Novel Beginnings: How To Start Your Book

hello everyone Alexa done here and today I am talking all about beginnings you have to start somewhere but the thing about beginnings is it's really really important that you mail them so pressures on really every part of a book is the hardest part to write and I have a whole video on middles middles are so bad so I'm going totally out of order now we're gonna do beginnings and eventually I'll make a really long video about endings but this is all about beginnings essentially the first act of your book how do you start your book what do you need to do in terms of craft and pacing so that people want to keep reading it's important to remember that you really only get one first impression usually and in the case of agents editors and readers you might only capture their attention for one page so you have to make that one page count but that one page has to lead to a great first scene to a great first chapter up to a great inciting incident and it all has to kind of build up to the break into two the first major decision point that propels them into that dreaded muddled middle essentially at the beginning of your book has to do a lot of work it has to fire on a lot of cylinders and I'm going to talk very broadly and generally about beginnings first acts first but then I'm going to get hyper specific we're going to really drill into first sentences and first pages but before we do that let's start with starting in the right place or starting in the wrong place this is kind of a you know it when you see it problem but many stories start in the wrong place the writer chooses to focus on the first key moment opening scene where you open your story is really really important sometimes you nail it on the first go and your first draft but many writers have to fix this in editing first you want to avoid cliches things like waking up from a dream well or even having a dream dreams are really common openings very overdone you want to avoid waking up getting ready eating breakfast meeting key characters you'll see this a lot in Y a like first day of school describing the weather is another really big cliche another not so much cliche but just don't that we're gonna talk a bit more about detail is opening on action I'm gonna tell you why that can be a bad thing and can is the optimal word all of these cliches and tropes that make bad beginnings can be done well there are exceptions to every role so for example Hunger Games starts with Katniss waking up and going through her day but the key thing is is that Suzanne Collins made very specific choices about what that day is it's a significant day and every single beat that Katniss walks through gives you vital information about character and world but the reason this works is that your opening is a vital opportunity to say things about character and world you are giving your reader the introduction to what this is why it's interesting and why they should care to that end where whatever you choose to open on should perform multiple functions it should say something about your world about your main plot conceit and about your main character it's also about timing a great piece of advice I've heard is to think of that opening scene that first chapter as 15 minutes before the big thing happens 15 minutes before the thing that's gonna change everything happens doesn't have to literally be 15 minutes but sometimes thinking of it in literal terms can help you land on okay so where is my character right before everything is going to change that's really what it is you're thinking about that moment before the big moment of change and when it comes to starting in the wrong place very often writers they start too far ahead and you end up with dragged pasting because readers are reading for scene after scene after scene and chapter after chapter and they're like what's the point what is this leading toward and by choosing the right starting point you're giving them just enough of a taste to establish everything but without running the risk of boring them because you take too long to get to the point essentially I'm going to talk about what that point is in a minute but first I want to talk about exposition pitfalls this is a big trap that a lot of writers fall into in the beginning of the book because they think that they need to tell the reader everything all of the backstory and little details that they think are essential to the reader caring and understanding the world and wanting to read on but the trick especially in the very literal beginning first scenes first chapters a lot of writers fall into the trap of info dumping and too much exposition you can have too much of a good thing this can manifest as too many asides as you're walking through the character scene of backstory if you hit the reader over the head with this key backstory point they can go I know this already so for example let's say your opening scene is through two characters who have conflict with each other and they're having a conversation if you pause in your narrative too many times to be like well once upon a time they blah blah blah blah blah and you're repeating essentially the same idea the reader is gonna become frustrated it's a matter of giving key information carefully and within reason typically if you have a really important bit of backstory exposition you only need to say it once if you say it well maximum two times where I've read beginnings that just really kind of drag in terms of exposition it's when an author is hitting you over the head three four five times with information that you already have I'll tell you that in drafting it's kind of natural to do this not just in the first chapter but in the first act generally because we as the writers are often developing things and figuring things out ourself but it is your critical job in editing to take all that extra stuff out you don't need to say something three times that you can say super efficiently once or twice max in carefully chosen spots because it is true that's something that you introduced in chapter one a reader might have kind of forgotten the finer points a bit by Chapter four so you can drop in a little reminder and reference but where I've seen the most egregious cases is three four or five times in a single chapter especially the first chapter going back over the same back story points and then with info dumping this is long paragraphs of pure back story there are certain key things you do need to drop into the text but if you have too much info dumping then it's just walls and rolls and walls of telling telling is passive and it's not engaging to your reader no reader wants to feel like they're reading a history of the story your storytelling should be engaging and active and you should use other craft techniques to weave in these details of backstory and world instead of info dumping and it's totally