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This week we talked about beginnings and how to make them effective.  Now it’s your turn to apply what you learned to your own Work In Progress (WIP).  Using the Five Promises we discussed in Wednesday’s post, rework the opening of your WIP to incorporate as many of those promises as you can.

Weekend Prompt:

Step 1–Look at the first five pages of your WIP and answer the following questions.  As you consider each question, highlight or underline the passage in your piece that addresses it.  This is concrete evidence that you have made each promise to your reader.

Five Questions:

1)  Do you give your reader a character to root for?  Does this character appear in the first 5 pages?

2)  Does the narration have a distinct voice (either the voice of the character telling the story or the voice of the narrator)?

3)  Do you introduce the world of your story?  Do you avoid overloading the readers with details and give just enough to establish that world?

4)  Is there a problem that the main character faces?  Is that problem clear in the first 5 pages?

5)  Is there an event that sets the story in motion?  Does this event happen within the first five pages (or at the very least the first chapter)?

Step 2–Bonus Question: If you chose to break any of the five promises (i.e. you answered “No” to one or more of the above questions), did you do so with an artful reason for it?  What is that reason?

Step 3–Identify which area(s) is lacking in your opening.  Maybe you introduce the main character but the voice of the narrator is wishy-washy or the setting of the story is unclear.  Maybe there’s no clear event that sets the story in motion.  Whatever is missing from your opening, brainstorm some ways to add those elements into the first 5 pages (or if not the first 5 pages, at least the first chapter).  If you’ve answered all these promises to your reader, think about which promises you could emphasize more.  Once you’ve identified what’s missing in your opening and have brainstormed how to fix it, apply those changes to your story.

Why do we care about the first 5 pages?  While there are no hard-and-fast rules about answering all these promises in exactly 5 pages, it makes sense to do so whenever possible.  Why?  Because the first five pages is often all you get to present your story when you begin the query process.  Many agents request queries with either the first chapter or the first five pages as a sample (so the can get a sense for your writing beyond the query letter).

It’s not mandatory to answer all five promises within this rigid set of pages–the writing police won’t come get you if you miss a promise or two–but it would serve you well to answer as many promises as possible.  Of course, if fitting all five promises into the first five pages forces you to perform outrageous feats of verbal acrobatics and sacrifice the quality of your writing, then don’t do it.  But if you can answer these questions as early as possible in your story, you are more likely to hook your reader and get them to keep reading.