Where to begin a novel?
Why, at the beginning, of course!
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News!
My debut novel Greenwich will be out in July! Adrienne Brodeur called it “A stunning debut…Fast-paced, beautifully written, vividly peopled… impossible to put down.” Preorder wherever you like to get your books!
“Care and Feeding” is out in The Rumpus
“Good Dead Girls,” is out in No Tokens
Dear Kate,
How do you know where to begin a novel? Like how do you know what suits your book?
I’m thinking of famous lines like “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” Versus: “I am born.”
Both Mrs. Dalloway and David Copperfield are character studies. But what chutzpah to start your novel with “I am born.” !
- Dr. B.
Dear Dr. B,
It’s a perennial question! Where to begin—and also where to end, and what comes in the middle, and what words to use to describe it all. Rebecca Makkai tackles this in her Substack post on beginnings, “Where Do We Even Start?”, which is definitely worth a read:
A story starts with an inciting incident. We have the regular world of the characters, and then something changes. The arc of the whole story, from beginning to end, covers the change and its rammifications—what further changes it leads to, until we arrive at a new normal and a sense of completeness that signals “the end.” (How you know where to end your story is another question!)
As Makkai wisely says, “If you don’t know what your story is about yet, write until you do.” It can take writing to the end of a book to finally get a sense of what you were trying to say all along—and then the task becomes to revise and dare I say even rewrite until the story on the page inches closer to the one you’re finally realize you’ve been trying to tell all along. If you do know what your story is about—and even if you don’t, well, you still have to start somewhere—the place to start is as close as you can get to your starting point, lol.
To find that starting point, first ask yourself, What’s the inciting incident? What’s the thing that sets your story in motion—that differentiates this day from all the others? Then you have another series of questions (writing is basically one endless decision tree): how close do you want to start to that incident? How much lead time do you want to give the reader, in which you show the unchanged world before everything shifts? Do you want a cold opening, that starts in the middle of the action? Or would that be too abrupt? There’s no one approach that’s inherently better than the others. And there’s no way of knowing what “suits” your book until you have a book to be suited to, you know? You just sort of have to write enough to get a feel for it, and to not be afraid to write and write, and then delete and start over, or try a different approach and see how it compares.
The best tools for writing are other books and stories. Check out where other authors have decided to start their stories, and then start to pick apart why. You’ve looked at Mrs. Dalloway and David Copperfield—two excellent choices, Dr. B. (And I’ll add Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which starts with a riff on the Dickens: “First, I got myself born.”) As you note, these books are character studies, and so it makes sense that they begin with character. They’re introducing us to their protagonists, but also, in their language and syntax and voice, they’re showing us how it will feel to enter into their worlds. They’re giving us a sense of what we’ll get if we read on. Look at contemporary books in your genre—the ones you want to be next to on shelves. You don’t have to imitate them! You can do your own thing! But get a sense of what you like—and what you don’t like—about the moves your peers are making. Even if you don’t like it, something works about the book that made an agent and then an editor and probably a bunch of other readers want to read on. Can you pinpoint what it is? Some books start with a sword fight, some books start with a body washed up on shore, some books start with a phone call… In all of these cases, you’re finding the entry point into the story—whether that’s a single day that begins with getting flowers, or a saga about growing up that might as well begin at the beginning, with birth.
What opening suits what type of book depends on character, pacing, mood, voice—and a lot of nebulous things about what just feels right for your story. What’s grabby and interesting and does the work you need it to do—tells us something and brings us in and starts to set up the promise in the opening pages that the rest of the book will then have to deliver on. The really hard thing about openings is that they have to do something—they have to start telling the story. But they also can’t do too much, because we haven’t met any of the characters and don’t know anything about their world. Yet if you take too much time to tell us “these are the characters and this is their world,” that gets real slow real fast. Like doling out backstory in a way that doesn’t feel like backstory, or establishing narrative tension in a way that feels organic and interesting, choosing those exact first words is something that likely will take some revising and readdressing until all the components are in place.
