Episode 203: 7 Bad Ways To Start Your Novel

In this week's episode, we take a look at seven bad ways to open your novel and how to avoid their pitfalls.

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 203 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May the 31st, 2024 and today we are looking at seven bad ways to start your novel. Usually here we have Coupon of the Week. Unfortunately my Internet is currently down as I'm recording this, which means I can't get to my Payhip store and I can't create a Coupon of the Week. So we will resume with Coupon of the Week in June when I start recording new episodes.

So now let's move directly to my current writing progress on my current writing projects. I am 38,000 words into Shield of Darkness, which currently puts the Chapter 7 of 24. I have 24 chapters in the rough draft outline, but that will probably increase because I’ll have to split a few of the longer ones in editing. I had hoped to have that out in June. That doesn't look like it's going to happen because I have a lot of home repair to do in June and a couple of multi-day commitments where I won't be able to do any writing. So I think we are looking more likely for some time after the 4th of July in mid-July is when that book will come out.

I am also 20,000 words into Half-Orc Paladin, which will come out after Shield of Darkness comes out. I am also 6,000 words into Ghost in the Tombs, which will come out sometime this fall, if all goes well.

In audiobook news, we are done recording Tales of the Shield Knight, which will excellently be excellently narrated by Brian Wills and that will be a collection of the various short stories I wrote to accompany the Sevenfold Sword and Dragontiarna series. That is all done and should hopefully start appearing on various audiobook platforms before the end of June.

00:01:44 Question of the Week

Now before we get into our main topic, let's go to Question of the Week. Question of the Week is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics, and this week's question: what was the first smartphone you ever used, and what was the first time you decided a smartphone was useful and not a waste of money? And we had one response for this one.

Our first response is from Justin, who says: my work issued me a BlackBerry in 2004. Some folks considered them a first smartphone. I considered it a pain. They figured with that they owed me 24/7 and demanded an answer within 5 minutes to any email. I stopped that by asking how much they were paying me to reply outside of work hours. Then I was brought in for a work reprimand for not replying to an urgent e-mail sent during the day.

My defense was that I was driving back from a remote site. When asked if I should be using the device while driving (already a no-no back then) or should I pull over and check every time I got a message, my boss decided that just maybe I wouldn't get in trouble that time, anyway. So far, I was not a fan.

In 2011, we switched from Blackberries to Samsung with the first Galaxy S. I was unsure about the change, but the increased battery life and ability to put the phone in my shirt pocket won me over. What made it a true useful tool was when I installed the flashlight app on it. Working in a prison made it a pain to bring in a flashlight. You had to have paperwork and disassembled at every checkpoint to show that there's no contraband being smuggled in. The phone got a sticker and was blessed to pass security scrutiny thereafter. The flashlight was so handy. Now it's part of the OS, but then it needed a separate program to run.

Yeah, smartphones have definitely contributed to the erosion of work/life balance, in my opinion. I used to do a lot of support for BlackBerry devices and they were a huge pain. I wasn't terribly upset to see the iPhone and Android displace BlackBerry and you know, sort of push it out of business because those phones, from a support perspective, let me tell you, were a big pain.

For myself, it was in 2013 when I got my first smartphone, a Samsung Galaxy S3. I hadn’t wanted to get a smartphone, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to find non-smartphones. So I finally bit the bullet and moved into the new technology. At the time, I usually resented it since I just wanted another flip phone.

When did I find it useful for the first time? I remember that incident distinctly. I was working in IT support at the time, and the next day I had to go activate some network ports in another building. The building in question had been built in the ‘90s before Wi-Fi, and so every room had something like a billion Ethernet ports in it. But network switches are expensive, and even though the building has a little like 500 Ethernet ports, only 48 of them could be active at any one time, since that was how many ports the network switch had. So when anyone moved offices, an IT support minion (i.e. me) had to go over there and move the active network ports in the network closet.

