husband’s bookshelf. In other words, I could have picked any number of well-regarded books and found opening lines that work similar ways.

Catch-22

It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain, he fell madly in love with him.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

The hook: This line begs the question: Why did Yossarian fall in love with the priest? Making the reader ask a question is always a good strategy for an opening line. It hooks the reader and makes them want to keep reading to see if they get an answer.

The tone: In addition, the idea of a man falling in love with a priest at first sight is humorous. This sets the silly tone of the rest of the novel. It is important that your opening line help establish the reader’s expectations about what kind of book they have chosen to read, even if the book later subverts some of the reader’s expectations, which Catch-22 certainly does.

The character: We are also being introduced to the character of Yossarian here. Generally the first person you see in a novel will be the main character. That may sound basic, but it’s important. There are exceptions to this, of course, but if you chose to begin with someone other than the main character, you need to write carefully so the reader can follow the transition.

The Golden Compass

Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening halls, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

The hook: Here we see the main character sneaking through the hallway. This begs the question: why does she need to sneak? Right away we sense that there is a mystery afoot. The story begins in medias res, or in the middle of things. This means there is no exposition or introduction at the beginning of the story: we are thrown into the action right away.

The world: The fourth word in this sentence is “daemon.” This tells us right away that we are in a fantasy novel and sets the readers expectations accordingly.

The movement: It is significant that Lyra is not in a static position. She’s moving through the hallway. This movement makes the reader feel like they are getting pulled into the story. If Philip Pullman had started the novel a little later, we would see Lyra hiding and overhearing a conversation she’s not supposed to hear. Even though this would technically still be in medias res, it’s less gripping than seeing her in motion.

Gravity’s Rainbow

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

The hook: There’s a big mystery here. What is this thing in the sky and why is it screaming? Why did it happen before and why is it happening now? Having this much mystery up front can be risky because it may alienate some readers. Make sure you introduce a character quickly to help ground them.

The movement: Once again we begin a story with movement, but this time it is the movement of an object across the entire skyline, rather than the movement of a single character that we saw earlier. This alone says a lot about the novel: it’s a big book about big ideas and takes a broad view of history. The movement of the large object across the large space is mimicking this.

The Devil Wears Prada

The light hadn’t even officially turned green at the intersection of 17th and Broadway before an army of yellow cabs roared past the tiny death trap I was attempting to navigate around the city streets. Clutch, gas, shift (neutral to first? or second?) release, clutch, I repeated over and over in my head…

The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger

The Character: We learn a lot about the main character from these opening sentences. We learn she’s a frantic, anxiety-prone loser. Her struggle against traffic immediately establishes her as an underdog. Readers tend to love underdogs and want to root for them, especially if they find her anxieties and problems relatable.

The Movement: Once again, we are in motion. This time, we’re careening through the chaotic streets of New York City. We know this even though the city isn’t named because of the concrete pieces of description: the familiar street names combined with the yellow cabs and traffic. But importantly, this setting is done inside the act of driving. This allows the reader to feel like they are driving through New York City with the character.

Pumping Up Your Novel’s Opening Line

Now let’s apply what we’ve learned to our own opening lines. The following are general principles you can apply to begin your novel with a bang.

Add Movement

As we saw in our examples, keeping the readers in motion will draw them into the story. This is a great way for the writer to prove that they created a dynamic world, assuring the reader that the characters will experience change by the end of the story.

Act First, Explain Later

Don’t bog down the beginning with paragraphs of backstory. Begin with an intriguing scene and incorporate the necessary background in small doses throughout the first chapter.

Build an Iceberg

Remember Hemingway’s iceberg? A good writer doesn’t need to spell everything out for the readers. Instead, they give just enough information for the readers to use their own imagination. This is especially true in opening sentences, where some mystery or ambiguity can hook the reader.

Establish the Voice

The reader should get a hint at the general tone of the novel from the very beginning. Will it be a tender love story or a side-splitting satire? If you have a first-person narrator, you also have to give a hint at the character’s personality. Are they a hapless schmuck, like the narrator of The Devil Wears Prada, or are they are sardonic and bitter, like Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye? In a first-person novel, the reader’s interest is often dependent on the strength of the narrator’s personality.

Wrapping Up

I suggest you take some of your favorite books off the shelves and examine their opening sentences. How many of them follow these rules? How many break them? Do you notice a difference between classic and contemporary novels?

If you’d like more advice on improving your novel, follow this blog on Facebook or Twitter! I look forward to writing with you again.