Last year in August, I
started the first semester of my Masters of Fine Arts at Chatham University in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Moving all the way to the Eastern US was a pretty big
deal for me and I was anxious to make the most of my time there. I left with
big plans to finish writing a children’s book I’d started, one about goblins
and faeries and other delightful staples of high fantasy.
Only I got there and
at the first class, my new thesis advisor informed me that the five pages due the
next week had to be, no ifs ands or buts about it, from a new project. Mildly
frustrated, I spat out a piece that was a jumbled mess of characters. I’d had
these people in my head for some time, but no firm structure to build them
into. So, since I was homesick, I had them find something strange on a Pacific
North-west inspired beach and then called it a day.
But when I took it to
class, something strange happened. Our class was on beginnings and as my
advisor explained what made a good beginning, I got really excited. Because I
knew my sample pages began horribly. They started exactly in the wrong place,
had too many characters and didn’t get to the meat of the scene fast enough. I’d
never been so thrilled to be mediocre.
So I revised the pages
and brought them in and they were... better. Good enough that I felt inspired
and I just kept plugging away. In the end, I never returned to that first
children’s story, though I hope to some day. By the end of the following summer,
I’d finished a draft of RIFT RUNNERS and started querying my spankin’ new YA
novel in the fall.
Which brings me back
to the beginning pages. Querying really is the art of making a good first
impression. There’s the letter itself, of course, but there’s also those key
first five pages. Many literary agents
request that they be included with the query, while others who later request
pages may stop reading early if the first few aren’t up to snuff.
Needless to
say, I’ve had “first page” anxiety for a long time. I have a higher request rate from agents on queries that DON'T offer any pages to look at and both the partials I've sent out I got rejections on. It might be too soon to say if the opening pages suck, but it has got me wondering. I’ve rewritten the first
chapter of my novel more than any other part of the book. Much to my surprise,
it isn’t endings that turned out to be hard for me, but getting the opening to
click with the rest of the story.
Which brings me to the
Blind Speed Dating contest, hosted at Cupid's Literary Connection. This is effectively a query letter contest, the first of its kind I’d ever
stumbled across and the idea got me excited. It turns out there are lots of
contests like this hosted by bloggers, most of whom communicate through
Twitter. They seem to be a pretty tight knit, supportive community.
In this case, a pack
of 40-45 entries would be chosen from the submissions and those would go into a
round where agents would bid on the chance to see pages. But not only would
your query be judged, so would your first 250 words. In other words, if I
applied to this competition, I might get some idea of how my query and first
page stack up next to the other YA entries, publically. So entered I did.
I came to the
conclusion that if I didn’t make it past the bouncer round and into the pot the
agents look at, I would be tearing up the first five pages AGAIN and truth be
told, I may still do that. But it’s happily in the category of *may* still
because I DID get in!
This isn’t to say my
first page is perfect, but if I do rewrite it, it will structurally be a very
different opener. And I frankly don’t know if it will be any better. In editing, we all hit points where it gets hard to see the forest for
the trees. Changing the beginning may be better for the story. It may not. So
here’s to one more exciting week of testing out Rift Runners! Hopefully, an
agent or two might pierce it with their cupid’s arrow. J
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