The First Chapter

Contrary to popular belief, the first chapter of a book is the hardest.  It’s amateurs who think it’s the easiest.  Here’s why:

You get an idea.  You sit down and start writing.  The work is brisk because you’ve got a lot on your mind.  A day or two later, you have a first chapter that looks good enough to eat.  Then you get all chipper and start on chapter two, chapter three, chapter four, chapter five – you’re in the heat of the day now.  Personally, chapter five doesn’t scare me in the least.  The key is going on and on until you finish.

Then you get back to chapter one and do you know what?  It’s a mess.  It looks like you vomited chop suey on the fun rug at Chunky Cheese.  Nearly every sentence needs dissecting.  Do you know why?  Because when you started out with your original premise, you thought you had what you were doing nailed.  You didn’t.  You are so much wiser about your plot by this point, so you see how many changes you need to make to make the thing flow as a whole the way it is supposed to.

You can say, ‘that’s poor planning’ if you want to criticize me, but I’ll just retaliate by saying that you’re an amateur.  An artist who doesn’t let their work grow organically (without their stamp of approval) is going to get bored writing their book awfully quickly.  You have to let your book do what it wants to a certain degree.  It could be that your subconscious is driving at something your fingers didn’t exactly know about.  To force it back down is the same as swallowing throw-up (later I’ll write about how writing is exactly like trimming a tree, which is absolutely nothing like throwing up … just warning you).

So chapter one is going to get hacked apart and sewn back together like Frankenstein’s monster until you are so tired of your opening line you could just die.  But that means you’re doing it right.

The thing that makes ripping apart the first chapter so hard is that it was the thing that got you started to begin with.  An inexperienced author feels like they’re killing the sweetest part of their inspiration.  An experienced author cuts it without the tiniest fragment of remorse.  They’re playing that game we all learned on Sesame Street – one of these things doesn’t belong.  One of these things isn’t the same.  Really!  Why isn’t there a musical note key on the keyboard instead of the letter C?  We don’t really need the C as much as we need to have a piece of punctuation that indicates loud, obnoxious singing.  I do that as much as I talk.

In summation – chapter one is a worm ridden corpse that the author must somehow turn into a glittering 15 second commercial for the book or no one will read it.

Here's a link to read my novel Rose Red for free https://www.fictionpress.com/story/story_preview.php?storyid=3151941&chapter=1