okay to trust your reader to be curious about something and find out later a big one where I've seen this with info dumping is character backstories I've seen this a lot in romances where there's some sort of backstory or conflict between the main character and the love interest but the writer really just like nails that end like this is their backstory it's completely fine in an introductory section to have a look a shared look or a feeling in the main character that goes unexplained you're essentially teasing that there's something here and you have to trust your reader to know there's something here I might not know exactly what it is in this exact moment but I know I'm gonna find out over the next couple of chapters part of the craft of writing and artful exposition is learning when to reveal bits of information and when and generally speaking it's better to dole them out gradually especially through active character to actions and interesting scenes and also again trusting the reader it's the iceberg theory the reader should only see the tip of the iceberg whether it's character backstory or world building you know the rest that's under the surface but they only really need the tip of the iceberg so stick to that only give them as much as they need to really actively understand and enjoy the story anything more than that is simply going to drag your pacing the third thing that can be a real pitfall of beginnings is when I don't care about your characters when your reader just doesn't care because you haven't given them a reason to and that is a primary function of your first act and specifically the section of the book that leads up to your inciting incident and up to the choice that the character has to make we're just gonna propel you into act two or the middle beginnings are really the place of character development it's when you lay all of your track groundwork to make people care about the story this is why opening on action is found upon because if you throw the reader right into something really high-octane and exciting but they don't know who anyone is or what's going on they're not going to care so if especially if it's life or death stakes type action the reader will be like who is this person and that is why an opening like Susan Collins is opening for the Hunger Games which is technically trophy and cliche works because the choices she made walking you through this morning with Katniss leading up to the reaping made you care she showed you who Katniss cared about and illustrated some of her vulnerabilities as well as her wants and the conflicts in the way of those wats that kind of drew on our empathy and that's essentially what you're doing when you're making a reader care about your character you're providing enough information details you're showing things through interactions to make them feel vulnerable or on a certain level relatable the relatability is overrated you just need to make well-rounded enough that there's something for the reader to latch on to and let's talk about some ways that you can make readers care about your characters one kind of famous cliche one is the save the cat moment this is why there is a craft book called save the cat it's by blake snyder who came up with the blake snyder beat sheet i do like to talk about the blake snyder beat sheet i like some of the beats i think learning the story structure can help you and one of those key beats enact one is the save the cat moment and in this case it is literally the hero of the story of saving a cat so you show them caring for someone who needs their help and that's a very basic oh they have empathy so i like them other things you can do is show vulnerability in your characters early on in act 1 it's not just kind of what are they good at but what are their weaknesses what are their foils what do they want and what is kind of standing in their way it's through clearly establishing kind of who your character is and what they're going for and how your world and the inherent conflict of your world and the plot is going to create issues this also develops empathy and the reader because theoretically hopefully they want your character to get what they want and they go oh no this terrible thing that is standing in their way it's clearly establishing essentially the stakes of your world and this all brings me to the point of it all I tease that we would talk about this the point of the beginning which is everything should lead up to your inciting incident this is the most important thing you are going to do in your act 1 and I can always tell when a book has a problem if it doesn't have an inciting incident the inciting incident is the big thing that happens to change everything and this is an essential aspect of story because if nothing changes nothing happens and the thing is if you don't do all this other stuff I've talked about well then your inciting incident isn't going to land if you don't delicately balance your exposition if you don't establish a character with very clear wants and flaws and qualities that people care about then your inciting incident isn't going to matter I mentioned how opening with breakneck action doesn't work because we don't care same thing goes with hitting us with the inciting incident too soon in the story some people think that it needs to happen on page one but you don't have to be in a rush but she also shouldn't take too much time there's basically a sweet spot that you have to find and I'm always hesitant to be prescriptive about this if you follow save the cat it actually gives you a literal page number by which you need to have your inciting incident with novels there are different ways to navigate it you can also have like multiple inciting incidents in the sense that you can have like the thing that happens and then the other thing that happens that actually triggers the journey so for example if like in a thriller you could have the murder happen very soon but the actual inciting incident is what happens after the murder say the main character is a suspect or someone like sends them a threatening letter so that's kind of two things working together for a larger inciting incident well technically someone dying it represents the big shake-up and the change it's actually the consequence of that that creates personal conflict for the main character that is the inciting incident and generally that does need to hit I'd say the sweet spot is the 15 percent mark you can get away with 20% it's more than 30 you have a problem but the time you hit the 30 percent mark in your manuscript I'm of course going by Kindle percentages you need to get into your second act because basically the thing about beginnings is if you bore your reader you will lose them you need to keep them turning pages and actually incentivize them to keep reading that's why you need your inciting incident to happen at a good point