How to Start a Book

Okay, I finished the rough draft of my manuscript… and then the second draft… and then I went through it again. You know what? I hated the beginning.

Maybe I had read this thing too many times. Maybe the whole thing was trash. I started doing some research. I had one question to answer… How is a book supposed to start?

I realized that I’m not the first author to ask this question when I realized how many books and blogs there are out there with this as a topic line. Realizing that I could kill many hours reading and call it research, I dug in to read as many of these as possible. I was going to find out the perfect solution to my dragging book problem.

After several hours, I realized that each author had their own solution to the best way to start a book. Although I had become familiar with some great phrases like, ‘setting the hook’ and ‘dragging the reader in’, I still didn’t know for sure how to redo the beginning of my book. I had found several books that made me question where the beginning of my book should be, however. Maybe I needed to add a few more chapters at the beginning? Tell more story? Tell less story?

Finally, I decided that the opening of the book just needs a couple of things. When I go shopping for a new book I often read the first page. If I like the character and the voice of the author, I’ll probably buy the book. So, I decided that what I really needed to do was to go back to the beginning of my book and rewrite the first page and make sure that the character is in there enough to be understood and that I get enough of my writing style there for the reader to understand how I’ll write the story. I just needed to create some situation for the main character to ‘be in’ that would describe her personality in the first page. How hard could that be, right?

One of the most interesting blogs, that I read, used the Disney movies as an example. In most of the Disney animated movies, the main character is introduced by an opening song that goes through and introduces their world and the one thing that they value. Belle in the opening of Beauty and the Beast and her books, as an example. 

Now, all I have to do is find that core value of my character and create an interesting scene to begin the book. It doesn’t even have to have an importance in the story, just introduce the character and grab the reader into the story.

Should be easy, right?