Foreword
You don’t have much time.
The clock starts as soon as a reader looks at the book and thinks about buying it, or an agent picks up the manuscript and wonders if this is the one they’ll auction to every editor in town.
So put yourself in the mind of one of them, then count:
One one-thousand: Good title. Don’t know the author but maybe—
Two one-thousand: What’s it about?
Three one-thousand, four one-thousand: (With a glance at the flap copy or cover letter.) Hey, sounds interesting. Let’s read a bit.
Leading to:
Five one-thousand, six one-thousand: “It was a dark and stormy night …” Nope. Heard it before. Next!
Or:
Five one-thousand. Six one-thousand: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Wait … what? How can it be both at once? Let’s read some more.
And ya got ’em … or not.
It can be that brutal.
Six seconds—or even sixty—is not much time to decide the fate of something that may have taken all your waking hours (and spoiled your sleep) for months … even years.
But the truth is that an editor or agent can always tell on the first page, often in the first paragraph, and sometimes in the first sentence, if you know what you’re doing. Can you grab them right away? Make their skeptical eyes track to the bottom of the page? Get their itchy fingers to turn it? If not, well, manuscripts are overflowing the mail room and query e-mails are overwhelming the company servers. So there’s plenty more where you came from.
Readers can be even tougher. They live in a world where one-hundred-and-forty-character sentence fragments pass for intelligent discourse. They can watch movies—actual big-time, full-length features, from Casablanca to Paul Blart, Mall Cop—on a device that fits right in their hand. This device also enables them to watch videos of cats and car crashes, or listen to music, or read random opinions from electronic “friends” scattered across the globe at any time of day or night. And it entices them with games, too, so that instead of reading about three-dimensional characters on a printed page, they can become one-dimensional characters in a three-dimensional cyberworld.
And you’re working in a medium that a Spaniard named Cervantes invented five centuries ago. It’s enough to make you feel like Don Quixote himself.
When readers open your book or turn on their devices and see your backlit text on their black-and-white screens, they’re thinking one thing: “This better be good.”
So how do you make it good?
Begin by reading a book about beginnings. Listen to Paula Munier. Her experiences as a writer, editor, and agent have taught her the most important truths that every writer—neophyte or old pro—needs to know. And you need to learn them.
But some of her truths are hard.
For starters, Paula can’t teach you creativity. No one can. No one really knows where it comes from or why some have it and others, who yearn for it, don’t. No one—not even you—can say how the ideas, observations, and memories swirling about in your head will coalesce into a coherent fictional idea. And no one can predict if your creativity will earn you “best of times” fame or a slow fade into that “dark and stormy night.”
This leads to the second hard truth: No one can teach talent. Lots of people have the creativity to come up with a fresh plot hook or a cool character setup. But as the legendary detective novelist Robert B. Parker used to say, it’s all in the execution. And execution reveals talent, that indefinable something that separates one writer from the rest, like a “third eye” that lets some see a story all the way through in a way that no one else has.
But here’s the best and most important truth of all: You probably have a lot more talent than you think. If you are willing to sit at a desk, deny the distractions, and write until you’re numb, you have one of the main components of talent, which is the discipline to draw it out of yourself. And when you tell a story, you are responding to one of the deepest impulses of the species. Human beings have been making sense of the world through storytelling since we could first make sense of anything. So the instinct’s in you, too.
And Paula Munier can teach you the rock-solid principles and techniques that will reward your discipline and unleash your instinctive talent on all those agents, editors, and readers out there, just praying for a book to sweep them away.
E.L. Doctorow once said about beginning a novel, “You don’t start with any artistic manifesto. You just do what works.” This book, with incisive analysis and vivid examples, well-chosen quotes from great authors, sharp lists, and challenging exercises, will help you to discover what works best for you. It is a practical book for people who would make a living in the wildly impractical business of turning their fantasies into reality on the page.
Yes, Paula talks about the big ideas, the grand arcs, and the importance of the three-act structure in both story and scene. But she concentrates on the beginning, because the DNA of you as a writer and of your novel exists in those first sentences, in the expectations and questions they raise in the reader, in the answers they offer about you and your ability to deliver what I call the six Ps of page one: personality, punch, plot, place, pace, and promise.
Do you create a character who inhabits a believable world, who wants something, and whose desire—when met by opposition—will drive the story to ever greater levels of intensity? Do you deliver it in prose that snaps and crackles and somehow captures the mood of the story itself? Well, do you?
Writing a novel is damned hard business. That’s the most basic truth. If it was easy, everyone would do it. So you can use all the help you can get. So listen to Paula. And listen to the giants she quotes, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who once scrawled on the back of an envelope: “Action is character.” It can’t be said more clearly than that. And Paula will have you saying it to yourself on page one and repeating it all the way to the end.
As you struggle, remember that no matter what kind of software or hand held device competes with it, the novel is still the best form of virtual reality there is. All it needs are your well-chosen words and the imagination of a willing reader.
So what are you waiting for? Begin with The Writer’s Guide to Beginnings. Then start writing. Grab those readers on the first page, and they may never let go.