Nailing the beginning of your book can feel like a high-stakes tightrope act for a skeptical audience. You have to introduce your characters, world, hook, and plot, all the while aware that the reader, agent, or editor on the other side might stop reading at any time. But you have a superpower at your disposal. The most important thing you can do in the first few pages is something simple: make your reader a promise as to what kind of experience they will have with your story. When your first pages make a strong promise--one that sets up expectations regarding tone, pace, and experience--you will find and delight the readers who want to fall in love with your book. In this workshop, we'll use real-world examples to explore effective, weak, and confusing promises, and you'll experiment with ways to make the promise in your premise as clear and captivating as possible.
Nailing the beginning of your book can feel like a high-stakes tightrope act for a skeptical audience. You have to introduce your characters, world, hook, and plot, all the while aware that the reader, agent, or editor on the other side might stop reading at any time. But you have a superpower at your disposal. The most important thing you can do in the first few pages is something simple: make your reader a promise as to what kind of experience they will have with your story. When your first pages make a strong promise--one that sets up expectations regarding tone, pace, and experience--you will find and delight the readers who want to fall in love with your book. In this workshop, we'll use real-world examples to explore effective, weak, and confusing promises, and you'll experiment with ways to make the promise in your premise as clear and captivating as possible.
