Writing Podcast Episode 736: Judith Katherine discusses being 'Simply Beside Herself'

Now, can I tell you about a recent manuscript that I opened and I started reading and the first sentence was about the light.

You know, it was grey apparently and it was coming in low over the paddocks, okay.

The second sentence was about the wind and by the third sentence we'd moved on to a fence and it was a very well-described fence but I still had no real idea whether there was a human being in the book yet but, you know, that's okay.

Now, I want to be clear that I have nothing against

the weather.

I mean, I live in Sydney where we talk about it all the time.

And I understand why writers do this, because some of the best novels ever written do open on a landscape.

And if you've read a lot of them, you sort of absorb the idea that a proper book begins with the sky.

But when a really good writer does it, you know, opens with the sky or something like that, there really is a voice underneath the weather and you can feel a person standing in that landscape even before they're named, right? And if you don't think about that, then it's just weather.

So it isn't only the sky either.

In my experience, there are three openings that turn up over and over again, and they are the weather, they're the alarm clock, you know, when you wake up, and the mirror, like the character wakes up or the character looks at her reflection and describes herself to us or the sun does something over a hill.

And the trouble with all three is the same.

The reader has nobody to care about yet.

They're being asked to admire a view before anyone has invited them in kind of thing.

So what do you open with instead? People sometimes hear this advice and assume that I mean like a car chase, and I don't.

I mean a person doing something they want to do.

A woman trying to get a key out of a lock without waking the dog is better than First sentence with a sunrise, right? Because in 11 words, I've got a person, a problem and a dog.

And I want to know why she's sneaking out.

The weather can come later because readers will happily take weather once they have somebody to stand in that weather.

And I say this as someone who has read a lot of first pages.

And I can tell you that the writer nearly always knows this already, right? If you ask them what their book is about, they'll tell you about a woman with a secret or a man who has to go back to the town he ran away from.

They never say it's about the light over the paddocks.

The person is right there in their head, but for some reason, you know, we make them wait on the doorstep while we describe the sky.

So this week, try this.

Open your manuscript and find the first sentence in which a named person does something on purpose or, you know, a significant person does something on purpose.