they need to care about your character they need to understand enough about the world and the characters to understand what's going on but not have so much that you're making them read 50 60 70 pages before thing happens and really you can fix so many problems in a novel in your second act in your middle and in your end by nailing your beginning by nailing that first act because flawless setup has payoffs and if you have a pretty great middle and a pretty great ending but your begining sucks no one's going to get to those better parts of the book so I also do want to caution the opposite problem which is people who work so much on their beginning hyper polishing it making it super super great and then the rest of the book doesn't hold up that is a different kind of problem with different solutions and just a few examples of inciting incidents and hungergames it is of course prints name being chosen in the reaping in my book brightly burning is Stella getting the job that she applies for which happens in about chapter four like there's definitely a good amount of setup compare that to my second book the Stars we steal my inciting incident essentially happens at the end of chapter one you could really play around with the placement of your inciting incidents and it's gonna be completely dependent on kind of the world building character establishment etc of your book different books definitely call for different pacing and different structures as I mentioned already in a mystery or a thriller you want your murder usually to happen as soon as possible but it can vary the murder can technically be an inciting incident but then you follow it with an actual character specific inciting incident and a great example of this is Dana MELAS people like us the body is discovered in the first chapter I mean it hits you right in the face I think it's on page one possibly page two but the real inciting incident to the action of the book is when the main character receives a blackmail note so there's really not one like formulaic way to do this but it's a matter of kind of understanding what works and what doesn't work in lots of different books and deciding what is going to work best for your plot conceit characters and so on the most important thing though is not to do any of this too soon or leave it too late it's this magical kind of balance of pasting in the beginning of your book which all brings me to the next the thing that's going to follow your inciting incident and wrap up your beginning which is the decision-making moment that pushes the whole book into act 2 that pushes the character into the second act or your middle typically this is going to be a decision point you're gonna have your inciting incident and then your main character has to react to it and do something about it generally they're going to do something about it because if they don't there's no plot a character not deciding to do something isn't a plot so really they have to decide to do something but you always want to have a moment of reflection after an inciting incident it needs to sit with your characters so that it sits with your reader so that they appreciate what those consequences are and then yes you need to bring your character to a decision point whatever that decision point is will propel the main action of the second act very often in books it's the literal decision to go on a quest in other cases it's resisting a romance that of course the reader knows is inevitable in a mystery thriller it's an investigation plot it can really vary depending on your genre but you want to bring your act 1 to that decision point and that wraps up what the beginning of your book is essentially but let's dial it all the way back to the literal beginning of your book because I think a lot of people really struggle with this I think they get stuck on it and in fairness literal beginnings are important as I mentioned with many agents and readers you only get that one first impression I know when I'm considering buying a book when I do the look inside feature on Amazon or I physically pick it up in a bookstore I will often read just the first page I might give it one page turn in a quick skim but it's really all about that first page in some cases we really look at first lines I'll tell you for sure an agent can skim your first page which is only gonna be about 250 words and know whether or not you can write and whether or not this is a story that they want to follow bearing in mind of course they have read your pitch so really your first page has to deliver on the promise of whatever your pitch is in the case of agents this is what you're saying in your query letter and in the case of readers its back cover copy though some readers don't read back cover copy so it's kind of like a mixed bag that first page does in many ways have to stand on its own it has to communicate a lot about what type of the story is independent of the blurb but it also has to deliver on the promise of the blurb and that's kind of what I want to talk about with literal first pages and first lines so there are essentially two key places where your novel has to deliver on the promise of the premise the literal beats of your book in act two called the promise of the premise or fun and games which is where you have a fun and games essentially like montage of whatever the hook of your book is that's going to be an act to and also on page one so this is when you're going to be very careful about what scene are setup you choose for the very beginning of your book because whatever it is should make complete sense for your hook for your pitch for your setup for example as I mentioned in a mystery or a thriller it's going to be discovering a body it's going to be showing an aspect of the main character's life that investigation character that is going to play into your main mysteries so just a random example aside to pull off my shelf is the cheerleaders by Kara Thomas I didn't even remember what the first page was but I just checked it is the main character reacting negatively to the new house in the suburbs where she is with her mom and her stepfather and this is essentially kind of a book about the oppressive nature of suburbs and appearances and so on and it's a book about a girl whose sister died five years ago and it created fractures in her family this is actually a great example of something that feels kind of mundane a character reflecting on their new home but it definitely works in the context of the book my book the Stars we steal opens on a fancy party in a ballroom on a character kind of absorbing all of the pomp and circumstance and reflect on the fact that she is in this forced courtship ritual and she really hates it which is definitely the promise of the premise which is Jane Austen Meets The Bachelor a bowl was a natural place to open a book that is basically all about dress porn and parties