Ugh, it’s so hard, isn’t it?
You pour your heart into the page and then you receive repeated “no thank you” emails from editors and agents who clearly must have not missed your beautiful and lyrical words. Is it you? Is your breath bad? Does your manuscript have BO?
It might be your first page.
And we’ve all been there — we’ve all opened a book that seemed boring or lackluster in the opening chapter. Usually the thing that keeps us reading might be the buzz from the literary world or maybe a friend who pressed the book into your hands and said “You’re going to love this, trust me.” But a fresh submission doesn’t have that street team whispering into the agent’s ear. Your first page has to seduce, woo, tantalize and show the reader what the rest of your book is about.
Editors and agents are busy people and they receive submissions in the THOUSANDS. Just simple math shows that they physically have no time to read to the end of each and every one of those hopeful submissions. When I read submissions, I can usually tell by the fourth page that I’m going to keep reading until the end, and if something hasn’t hooked me by the end of page two, it’s unlikely that I’ll keep going.
Unfair? Maybe. Realistic? Definitely.
There’s got to be something special to keep them on your submission. Not just your hopeful expression and your open heart. If they’re not making it beyond page 1, they’ll never get to your character’s amazing sense of humor nor your compelling plot twist.
The first page is generally where we start drafting — but sometimes it’s not where your story actually starts, and that’s a problem. Occasionally we start building in back story that’s going to be crucial for the reader to understand for future elements.
Consider the nursery rhyme of Jack and Jill. It’s a pretty simple tale — two people went up a hill to get water (why? We don’t know — they just did), one was terribly injured in a fall (what caused the fall? Dunno. Was it Jack’s fault? Jill’s fault? Dunno) and the other “came tumbling after” (what does that mean — was Jill hurt as well? Was she upset? Was she doing gymnastics? Dunno). One writer might draft this story beginning with Jack and Jill’s relationship — are they married? Are they siblings? Coworkers on the water reclamation project? What’s the story there? Perhaps it makes sense to tell the story of Jack and Jill meeting for the first time? Maybe it’s a meet cute. Another writer might start the story entirely differently. Perhaps we must explain why Jack and Jill’s father asked them to climb up a hill to fetch a pail of water. Perhaps he’s ill and can’t do it himself. Still another writer might choose to begin the story at the bottom of the hill after they’ve fallen, with Jack suffering his traumatic brain injury and Jill looking to stop the bleeding.
While all of these stories would be essentially the same tale, the first pages have varying degrees of urgency and conflict. If we start with their father, the reader will assume the father is the main character — that it’s his story. If we start with Jack and Jill meeting for the first time, the reader understands that this is the story of their relationship. If we start with the bloody aftermath of the fall, the story is entirely different and entirely focused on Jill responding to a victim’s emergency while their relationship, the need for water, the hill and everything else will take a backseat.
One of the most elemental parts of writing is that the first draft exists to for the writer to tell themself the story. All subsequent drafts are for the writer to tell the reader the story. What exists on page one (or more reasonably, pages one through twenty or more) is very likely going to look FAR DIFFERENT in the first draft than the final draft. This is not to say that those first draft first pages are useless — they performed a very necessary task in that they helped the writer find their way to the story they are trying to tell. Much like a brick layer constructs a wooden form to support masonry while the mortar cures, the writer needs those pages for a time until they aren’t needed anymore.
And that’s the rub. Identifying what isn’t needed anymore. Because you’ve read and reread your story so many times that it becomes difficult to see that the mortar has firmed up and the wooden supports aren’t necessary. In fact, they’re getting in the way.
Your first page must be directly relevant to the story — the bucket of water is the least interesting thing in the story of Jack and Jill, unless it is the last bucket of water in a village that is dying of thirst, at which point, Jack breaking his crown is actually fairly low stakes in comparison to the greater need. The hill is a physical obstacle — it COULD be an interesting element to the story if that’s the thing that causes the fall. But if the story begins with the day Jill is born and given her name, we have a very different value proposition than Jill trying to carry Jack’s bloody corpse down the hill. Most editors will not make it past page two of the childbirth story.
Additionally, the first page must have a hint of conflict. If we opened with a four page description of all the people who lived in Jack and Jill’s quaint village, a description of the clock tower and the gazebo and the farmer’s market, our editor is going to give up before they ever turn the page. So what, they’ll think, and they’d be right.
I’m teaching a free workshop on the tricks of writing a winning first page. It’s hosted by the Friends of the Brown County Library’s UntitledTown and it’s open to everyone. We’ll go through first pages from literature as well as real stories I’ve accepted during my tenure as fiction editor at Witness Magazine — and a few examples that don’t work. We’ll also talk about the common first page mistakes that writers of every ability frequently make — and why they’re incredibly difficult to pull off well.
