9 Signs the Beginning of Your Novel Looks Promising

so how do you know whether the beginning of your novel works well this video is kind of like a test for your novel and if you run it through all nine of these considerations and your novel beginning hits all nine of them well there's a good chance that you have a winner on your hands let's get started right away with number one there's a gripping story question so a story question is just something that the reader thinks when they're reading the initial pages of your book they have a question about what's going to happen in

the future and if you know what sort of story question your readers might ask it's just a good shortcut to know that oh you're going to get readers to keep reading let's look at some examples like The Giver by Lewis Lowry the question it asks is why is this seemingly perfect Society so rigidly controlled I think readers are curious about that mystery and that they want to keep reading to find out the answer to that question or let's look at what the question would be for Gone Girl by Jillian Flynn one question is what happened

to Amy Dunn that's very much a mystery two is Nick telling the truth about his wife's disappearance now if you can't come up with a gripping story question for the beginning of your novel it might be a sign of one of these three problems one you might be starting too slow you really should have the story question arise in the first chapter if you're waiting until chapter 3 or something it's it's too late two it might be a sign that you're starting in the wrong place you want to start in the type of place that

does raise a story question that the reader is curious about and the third thing is maybe you haven't figured out what this book is really about and so you're too close to it and you don't know what the question is that your story is asking and maybe you just need to keep on writing and later on you'll be able to come back and ask the right story question and if you know your story question please leave it in the comments and people let's upvote the best ones it's also important at the beginning of your book

to make sure the reader knows whose story it is so I want you to ask yourself right now whose story is this this book that I'm writing who does the story really belong to often when I read the beginning of a book with a a large number of characters in it sometimes I'm left wondering I don't know whose story this really belongs to it can't belong to everyone that's really not an option there has to be at least one person that rises above the fry that is slightly more important than all the other characters in

your novel now if you're writing in first person well I mean usually it's kind of obvious it's the first person narrator but not always right think of like Watson and Sherlock Holmes Watson is the first person narrator but I think everyone thinks that this book is really about Holmes but if you're writing in third person with a bunch of different character points of views you might need to ask yourself a few questions to figure out who the main character is one question you can ask yourself is who changes the most Whoever has the biggest character

Arc over the course of your novel that's often a sign that the story belongs to them another good question is what character starts and ends the book these are very privileged positions and so when you have a character that occupies that space it's a sign oh this book is really about them the third question is what character will accomplish the central goal the character who accomplishes the main goal of the novel often is the most important character in the book now I know that the more characters that you have the more difficult it becomes to

answer this question I know I know but if you can't answer this question you're often going to be floundering when it comes to basic structural questions like how do I begin my book how do I end my book or like a basic question like what is my Climax and what are the roles that my character should play in that climax even by the end of a series like Game of Thrones in which it seems that there are millions of characters it still feels like the main characters are Jon Snow and Daenerys so there's really no

excuse in your mind you really need to know who does this story belong to now you also know that the beginning of your novel looks promising if number three your protagonist has clear Stakes the reader should be able to answer what happens if your main character fails both in terms of external Stakes um do they survive or is their main relation relationship ruined but also a sense of their internal Stakes if they fail do they lose a sense of their own Identity or do they feel like they're completely morally bankrupt and you also need to

have clear Stakes set out from the very beginning of what happens when your character actually succeeds what do they get what do they earn what's the payoff now if you don't have a good answer in the beginning of your novel for what happens if the main character succeeds or fails then usually it means you haven't started the story fast enough if you are waiting for a third of the way through your bat or halfway through the book to finally tell the reader like oh these are the high stakes of the story I think that's much

too late for an example of this let's look at the secret history by Donna tart in the first page and a half I kid you not the first page and a half she has very clearly laid out the stakes of this entire extremely long novel the external Stakes are really clear if the police are able to pin the murder on them they will all go to jail but I think the internal Stakes are communicated just as clearly if he can't get over this murder then this is going to haunt him and he's not going to

be able to go on with his life and by the way please like this video because it makes my heart very happy and subscribe if you haven't because people are always telling me in the comments like you don't have enough subscribers and I'm like man I haven't been even doing this a year but uh thank you I think that's a compliment but you can help with that by subscribing you also know the beginning of your novel looks promising if number four you use a mix of showing and telling so you've probably heard the advice before

like oh you should start with like a scene you know which is basically showing and that's not terrible advice I just want to expand your notion of what the novel can do the novel is a very expansive form you can take a lot of different approaches to it and so I don't want to make you think like oh I have to do all showing in my first chapter no I mean I think it's just as easily you can do a mix of showing and telling any sort of mixture you could do 95% showing and 5%

telling you could do half and half and for an example of this let's look at the Hobbit by Tolkien the first few pages of this book are telling he's telling us about this Hobbit and what his hole is like and what the Shire is like and then the book transitions into showing where we have Gandalf come along and talk to bbo and they blow smoke rings and Gandalf invites them on an adventure so please please please don't trap yourself into this little box of thinking like oh like all of my first chapter needs to be

showing I have to have lots of scenes I think the advantages of telling in the beginning of your novel is sometimes it can accelerate our knowledge of a character like we feel we get to know them very quickly if you just have a couple lines telling us about who they are I also think telling helps to orient the reader quickly and it also helps to pick up the pace at the beginning of a novel and the pace is so important especially at the beginning of a novel telling allows you to skip over the boring stuff