and courtship it's the promise of the premise readers want to read about girls and dresses and boys and parties that is the premise of the premise of a book like mine coming back to the Hunger Games even though it seems very mundane that morning of Katniss waking up and going about her routine before the reaping this is the promise of the premise that we all bought from dystopian novels which was the gradual introduction of this horrendous world kind of the contextualization of what makes this a dystopia same thing with divergent where she's getting ready for the ceremony and it's the focus of like her mother doing her hair and there not being any mirrors in the house again a way to use setting and set up to tell you a lot about the world as well as the characters I think I might do an entire video that's just analysing first pages because I think using examples is one of the best ways to kind of figure this out but I don't want to derail this whole video by going into more examples but I probably will do that so look for that video ditto burst lines so let's talk about first lines so the pressure is on because your first line definitely needs to land not every first line of a first book has to be like it award-winner but there are some that are just damn notable think about Pride and Prejudice where it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife I do look it up so I nailed it but I could have rattled off a decent approximation of that because it is such a famous slide and it also really sums up the general concept of the book and it's definitely a promise on the premise because you know it's gonna be a social politics courtship romance and also very funny Jane Austen was very witty and that's the thing if your tone is punchy if you are a punchy writer if you are funny and that is part of the voice of your book I say punchy and pissy on that first line I think the best lines are kind of short and sweet and a little bit quippy when that is the point a first line can tell you a lot about a book it can tell you a lot about the author's voice and what they are trying to do with this book so the first line of my book the stars beast eale is the extravagance made my teeth hurt first of all it's kind of a ridiculous sentence which was on purpose and it's a character who is responding very negatively to this social situation that she's stuck in the next paragraph goes on to explain how ridiculous this party is and specifically her teeth hurting you go on to realize she's basically grinding her teeth because it is so so terrible immediately you're thrown into the mindset of the main character and kind of the mood and tone of what this first scene is meant to be in the case of brightly burning my first line was the gravity stabilizers we're failing again the purpose there is simply there in space it's a sci-fi ooh and that's the thing it's not like an amazing magical line that's gonna be on a quilt pillow but it definitely performed a function and in both of those cases these are short declarative sentences a strong declarative sentence can do a lot of great work on your first page you also have the option of opening with dialogue but this one you do have to be a little bit careful this can fall under jumping into an action where the readers don't have any context and so they don't care if you dump a reader right into a conversation between two people they might feel a little bit lost there can be exceptions but that's just kind of my caution there with opening on conversation but you can't open on a really zippy line of dialogue for example in my first ever book I had the character at a student assembly and so the first line is an absolutely ridiculous line from a student government candidate's speech and that was used to set the tone of like honestly utter ridiculousness I decided to randomly pull alienated off the shelf by Melissa Landers this is interesting her literal first line is just winning one word period followed by kara Sweeney had made it her business and business was good that's actually a great example it's not the literal first line it's kind of two lines short and sweet lines that work in concert with each other and that already gives you a really strong sense of the main character so that's the thing where the first lines that you're considering what is that first line or that set of first lines essentially that first paragraph telling the reader about your character about your world the tone NZ voice and that's really it with beginnings it's both the micro-level first lines first pages and the macro-level gosh there's a lot of deft work you have to handle in the first act even just the first chapter I know it's a lot I know it can be overwhelming but I hope this helped you get a sense of kind of examples of what works and what doesn't work pitfalls you might be falling into maybe sparked a few ideas it takes just practice to get good at beginnings to have a firm idea of what scene is going to perfectly demonstrate kind of the world of your book and characters with some books you have to do trial and error try a couple different beginnings on others you know before you start that perfect first line I came up with the first line of my thriller and I just it crystallized the entire first scene it crystallized the beginning of the book sometimes it's easy and sometimes it's hard you can fix most things and editing thankfully and it does take a lot of practice especially to figure out pacing and you're juggling setups character world and pacing in beginnings it's a lot but with practice you can figure it out and I believe in you and as I mentioned if then you're like oh gosh but what about the middle I have an entire video on that on metal middles and it's just a matter of time before I do one on 3rd acts on endings but I hope this helps you out with those blasted beginnings let me know it down below in the comments how do you end up starting your books do you know first lines first scenes first chapters do you arrive at them after some trial and error what are some things about beginnings of books that drive you crazy as a reader or as a writer give this video a thumbs up if you liked it and I'll make more of these ridiculously kind of in-depth craft talks about books and structure and stuff like that and if you're not already subscribed to the channel go ahead and do that I post new videos two to three times a week thank you so much for watching and as always guys happy writing

Channel: Alexa Donne

Views: 111,381

Rating: 4.9771352 out of 5

Keywords: alexa donne, author tube, writing advice, how to write a book, publishing advice, book beginnings, how to start your book, starting your novel, first chapters, first pages, first sentences, info dumping, exposition, inciting incident, inciting incidents

Id: NZSTcBRp8gg

Length: 29min 1sec (1741 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 22 2019