Beginning
Two blogs which I have recently begun reading regularly, Kristen Lamb’s fabulous blog and a new one by the always generous-with-her-knowledge Rebecca York called “On Romance Writing”, both recently featured the topic “beginnings”. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that! Beginnings are probably The Most Important part of your book. If you don’t capture a reader with your beginning, you can beg and plead all you like, but they won’t hang around to get to the great part on page 25.
Beginnings have always been hard for me. I write and rewrite the beginnings of my books at least five, sometimes as many as ten times. Yes! I will actually have ten beginnings to my book. I can’t tell you how frustrating that is. Well, I guess you can imagine.
I usually know where I want to begin the story. I know to begin with a bang, as York reminds us in her blog. She suggests beginning in the middle of an exciting scene. An action scene. Get your reader involved and as you do so, drop hints as to who your protagonist is and get that empathy developing quickly in as few words as possible so that your reader is hooked quickly – action and empathy. It works! She gives a terrific example.
On the other hand, Lamb tells us that if we don’t start with a bit of set up, showing our protagonist’s ordinary world, our reader won’t care if our heroine is nearly killed on the first page. Yes, we’ll feel bad because we’re human that way, but we won’t really care. She stresses the need to establish who the character is, what their world is like and get that empathy going right away before we delve into the inciting event, into that action that York loves.
Ok, I can see her point. I can understand where they’re both coming from. And, just to confuse you, I think they’re both right.
Wait. What? How can they both be right? One tells you to start with action, the other with some description (well, not full stop dead description, but showing of the world). They’re completely different, how can they both be right?
Easy – it depends what you’re writing. If you’re writing a book that’s going to be filled with action and adventure – romantic suspense, like York, or YA/middle grade books (like my series which I hope to publish before the end of the year – ha, ha, ha – ahem, er, sorry, working on it), then you want to start with action and quickly build up that empathy. If you’re writing something with a slower pace, you’ll want to start by establishing the world of your novel and letting us get to know the protagonist a bit – building that empathy – first before you get into the conflict. 
The key, I think, you (and I) need to remember is that empathy. You’ll notice that both writers emphasize that right off. Build empathy between your reader and your protagonist as quickly as you can (within the first page). Whether you do that through high tension action or slow descriptive action doesn’t matter. Once we love the protagonist, once we care, we’re a lot less likely to give up on the book. We’ll not only want to know, but need to know, their story. But it all starts at the beginning.
