From author Anne R. Allen:
There are as many ways to start your novel as there are writers, so be aware that these are not hard and fast rules. But newbies tend to fall into certain patterns when beginning a work of fiction. Those patterns can be less than enticing to the modern reader, who expects a story to start on page one.
. . . .
1) Faux Starts
These can include:
a) “It was all a dream”
The princess fights the dragon in a fierce blood-and-guts battle and, just as the beast moves in for the kill…a 12 year old girl wakes up in her Disney princess bedroom and we find out it was all a dream.
She then goes downstairs for breakfast and has a mundane conversation with Mom and Dad about school.
You’ve left your readers feeling cheated and they’re not going to want to go on.
b) The genealogy moment
The mage casts a deadly spell on the evil tyrant who has held the land in perpetual winter for 1000 years, and just as he is about to speak the final word, a wraith wafts through the castle walls and offs the mage in a shower of ice crystals.
In chapter two, the great, great granddaughter of the mage wakes up in her Disney princess bedroom.
Again, you’ve set up the reader to expect one kind of story and given them another.
c) Dead man walking
As you start your novel, the pitiful homeless man clutches his meager possessions stuffed into the Disney princess pillowcase that is all he has left of his children and former middle-class life. We learn all about his tragic existence as a shadowy figure stalks him.
Cut to the police detective serving breakfast to her squabbling kids when she gets the call about the dead homeless guy with the pillowcase.
This is a classic opener for TV cop shows, but it doesn’t work to start a novel, because readers will identify with the first character they meet in a book, and if you kill off that character immediately, readers will feel betrayed.
Link to the rest at Anne R. Allen
Here’s a link to Anne R. Allen’s books. If you like an author’s post, you can show your appreciation by checking out their books.
I feel like a lot of these so-called “rules” for books no longer apply. That they’re hand-me-downs from a previous era that don’t matter in the hands of a talented writer. I think a really good writer could take any one of these so called no-nos and create an amazing, hook-y, can’t stop reading beginning with them. I’m surprised that the advice wasn’t “don’t do a prologue full stop,” as that seems to be what I’ve heard most often. That prologues are garbage and anybody who includes them is a bad writer.
And as has been pointed out repeatedly, “Game of Thrones” spit all over these rules and I think those books have done okay. 😉
Just another article telling people not to write what I like to read. I like descriptive intoductions and I like fairytale openings. The advice modern writers are given is at odds with the stories that got me interested in reading in the first place.
Why can’t people write “take care if you employ X technique” advice, rather than these prescriptive do’s and don’ts?
Because it doesn’t lead to click-bait blog post titles.
‘Three ways to get rich forever’
works better than
‘Three possible ways some people have used to become wealthier, with a bunch of caveats to use them safely.’
Hmmm…I wonder how Ms. Allen would react to my series. I have many characters, heroes, and openings.
Interesting.
Really? I mean, really?
Try telling that to every Romance writer who ever wrote a 2-pov Romance novel.
I’ve also come across a number of standalone fantasy and SF books that had multiple characters. This includes both true standalones (one book only), and “series” standalone novels about 2 or more characters. After all, not all those authors who wrote those initial “series” books were assured of a publishing career where they’d be able to write stories with those characters again.
Sheesh. C’mon lady, just because that’s what you think and the way your stories all work out, that doesn’t mean it applies to every author’s every book.
Heck, I once read through a 1,000-page family saga standalone. It had at least 6 MCs, each covering a particular era of the family’s history.
While I don’t tend to write to the style MANY of my favorite books have entire rosters of primary POV characters. Just as often they’ll employ single-POV character scenes or chapters as a way to give exposition without feeling like they are. When done well it works to amazing effect.
Yeah. My current story (planned as a series) is about a family, so there are basically six main characters (along with some important secondary characters). Not each book with a separate protagonist. The entire series is about the family, with their individual stories woven into the whole. Which, yeah, makes it a lot more complicated and time-consuming to write, but I think it’s worth it. Saying all stories *must* be about one character is just short-sighted and narrow-minded.
And it could be said that it all starts with a ‘dead man walking’ opening, although it’s not a random bystander but someone who’s important to the story, and whose death is actually the inciting incident, which makes it a natural place to start.
The parallel narratives is a fairly common technique in SF&F. Even more than ensemble narratives ala LoTR and A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE.
First thing that popped into my head was HERITAGE OF HASTUR which is built of alternating chapters featuring two narratives–one third person, one first person–straight through to the climax where they converge with a big payoff.
Near as I can tell all writing rules are more like light suggestions that can be safely ignored if you know what you’re doing and it helps the story. For every “thou shall not” there’s multiple succesful violations all over.
#2 is pretty much the norm in most popular novels I read; even Lee Childs typically spends 500-1000 words establishing the setting before Jack Reacher beats someone up. But it has to be description that’s relevant to the character and situation, not just the writer typing every detail they think up.
If anything, I’m more likely to drop a book because it throws me straight into characters I know nothing about in a setting I know nothing about.
#4 is basically the summary opening, where you start with the world and zoom in to the character. Which works fine so long as you keep it interesting and short.
So I think the point is not that those are bad ways to start a story, but that they’re easy for new writers to do badly.
>>So I think the point is not that those are bad ways to start a story, but that they’re easy for new writers to do badly
This.
>>Why can’t people write “take care if you employ X technique” advice, rather than these prescriptive do’s and don’ts?
Over the years, it seems that valid writing advice has been squished into off-hand phrases that don’t mean much unless one has studied writing for a while and saw the advice when it was, like, a lesson. People trying to help new writers just distilled everything down to the minimum, which isn’t all that helpful and can be very confusing.
Do what you want. But do it well. Know the rules before you break them.
Know the rules before you break them.
I agree, but I think in this case the objection is that several of these examples are not really rules. There are far too many successful classic and modern examples of these rules being “broken” to make the claim that they’re rules to be very credible.
SF&F and romance “break” the “one main character” rule as a matter of course, so a well-read newbie writer of those genres will naturally disregard that rule.
Mystery, thriller, and horror genres routinely “break” the dead man walking rule, so a newbie to those genres will sensibly reject this rule.
It’s pointless to tell people there are “rules” that clearly don’t exist for one genre or another. All it does is encourage the sensible newbie to disregard one’s advice. These “rules” outlined in the OP are a good example of why it would be better to give examples of techniques or tropes executed well vs. poorly rather than a blanket ban. I’ve learned a lot more from writing advice where the former happens than the latter.
Very good points, Jamie. It seems to me that it just comes down to the fact that the best way to learn how to write fiction is to read a lot of fiction. (And then, of course, to write a lot so as to practice your technique.) As with many things in life, there are no shortcuts, no matter how many people would like to act like there are.
The boy ran for his life. *
That is the first line of Stuart Woods’s Chiefs. It is in a prologue that Woods tacked on after he finished the novel. It created enough tension and interest to get me to read through the excruciatingly slow and boring first chapter.
* He failed.
Games of Thrones starts with a Dead Man Walking (Rangers who are taken by the Others). We cut to child’s POV, watching the survivor’s execution for desertion. It hooked me hard more than a decade ago. It would still hook me today.
Yeah, I just came to these comments to mention that very one. And that’s not the only time I’ve seen it work.
I’ve read several novels (often thrillers, sometimes horror) that begin with Dead Man Walking Faux Openings. Each one worked, or I wouldn’t have kept reading.
Agreed. And the Dead Man Walking Faux Openings are a great use of prologues, which can prime the reader that the sequence is not the main event, just connected to it.
A good read, though as with most lists it proves that there are exceptions to every rule.