First Pages

Everyone writer knows the importance of hooking a reader quickly. Knowing it and doing it are two entirely different things. Slow beginnings have many reasons. Today I’m going to focus on one of them. Backstory.

There is a tendency to stuff first chapter(s) with backstory. Please don’t do that. If we don’t know the character, why would we care how s/he felt as a child when his/her parakeet died? I compare book openings to parties in one way. We are meeting people for the first time. When you meet someone at a party, do you immediately learn their life story? Would you want to? Probably not. We want to learn more about people as we get to know them, and characters are no different. Make your protagonist(s) interesting and/or likeable, and we’ll keep reading. Telling us (and backstory usually takes the form of ‘telling’ instead of ‘showing’) the hero/heroine’s life right away seldom intrigues readers. We drop the book and pick up another just like we would avoid a bore at a party.

When I work with new writers, I usually find their opening near the end of the first chapter. Then the writer asks how readers will understand it without the first part of the chapter. That’s the point. We don’t have to understand, we only have to want to understand. It’s up to us to create characters and/or a situation which draws the reader in, and we have to do that fast!

My best advice on openings is to keep backstory to the barest minimum. Any character history we need to know, emphasis on ‘need’, can be slipped in later, teaspoon at a time.

As you develop your characters and plot, ask yourself what you want readers to know vs what they must know. My bet is much of what you think we need to know is really only something you want to tell us. You love your characters. At times they feel a part of you. You want readers to love them, too. That’s natural. But if you make them interesting and/or likeable, rather than telling the story of their lives, readers will follow along just fine. They’ll want to know more, and that’s a hook!

Your first line doesn’t have to be a grabber, but it’s nice if it is. If not, have something which makes us want more by the end of the first or second paragraph. Not long ago my husband said, “The clock on your computer is wrong.” I said, “Oh, that’s right. It’s Thursday.” The look on his face was priceless. Later I thought what a great opening that would be. I’d have to read more just to figure out what in the world a clock had to do with Thursday. (My computer clock always goes off on Thursday. I have no idea why.) Your hook doesn’t have to be an explosion or corpse or any spectacular event. Just something offbeat can grab a reader’s attention. Lewis Black does a hysterical routine about one line of an overheard conversation driving him nuts. He heard one woman say to another, “If it wasn’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have gone to college.” That’s all he heard and it made him loopy. He wanted to know more, and kept hearing that sentence in his head and wondering what it meant. In other words, that one line had him hooked.

If you're interested in reading them, the first chapters of Amanda’s Rib and Oblivious are at my web site. I went with a first line grabber, then tried to build interest. www.cyndiadepre.com