In the Beginning, There Was Herb Gathering

Cranky Rah does not like crowds. (This is an Understatement.) So it was with some...trepidation that I went to the James River Writers annual conference this past weekend.

People.
People all weekend.
People all weekend asking about what I write.

It could have been Bad.

And I'm not saying I wasn't uber happy to be back in my cave at the end of it. Or that I didn't spend the better part of the evening in soothing, enveloping darkness (while watching Joss Whedon's weird and wonderful modern take on Much Ado About Nothing).

But, honestly, it pretty much rocked. I had a wonderful chat with Connie LaPallo, author of Dark Enough to See the Stars in a Jamestown Sky and When the Moon Has No More Silver, historical fiction about the woman and children in the colony of Jamestown. (That would be Jamestown, Virginia, the first English settlement in America).

I hung out with some old JRW friends and made some new ones (a special shout out to my new YA-writing friend, Cool J). And I spent a bunch of time with the super brave AW (altogether now: awwwwww...) who walked into that conference, all by herself, at seventeen years old. That's lone Highlander staring down the English army across a cold moor brave—not, Rah hastens to add, that any of the JRW conference attendees are likely to burn down AW's house and destroy her crops. I haven't heard of a single instance of that happening in the entire 12 years of the conference's history.

My delicate forelock whispers
in the breeze as a I gaze solemnly,
tranquilly, moo-vingly into my
limpid almond-shaped eyes...

One of the sessions I went to on Saturday was a panel of agents and editors talking about Top Mistakes that Get Fiction Manuscripts Rejected and How to Avoid Them. Turns out that writers, bless our hearts, make the same mistakes over and over (and over and over). We love to use italics while our characters (who inevitably have almond-shaped eyes) gaze into reflective surfaces and describe themselves.

Where we get into the most trouble, though, is in the first pages and especially the first lines of our story. The first words a reader (and an agent) see should seriously rock. Because if they don't, your reader (who might be your potential agent) will just put your story down. It doesn't matter how fantabulous page two might have been.

At some level, writing is alchemy, and no one can tell you how to transform the words and thoughts in your brain into an awesome beginning that no one else has ever written. But the people who see un-awesome beginnings over and over can give us an idea of what doesn't work.

So here are the beginnings they see over and over (and over and over):

• The hero/heroine wakes up. (This is both a cliché beginning and ending, as when the hero or heroine wakes up at the end because the whole story was a dream.)
• It's the hero/heroine's birthday. (Very popular in Middle Grade manuscripts.)
• It's the hero/heroine's first day of high school. (Very popular in Young Adult manuscripts.)
• The heroine (usually) is gathering herbs. (Very popular in fantasy manuscripts.)
• There's too little action—or too much. (A lot of times, writers trying to avoid the nothing-happening beginning go kind of crazy and throw the reader into a hugely chaotic first scene that doesn't have all that much to do with the rest of the story.)
• There's way way too much world-building.

Where naughty, rule-breaking
writers don't go.

Don't freak out and think I'm telling you you can't start your story on the first day of school or with herb-gathering. You can. You're a writer; you can break all the rules you want to. (We'll talk more about breaking rules when I post about the And then I died ending.)

But if you're going to break the rules, do so purposefully. Play devil's advocate and convince your inner skeptic that this is the very best way to open your story. Use the cliché in a surprising way that makes it fresh, engaging and not a cliché. Write and rewrite and rewrite until your voice is so strong and your opening lines so compelling that your reader absolutely must turn the page.

Speaking of rewriting, I'm dying to write about world-building now. I'll work on that. Right now, let me just say that I think having too much world-building, especially in those first pages, isn't a writing error as much as an editing error.