The first five pages

From a blog called Live Write Thrive: The Burden of Your First Five Pages

Noah Lukeman, in his book The First Five Pages (published in 2000), says “Over the years I’ve read thousands of manuscripts, all, unbelievably, with the exact same type of mistakes. … Writers are doing the exact same things wrong.” I’ve found this to be spot-on in the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of manuscripts I’ve edited and critiqued too. He goes on to explain that the opening pages are indicative of the rest of a manuscript. Meaning, the weak writing or glaring errors or “bad” writing habits noticed on the first few pages almost always implies the rest of the manuscript will be more of the same.

Both believable and interesting! What are these typical “exact same type” of mistakes? I have guesses based on workshop entries I’ve seen. I’m ignoring anything like inability to write a clear sentence. I mean errors that you see despite perfectly good sentences.

A) No sense of place; “white room.”

“White room” openings seem pretty common to me, with people standing somewhere or talking about something, and you have no way to visualize the world around them. There’s nothing there. Or they’re standing on a platform at the spaceport, and that’s it. There’s no actual spaceport, just some sort of nebulous platform and the word “spaceport,” but … what does it look like? It’s not really there. And this goes on for the whole page or two pages or five pages.

B) No context; confusing action.

This is the “start in media res” problem, where the author tries to start with something exciting, but without enough context for the reader to know what to focus on. Also, starting with explosions and destruction right up front means no emotional impact because who are these people and why is all this happening? So lack of context creates both confusion and emotional distance.

I’m trying to think of others issues, but those are the two that spring to mind. Back to the post … Oh, I don’t see ANYTHING about mistakes; this post is actually “How to grab the reader with your first pages,” which is fine, but not what I thought the post was going to be about.

First pages need to be tight, with concise description, and jump right into dynamic action and hint of conflict. Every word counts, so excess verbiage and unimportant movement and speech must be eliminated.

Readers want to see the scene played out, not be told about it with lengthy narrative and explanation. They don’t want ordinary and predictable. They want their curiosity aroused and their hearts tugged as quickly as possible. They want to latch on to a character who intrigues them and who’s facing challenging circumstances.

I dislike the “readers want” and “readers don’t want” phrases, because readers aren’t that uniform in their tastes. I’m thinking once more about From All False Doctrine. Ordinary setting, no action, conversation — very possibly “excess verbiage,” depending on how you define that. There’s basically no perceptible hint of the challenging circumstances (there are hints, but delightfully subtle). Characters and curiosity … mostly characters. That’s what we have in that opening. Which is a great opening! It’s a fantastic opening! I resent this idea that you have to jump right into dynamic action — I resent that on behalf of From All False Doctrine! Which is funny, because I didn’t even write that, but I still resent this pressure toward opening with dynamic action! I don’t think it’s true, and to the extent it IS true, I think it needs to be MEANINGFUL action, not just dynamic action.

Here’s what this post says about action:

Writers are encouraged to open scenes in medias res. That means your character is dropped into the middle of something that’s been developing before the scene starts. It takes careful thought to come up with a strong opening moment in which to showcase your character. That scenario you put her in needs to covey her personality, core need, and immediate goal/objective and problem, as well as establish setting, hint at a bigger conflict (if possible and/or useful to the premise), and perhaps show and describe other characters in the scene.

Which is better, because “showcase your character” is context. Plus there’s “establish setting,” which is absolutely crucial in the opening pages, much more important than action. That’s what I think is most important in the opening — character and setting. And mood, or I guess I mean tone. If there’s action, fine, but that’s not nearly as important as establishing character, setting, and tone. And style. FINE, I keep adding more things I think are crucial, none of which are action. But THINK about the Wodehousian style of From All False Doctrine! That’s absolutely crucial to the opening. It’s the style that makes this opening engaging. For the right readers, sure, but that’s true of every style.

Character, setting, tone, and style. That’s it. That’s what you need in the first five pages. That’s what I think. Not action, not concise writing without a single wasted word — style, yes, but that isn’t a synonym for “concise;” we’re not all trying to write like Hemingway. And you know what? If something great comes across the desk of someone who says, “First pages need to be tight, with concise description, and jump right into dynamic action and hint of conflict. Every word counts, so excess verbiage and unimportant movement and speech must be eliminated,” and this great novel has zero characteristics that meet that description, I bet this person would say Yay, this is great! and simply not remember they gave this advice, because what they mean is, Your first pages have to grab me, and it doesn’t matter whether this great novel ignores all this advice as long as it’s great.

And … it would be nice if people noticed that and quit saying “readers want to jump right into the action” as though that’s a law chiseled into stone and handed down from on high. Granted, “Make your first pages great” is too vague to work as advice. Which is why writing advice is so useless. But that’s a different post.

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