Emma Laybourn's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing-first-chapter"
How not to start your children's book
I've started trawling through Smashwords again, looking for free children's ebooks for my next list. Sadly some books make me switch off before I've even reached the third page. These tend to have certain traits in common. So if you're writing a children's book and don't want to lose your readers in the first chapter, here are a few suggestions:
1)Please don't spend the opening paragraphs telling me what your characters look like. There's plenty of time for that later. In any case, what they say and do is far more important than their height or hair length or descriptions of their clothing.
2) The same goes for descriptions of the room, the weather and the breakfast that your characters are eating.
3)In fact, don't start with your characters eating breakfast at all, unless an elephant is about to crash through the wall and steal the muffins. Start with the first interesting event.
I know you only want to set the scene, and have your characters fill in some back-story - maybe thus:
"As Joe poured himself a bowl of cereal, he pushed back his dark, tousled hair from his piercing blue eyes with a freckled hand and pondered on the unlikely series of events - his mother's trampoline accident and his father's disappearance in the cemetery - which had led to his spending this October half-term holiday with his spindly, middle-aged Auntie Agnes (who was not really his aunt but had been his mother's closest friend ever since they were kidnapped from boarding school together) in her creepy ivy-covered cottage, which happened to be right next door to the zoo..."
Most of the detail can wait until something has actually happened:
"Joe was half way through his bowl of cereal when the kitchen wall exploded in a shower of bricks. Through the gap, an elephant's trunk appeared."
4)When you do get round to filling in the back-story, please don't do it all at once in great distracting four-page wodges.
5)"Talking of wodges, dialogue is so much more readable than slabs of text."
"Really?"
"Sure. Get your characters talking. And your readers are more likely to keep reading too."
Well, I am, at least. And now I'm off to rewrite the beginning of my latest children's story, having just realised that I've broken at least two of these rules myself...
My next list of free children's ebooks should, I hope, be ready next month. Meanwhile, happy reading.
1)Please don't spend the opening paragraphs telling me what your characters look like. There's plenty of time for that later. In any case, what they say and do is far more important than their height or hair length or descriptions of their clothing.
2) The same goes for descriptions of the room, the weather and the breakfast that your characters are eating.
3)In fact, don't start with your characters eating breakfast at all, unless an elephant is about to crash through the wall and steal the muffins. Start with the first interesting event.
I know you only want to set the scene, and have your characters fill in some back-story - maybe thus:
"As Joe poured himself a bowl of cereal, he pushed back his dark, tousled hair from his piercing blue eyes with a freckled hand and pondered on the unlikely series of events - his mother's trampoline accident and his father's disappearance in the cemetery - which had led to his spending this October half-term holiday with his spindly, middle-aged Auntie Agnes (who was not really his aunt but had been his mother's closest friend ever since they were kidnapped from boarding school together) in her creepy ivy-covered cottage, which happened to be right next door to the zoo..."
Most of the detail can wait until something has actually happened:
"Joe was half way through his bowl of cereal when the kitchen wall exploded in a shower of bricks. Through the gap, an elephant's trunk appeared."
4)When you do get round to filling in the back-story, please don't do it all at once in great distracting four-page wodges.
5)"Talking of wodges, dialogue is so much more readable than slabs of text."
"Really?"
"Sure. Get your characters talking. And your readers are more likely to keep reading too."
Well, I am, at least. And now I'm off to rewrite the beginning of my latest children's story, having just realised that I've broken at least two of these rules myself...
My next list of free children's ebooks should, I hope, be ready next month. Meanwhile, happy reading.