Pro tip: Romance novels are really good to study for openings, because there has to be a meet cute and it has to happen pretty soon—but we also have to know something of the characters first, in order to care that they’re meeting in the first place. Mysteries also are great for pacing. We need a mystery to solve, and it can’t get started too late or the book will be a snoozefest. But if we don’t know anything about the world of the novel, it’s hard to be invested when the body appears or the jewels turn up missing. It’s all about the balance of doling out some information, while leaving other pieces out so the reader will have questions—and will need to keep reading in order to arrive at the answers.
If you don’t know all these pieces of your story yet, that’s okay. You’re writing to figure it out! Instead, ask yourself what’s the first thing you do know about what happens in your book. You can start writing with that, even if it’s not the beginning. You don’t have to write in any kind of order! You can write the scene you do know, and then work backwords, or forwards, either in the story or in an outline, to start stringing things together. I tend to brainstorm by writing down everything I know about the book on notecards, and then I start to order the cards, see where the gaps are, and start filling them in with new scenes and ideas. I don’t necessarily know the opening scene any more than I know what’s going to happen 2/3 of the way through, but I use outlining, brainstorming, freewriting, and writing the book itself, to help me try and figure it out each piece of the puzzle.
Some common opening pitfalls:
Make sure you’re actually telling a story! So often, beginnings will begin by giving us information, but if you look at what’s happening in those first pages, the pickings are slim. Check what the reader learns against what the characters are doing—they’re not the same thing, and it’s easy to have an imbalance.
Slooooow starts. We don’t need your character waking up, making breakfast, fighting with her mom because she’s so distracted from thinking about seeing that cute girl in homeroom. If the point is the cute girl in homeroom, then start the book in homeroom!
Way too much going on at once. The opposite of the slow start problem is that if a million super dramatic things are happening…but we don’t even know who your character are…it can be hard to feel invested and therefore to care about the outcome. This is a tricky balance. As with everything, it depends on how the scene is written and whether it feels grabby or not!
Lovely sentences, but where are they going? I’ve been suggesting here to write until you know what you’re writing about—to write your way into the story. But don’t forget to go back and cut all the parts where you didn’t know where you were going yet. Even if the sentences are great. Especially if the sentences are great! Beautiful writing can sometimes disguise the fact that there’s no there there, if you know what I mean.
The bottom line, Dr. B, is that I don’t think you necessarily need to know your perfect first line to start writing. And even if you do, it might change. If you’re starting a book and trying to figure out where it starts, I’d caution against getting too attached to anything, anyway. “Kill your darlings” doesn’t mean get rid of the parts you like about a book (that would make no sense), but about not getting so attached to your faves that you can’t see the forest through the trees, and the times when it might better serve the narrative to give it the axe. (See my last bullet point in the “pitfalls” list, above.)
For an example of how can play out in real life, I spent this very week rewriting the first page of my novel in progress. I’ve been working on it for almost two years, I’ve gone through an entire year of edits with my agent, and just this week I thought, wait. I need a new first page. !!! I’d liked my original first line, which had been the first line since the beginning. (“The fact is that they never found a body.”) There’s nothing wrong with that line! But. The story has changed in new ways, and I think a new first page can better set up and support where the book is now going. (“The last time I saw my brother, he was sitting on the edge of a bridge.” Will this stay the first line?? Time will tell!)
I rewrote the first page and in fact the entire first scene of Greenwich at least half a dozen times (I rewrote the ending even more). I just went back to check, and the opening line used to be: “Her aunt was late picking her up at the station.” Now the first line is: “I went to Greenwich at the last minute, to do what I thought would be some good.” A change in pov, in voice, in the starting point, in the whole set up and tone of the story. If I could have written the “right” first line from the beginning, I would have! (If I could have not written an entire book in the third person and then rewritten it in first, trust me I would have done that too.) But if I kept waiting to find the perfect first line, I never would have started. “Her aunt was late” was the right starting point at the time in which I wrote it. I don’t now what original first lines Woolf or Dickens or Kingsolver would have used, but you can’t assume that what you read in a published novel is the way it was written from the start.
As far as chutzpah — yeah! You’re writing a novel! Be bold, be brave, and don’t hold yourself back. Whether you’re at the beginning, or twenty drafts in and still searching for that right opening line, keep going!
Kate