Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

Beginnings Part One

Face it. The first five pages (sometimes the first five sentences) are going to make or break your book. They will be the first pages that a prospective agent or editor will read. Later, once the book gets picked up, they will be the first pages that a prospective book buyer will read.

So how do you make those five pages, and the rest of the beginning of the book, so good that the editor, agent, or prospective reader wants to keep reading?

A good beginning must do six things:

1) Hook the reader

2) Establish a bond with the Lead and the reader

3) Present the story world

4) Establish the general tone of the novel

5) Introduce the opposition

6) Get the reader to keep reading

Let’s take them one at a time.

Hooking the reader

“Tuesday was a fine California day, full of sunshine and promise, until Harry Lyon had to shoot someone at lunch.”

DRAGON TEARS by Dean Koontz

The above example is classic Dean Koontz. He uses this approach in many of his novels, an approach that is, in my personal opinion, extremely effective. It instantly draws you in as a reader and makes you want to find out more.

By exactly why does it work?

First, the use of a name gives it a sense of realism and helps the reader immediately begin to suspend their disbelief. It creates the illusion of reality.

Second, something is happening or about to happen to that character. And not just anything but something ominous, dangerous even. An interruption of what at first seemed to be a normal life.

Finally, he’s creating a sense of forward motion, right from the very start. And once he’s hooked you into the story, he keeps that motion going all the way to the very last page of the book.

You can do the same thing with action. Many of you have heard the suggestion to start in the middle of things, or in media res. Starting with an action filled opening scene, full of high stakes and danger to the hero, effectively pulls the reader along for the ride and sets the tone for the novel right away. Dialogue, especially dialogue focused around a conflict between characters, does the same thing.

Stephen King has made an effective use of something James Bell calls the Look-Back Hook. Here’s the opening to IT:

“The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years – if it ever did end- began, so far as I can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.”

The idea with the look-back hook is to suggest that there is a not-to-be-missed story here just waiting to unfold.

Many writers will make use of a prologue. The most effective prologues do one thing and one thing only – entice the reader to move on to chapter one. While an opening chapter should focus on your lead character and the plight they are about to be plunged into, a prologue doesn’t have to. A prologue can start with a secondary or tertiary character and not involve your lead at all. It must, however, eventually tie back to your central plot. I use this technique in the opening of one of my recent novels, A SCREAM OF ANGELS:

He stared down at the object at his feet with the dawning realization that what they had just uncovered could change the face of the world forever.

It was both exhilarating and extremely frightening.

He would have to decide how to deal with it in the next few minutes or the news would spread all over camp faster than a forest fire in the high Sierras.

They’d been working along the shores of the Dead Sea for several months and the season was just about over. In another week their permits would expire and, with little to show for all their efforts, it was doubtful that he could gain the funding for a return trip the following season. Never mind the rising violence in the Occupied Territories that threatened to close the borders permanently.

And now there was this.

He turned to the man crouched next to him. “Who else knows?”

The other shook his head. “No one. I’ve been working this end of the trench all day by myself. You’re the first to see it, other than me.”

Maybe, just maybe, they had a chance then.

After another moment of deep thought, he said, “Okay, here’s what we are going to do…”

* * *

Later that night.

His team moved swiftly through the camp and assembled on its far side. The area was quiet and no one seemed to have noticed their passage. With seven hours to go before sunrise, they should have just enough time to extract the specimen, wrap it up, and get it loaded on the truck before their companions discovered what they were up to.

There were five of them. All men he’d known for years. All men he trusted implicitly. They had sworn the same oaths as he and so he had little doubt that they would go to the grave with the secret if it became necessary.

He hoped it would not. He hated to think of what he’d have to do if they were discovered in the midst of their activities.

It was difficult work. The specimen wasn’t too tall, just a hair over seven feet, but the width was twice that and he was determined to remove it in one piece if at all possible. It took them almost four hours just to free it from its ancient resting place. Getting it properly mounted and wrapped took another two. By the time the sky began to glow pink with the coming sunrise, they were working furiously to get the now-secured package loaded up into the back of one of the expedition’s half-ton trucks.

While the rest of his team had worked through the night to extract the specimen, he had reached out to his network and had set other, longer range plans in motion. He’d secured a site to store the specimen until they could decide what to do with it and had arranged for others to meet them a few hours drive north. Smuggling the specimen across the border and out of the country was going to be difficult, but thankfully he knew more than a few places where the border guards would look the other way for the right amount of money. He’d cross that particular bridge when they came to it. For now, he’d done all he could.

The team said their goodbyes quietly and then he climbed up beside the driver for the long ride north. The rest of the expedition’s personnel were just beginning to stir and there was no time to waste.

As they got underway, it occurred to him that he had just organized and carried out the biggest theft in the history of the free world.

And, God help him, it actually felt good.

The mysterious object and the men who steal it aren’t fully identified until much later in the story, but they are intrinsic to the central plot and hopefully the mystery surrounding them is enough to pull the reader into what happens next.

Next month I’ll cover Establishing a Bond with the Lead and Presenting the Story World.

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If you liked this post, visit Joe's XtremeLife blog for more of the same. If you're interested in working with him as either a writing or life coach, check out XtremeLife Coaching. Joe's fiction can be found at his official website, JosephNassise.com
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