Jeri Smith-Ready

First chapter crazies

Beginnings are brutal. The blank page sits there, mocking our impotence. Sometimes, just to shut it up, we throw down the first words that come to mind (even if it's "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."), then recoil in a mad fit of deletion.

The blank page represents infinite possibilities. There's nothing so perfect as the unwritten novel. We see it all laid out in our minds, like a kid ready to build his first sand castle: it'll have moats, and spires, and windows, and...and a drawbridge! My sand castles always looked more like sand shanties--even the serfs wouldn't want to live in them. I'd get discouraged because it wasn't what I imagined.

At the beginning of a journey, you can go in any direction, but after that first step, you officially have a Path. What if it's the wrong path? That kind of thinking can drive you nuts and result in a major case of writer's block, but it's true. It's difficult to go back in later drafts and change the beginning, because it has more of a set-in-stone feeling than any other scene.

Until I started selling proposals, I always began a novel somewhere in the middle, with whatever scene I found most compelling, then I'd go back and write the beginning once I had a good sense of the characters. Now I submit the first X chapters of a book along with an outline, which is great from a business perspective. But it means I end up polishing and revising the beginning before I've written the rest of the book. Talk about chiseled in granite.

When I look back at opening lines from my novels, I realize that most of them stayed as originally written, even if the scene as a whole changed. That first moment of inspiration somehow worked.

So here's the first line of Voice of Crow:

The forest breathed.

We'll see if it sticks.

Labels: Voice of Crow

• posted by Jeri @ 7:49 AM
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