The Reader/Writer Contract

Here, the only signing is an autograph or credit card. There’s no lawyerly language, and the contract’s easily broken. Readers just donate unread novels to the local library.

Who wants to write an unwanted novel? Or even start one? Fortunately, readers come in as many varieties as writers hoping to reach them. Here’s your part of the contract: the better you identify your potential audience, and the more you satisfy their appetites, then the happier everyone involved will be.

So what’s in this contract?

~ Opening hook.

Get their attention. Don’t wait. What’s the hurry? Keep those library donations in mind.

What happens in the first moments of a book? For William Gibson, author of The Peripheral, a kind of invitation is extended—when  readers will or won’t feel what he calls “the click.” But this transcends connecting with an audience. Gibson adds that “the first sentences invite the writer, too: they contain a blueprint for the book that will be written.” – “The First Sentence Is a Handshake,” by Joe Fassler (The Atlantic)

~ Accessibility

Mark Twain observed that “A classic is something everybody wants to have read, but no one wants to read.” Why does this make us laugh? Because we may admire Wuthering Heights, but it’s not necessarily what we’re rereading. Gripping novels blend suspense and emotion with depth and insight. One without the other is like all protein or all dessert. Who wants that?

~ Context

Wait a second. Where are we? If you can’t tell in the first pages if you’re in Venice, California or Italy; whether it’s right now or fifty years ago; and fantasy or satire, you’ll likely replace this ambiguous novel with one you can follow.

~ Improbable probability

If we can’t believe that this could happen, we won’t care. Nor will we care if it’s obvious on page one who will end up with whom, how the sleuth will solve the mystery, or what gives the protagonist that happy ending. As Don Maass has observed, no reader wants an obvious plot device. No reader wants an unearned ending, either. 

~ Inconsistent consistency

Characters won’t seem credible unless all their traits fit together as a whole. But unless they occasionally surprise us, they’re neither believable nor fun.

~ Room to breathe

Novels that “tell” everything—even almost everything—suffocate. They’re as much fun as consistent consistency or probable probability. You can do better. Your readers deserve better.

Tip: Use the opening to promise readers what they can’t live without. Then deliver it.

That Tricky First Sentence: Individuality and Integration

Every opening—for each chapter and scene—is crucial. But the first is most crucial of all.  Along with the familiar openings of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, haunting openings usually need  no context at all:

They shoot the white girl first. – Toni Morrison, Paradise

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. – William Gibson, Neuromancer

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. – Gabriel García Márquez, 100 Years of Solitude

Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. – Ha Jin, Waiting

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. – Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

Yet, as Chad Harbach observed in The Art of Fielding,

It was easy enough to write a sentence, but if you were going to create a work of art, the way Melville had, each sentence needed to fit perfectly with the one that preceded it, and the unwritten one that would follow. And each of those sentences needed to square with the ones on either side, so that three became five and five became seven, seven became nine, and whichever sentence he was writing became the slender fulcrum on which the whole precarious edifice depended. That sentence could contain anything, anything, and so it promised the kind of absolute freedom that, to Affenlight’s mind, belonged to the artist and the artist alone. And yet that sentence was also beholden to the book’s very first one, and its last unwritten one, and every sentence in between.

Sentence Revision Exercise 1

Just for fun, model the first line in your book after the structure of an opening sentence you love. Now transform your sentence into something that actually works, perhaps a combination of your original sentence and the one from this exercise. What did you discover? Can you apply it?

Sentence Revision Exercise 2

View your first sentence as the launch pad for everything else. Is it powerful enough? Does it hint at what’s crucial and set up the climax? Revise until it does, to improve not only that essential sentence, but your understanding of your entire novel.

Tip: The opening sentence must stand on its own and foreshadow every sentence to come.