and summarize it really quickly and by the way if you need more help with your novel check out my course write your best novel in book Fox Academy it's helped thousands of other writers and I think it might help you too so check it out the fifth sign that you are starting your novel well is you sound like a person so when someone begins a novel they want to feel a voice on the other end of it like a human voice in other words not an AI voice not a nondescript voice not a Wikipedia entry

voice you want to be a person on the page you want to take your original voice and just cast it onto the page so that someone reading it could tell oh that sounds like so and so so now it's time for a pop quiz I'm going to give you a single sentence from an author a sentence full of voice it definitely sounds like this author and your task is to tell me who it is in the comments and because the voice is so strong in this single sentence I bet most of you are going to

know who this is if you really want to hear about it the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me and all that David Copperfield kind of crap but I don't feel like going into it if you want to know the truth so why is there so much voice in this single sentence one it's kind of confrontational oh what you want to know things about me well you know what I don't want to

tell you two it's kind of negative there's words like lousy there's words like crap and he says like listen I don't want to talk three I think it is very intimate he is speaking directly to the reader and then four there's this sort of swinging colloquialism about this this is not high fute in literature he has phrases like we're occupied and all you know it feels very almost slangy your goal in the beginning of the book whether it's first person or third person really is to come up with a kind of voice that is distinctive

to you so the reader can feel that it is a person telling the story and not a robot and now it's time for the next way that you know your novel is starting off well number six each scene has multiple purposes single purpose scenes are a little bit like single purpose PL plastic they are bad for the environment of your novel look your goal is to have every single scene especially especially the scenes at the beginning of your novel cuz they're so important your goal is to have them accomplish multiple things not just one thing

a scene can advance the plot it can develop character it can accomplish World building it can raise the stakes so I want you to squint at the first say three or four scenes in your novel and be like what are you really doing are you accomplishing multiple things cuz if not maybe you need to combine those scenes or maybe you need to throw one out and focus on the one that's doing multiple things at once let's look at the first scene in A Wrinkle in Time written by Matalin lingle this scene this scene is accomplishing

so much one we have character building Charles Wallace is obviously way too smart for his age and the way he speaks sounds like a 40-year-old not like a youngster two we get some plot going on we have a stranger swing into the scene Mrs what's it and it's revealed she lives in this haunted house out in the woods and then three there's some World building because everyone's wanting to know what exactly is a tesseract that's a scene that's accomplishing so much and honestly I could have probably picked any book off my bookshelf and looked at

the first scene and realized how much work it's doing so just check your first scene and ask whether it's accomplishing everything you want it to accomplish the seventh sign that the beginning of your novel looks promising is there's emotional friction you know what readers got to feel something no amount of heady intellectual ideas can substitute for the heart so just ask yourself really quick when my reader finishes say chapter 1 or chapter 2 what is the emotion I want them to be feeling if you can't come up with the answer to that question it's a

good sign that you've prioritized the puzzle making pieces of your novel setting things up but you haven't yet engaged their emotions and that's absolutely key to draw them into the story let's look at Bonnie gas's book lessons in chemistry before Elizabeth zot became a star of her own cooking show she was facing this workplace sexism and this is in the 1960s we know that this character is fiercely intelligent but she's not been giving a chance to show off her intelligent and so as readers we feel an enormous amount of frustration with What She's suffering right

away we are emotionally on her side sympathetic towards her and if you want more about how to incorporate emotions into your novel watch my video on why 90% of authors fail to connect with their readers I talk a lot about emotional Hooks and how to engage the reader emot so take a look at that if you haven't already I'll put a link in the description and here is the eighth check for the beginning of your novel you want to make sure that characters make meaningful choices you want to make sure that your main character is

actively making decisions decisions that drive the story forward and they're not sort of like sitting back passively and allowing the story to happen to them now I know there could be a counterargument to this that says it's much more important at the end of your novel to make your character active rather than at the beginning of the novel beginning of the novel they can be a little bit passive as something like happens to them and then the whole novel is them figuring out what to do okay I mean decent counterargument that that is true that's

true but I would say if it is possible in your story to make your main character active in the beginning you should do it you should take advantage of that let's look at divergent by Veronica Roth Tris has an enormous choice to make in the beginning of this novel will she stay with her family in the abnegation faction or will she instead Choose The Dauntless faction and because she worries that she's not selfless enough and that she has this very adventurous streak inside of her she does make the very important choice to choose dauntless and

I think the book would be completely different if she was just shuffled into dauntless rather than being forced to make a decision it gives her so much more personal responsibility it definitely shapes her character it creates a huge Rift with her family because they feel like she's abandoning them and it also creates the struggle of about her identity who is she who is she as a person so if it is at all possible make your characters make an important and key decision at the beginning of your book and last but definitely not least number nine

the story promises what it delivers okay this is not a throwaway point you might hear that and be like well of course my story promises what it delivers but I have to say that as an editor many many many times I have read the first half of a novel and it is separated radically separated sometimes from from the second half of the novel now why does this happen so often well novel writing is a long process and over the course of that process you change as a writer you become a different type of writer and

often your vision for the book can sometimes change in subtle ways or in quite radical ways so how do you solve this problem just make sure that if you set up a quest then the rest of the book is going on that Quest if you set up an antagonist don't drop that antagonist make sure that antagonist continues for the rest of the book if you talk about an inner conflict in the first chapter or two make sure that inner conflict is something that is haunting the character for the rest of the book in other words

you're trying not to fake your reader out the first few chapters of your novel are a promise to the reader hey this is what this book is about do not break that contract so out of those nine how did you do I hope you did pretty well you got most of them if not all of them you can go ahead and post your scores in the comments if you want to brag or you want to lament and please watch another of my videos to help you along the riding Journey