Opening Page Mistakes: Cliches That New Writers Have to Avoid

okay you're a new writer you're writing a manuscript you're really excited about it but what if you're making some horrible mistakes what if the mistake the way you open your book is like just classic errors to turn a literary agent off from ever wanting to read another page of your work well I'm Harry Bingham from Jericho right summer north of myself we've helped loads and loads of new writers make it all the way through to publication and I'll tell you how to not make the classic mistakes let's start off with mistake number one you haven't made this mistake I know you're a lot smarter than this but honestly we see a lot of new manuscripts by new writers and there will be a significant proportion of people who do make this mistake and that is to open the manuscript with somebody creaming and you know just don't do it okay it's such a sort of almost school type cliche for how to start on or you don't know how to start the story so you start with you know two paragraphs of somebody dreaming and then they wake up and oh you know isn't isn't that clever is that exciting it really isn't a good way to start you know even if it were the world's greatest way to start your novel it's going to strike that literary agent as oh my god not another one of these it's just a bad feeling to have right at the start of the book so it's a category one era do not start your book with someone dreaming but you haven't done that I know you haven't so what fun when we've gone to the second era which is also bed related okay it's about somebody waking up you'd be astonished how many first novels we see that open with somebody waking up I think what it is is you know you're your writer you've got a blank screen in front of you you're about to start a book you've got some ideas about who your character is and what's going to happen to them you sort of got to wake yourself up and you do that by waking your character up and you know they move around the first couple of pages of the book and they're no you know that brushing their teeth and getting dressed and yelling at the kids and doing all of that kind of stuff but the story doesn't really start until page through a page draw you know just just delete that whole getting up stuff just delete it and in your book where where the story starts my third mistake it's not such a horrendous one I have to say but it is something we see too often and it is also bed related okay it's starting a book with somebody in the hospital and obviously yeah look you know if you go to the crime book shelves in any big book store you can find plenty of novels that begin with people in a hospital it's really not good it's just again that bed thing it's we see so many books are open with somebody in hospital so it's effectively when you're approaching a literary agent what you're doing is saying I am using one of the most trodden ways of opening a book and you know it's just censor this message to the agent they're gonna worry oh no maybe the whole book is equally cliched and so I wouldn't tear that's a category one error but in if you really have to have that hospital-based opening I would avoid it okay moving on to the fourth error and this is a very different thing but it's it again is something that we come across and it's a wild excess of emotion okay and that's why I've got my kind of writing business now I don't mind you starting with a stormy sea nor sad scene but sometimes you know if you imagine you're going on a first date and somebody's super over intense in that first five minutes it's not that you know that intensity at the later stage of acquaintance might be okay but in the first five minutes it's a massive signal this isn't right get out of here and it's the same with books so if the opening language in your book is he felt the piercing agony of the sharp sword slicing through his tortured flesh bla bla bla bla bla it's just like oh no that's too much if you had that like 200 pages into the book you might have set up a whole kind of emotional world where where the reader was ready for that kind of thing but it's just too much and by all means start with a prison riot or start with somebody in a prison cell but then you want a much more oblique entrance to that he saw the bars of sunlight moving across the floor from where he was happy he could see nothing of the outside world beyond a narrow strip of cloud his chains rattle as he moved that kind of thing your you're putting your character in a really dark and gloomy situation and you're getting your reader in Frida's like who is this person why is he in jail what was the setup here but you're not kind of repelling them with that kind of excess of emotion okay no much sis I wasn't about to hold up three fingers five I know the number five it's a very rapid switch of point of view in those opening pages and by all means you can change points of view through the course of a book but remember the whole challenge in those opening pages is to get your reader into the novel to feel settled to feel happy in the worlds that you're creative and if you have like a page and a half from Susan's point of view and then like a page from a fun those point of view and then you know two pages from somebody else wins a review or some kind of flash back to when these guys were students together you're just giving the readers so much to process that you're making it hard for them to invest in your book so basically keep that first chapter nice and steady just settle your reader into the book and avoid those abrupt sort of rollercoaster style changes of you okay here are six and I really know my numbers they'll mailing it it's somewhat similar if you have too many names in your opening handful of pages you're just putting a huge kind of mental load on the reader it's just hard for them to grapple with so you know it's especially if those names are quite samey or especially if they're sort of science fiction fantasy type names where you know because they're more exotic it's harder to sort of process them if you have just too many names in those opening pages which I don't think column who is who is alfanso who is all Rick the warlord and it's just too many so to keep the number of names and characters relatively modest in that opening few pages because again that's a way to get the reader into novel to feel settled and then you can do whatever you need to do the final mistake in a way is sort of repeating some of these themes which is it's a failure to get personal and what do I mean by that well let's let's say that you know you you're writing a science fiction fantasy novel for example and you know part of what you want to deliver to the reader is this amazing world that you've built this you know these amazing landscapes these amazing sort of social situations and so on and you start telling the reader all about that well you know that's fine and of course you're going to get into that in the novel but a reader doesn't pick up a book because they want to engage with you know whatever worlds you've created they want to engage with the characters do you have moving around those wells so I mean let's say that you want to you know have a character who's involved with the uranium mines on some particular planet that's absolutely fine but don't start talking about the uranium mines have the guy sit at the mouth of a mine cleaning his boots and looking at the sunset that has got you know what inside him three moons or whatever it is and there because you're seeing the guy clean his boots you want to know about that guy and he want to know about the world that he's in and you know you enter the world always via a character so so start with the personal and bring filter the world in through that character's knowledge and experiences as we go so those are I've got this seven seven classic mistakes and you avoid making any of those that still gives you a whole world of ways to open the novel in a really great and compelling way I'm Harry Bingham for Jericho writers and by the way we've got this incredible tool for building you your novel from your idea taking your ideas and actually constructing a really robust idea for a novel it sits on the link below you can go and get it it's free it's our idea generator it's worked really really well for tons of people go grab it have fun and I hope to see you soon as I say I'm Harry Bingham for Jericho writers thank you for watching

Channel: Jericho Writers

Views: 13,618

Rating: 4.9738989 out of 5

Keywords: Writing mistakes, Mistakes writers make, Writing advice, how to write, how to write a book, writing, books, Writing tips, book writing

Id: xaMkf8eDkkU

Length: 8min 6sec (486 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 11 2018