We have trouble writing one beginning to our stories and novels. In a post on Writer Unboxed, Greer Macallister says every story actually has two. (FML)
“Every novel begins twice,” she says. “One type of beginning feels nearly impossible to get right; the other one, you can’t possibly get wrong.”
The first line of your first chapter is the hard one. “When the novel is published, it can only have one beginning, and boy howdy, can making that choice be tough,” Macallister says. “You’ll hear all sorts of advice about what type of beginning is best, but as with so much other writing advice, it’s useless if you take it as an absolute. No rule always applies.” You might edit and rewrite that opening numerous times. You might move a whole chapter to the front of the book. Macallister wrote five different “first chapters” of her novel Girl in Disguise before she found the right one.
And you have to get the beginning right, because that’s where you make promises to your readers. It has to be well-written, but structurally, you need to choose the right characters, setting, and actions to set up the rest of your story.
The second kind of beginning is much easier, Macallister says. “Whatever you sit down and write as the very first words of the writing process,” she explains. “Those words may end up at the beginning of the novel, or the end, or the third chapter, or not in the finished novel at all. But they’re absolutely essential, because you can’t finish a novel without starting it first. And no matter what you start with, simply by starting, you can’t get it wrong.”