I used to take a notebook with me on those kinds of calls so I could write down the port numbers and then match them up to the appropriate ports in the switch closet. But as I was doing this, it occurred to me that I didn't have to write down the port numbers. I could just take a picture of them and then look at the picture on my phone. This was much more efficient than writing down a bunch of port numbers and that was the first time I saw a smartphone as a useful tool instead of just an expensive toy.

The inspiration for this week’s question was a recent email I got from a reader complaining how the characters in the Silent Order science fiction series still use phones even though it's far in the future.

00:05:03 Main Topic: 7 Potentially Bad Openings for Your Novel

Now let's move on to our main topic this week, seven potentially bad beginnings or openings for your novel. It is important to try and have the opening of your novel be as interesting as possible, and sometimes writers overdo it a bit when they'll start the novel with a sentence like,
“today, I will tell you about the time I died for the fifth time” or something like that where you can be try and be so interesting that it becomes overwrought and actually kind of annoying to read.

The flip side of this is you definitely don't want your opening to be boring or do anything that would turn off the reader, because while the ending of your book is important, the opening is also important because that will be what draws the reader in and hopefully compels them to read more and then go on and purchase any sequels. So with that in mind, let's go through seven of the potentially worst openings for your novel.

Number one: being vague or mysterious to the point of being confusing. Confusion is bad. It's easy to confuse or baffle readers if you are not careful. The setting, characters, and what's happening all can't be a mystery at the beginning or the reader will have nothing to orient them in terms of what's happening in them in the book, or even what genre it is. It would be best to establish a very strong setting and character first and then have them learn what's happening and feel disoriented alongside the reader, which can work for a vague or mysterious beginning, especially if it's part of some action. You don't want your reader to be confused, but it is sometimes a good idea to have your protagonist be confused, since that will hook the reader and pull them in.

For example, let's say we have a convenience store clerk who's coming to work, and as she does, she sees her boss turn into a bat and fly away. This has never happened to her before, and she's immediately baffled and wondering whether she's has a brain tumor or she just saw something supernatural or science fictional happen, and that can and that kind of set out can be a good way to hook the reader and draw them further into the story.

The second bad way to start your novel is with nothing. In other words, nothing is happening or things are happening too slowly. Philosophical musings and/or emotional reflections are not a good way to start a book because they're not connected to the plot or character yet and on their own in fiction, they don't mean anything. Your reader has picked up the book to read a fictional story, not your opinions on various philosophies or political platforms or whatever. They don't have any emotional significance or connect to the plot until they're connected to a character in some way, and so you need to establish your characters in your settings and something of the plot before you can have a more philosophical considerations showing up. Something needs to be happening in the beginning to draw in reader interest, like for example with the convenience store.

This could also be a way to show, not tell about the characters and setting. With our convenience store clerk, we could have her wake up, look at her credit card bills trying to figure out ways to make more money. That lets us know that she might be in debt and might be having financial troubles and she could be worried about paying to fix her car or finding a better apartment. And so then she's worried about these things when out of the blue, her boss at the convenience store turns into a giant bat and flies away. That helps us establish proper context and character and then since she'll feel realistic and grounded after all that , it may be all the more shocking when she sees something outside of her everyday life.

The third bad way to start a novel is what's called an info dump. That is, when in a fantasy or science fiction setting, the writer dumps all of his or her world building onto you right away or if you are writing like a thriller or a historical novel, the writer dumps all of his or her research on you right away. You don't need to give readers all your world building, historical research, or other such research before moving ahead with the plot. Parcel out your world building slowly throughout the book. This can be done in a way to build tension or mystery to keep interest. Remember, the reader generally doesn't need to know more than is necessary to move the plot forward. No matter how much research you do, no matter how much information you require or world building you do, only put enough into the book to move the plot forward. Anything else will just it bog down.

The fourth bad way to start your novel is with a cliche, and by cliche we mean starting the novel with “it was a dark and stormy night.” I also strongly recommend not to start your novel with the description of the weather, since that's often lazy writing and sort of a crutch to, you know, sort of for the writer to warm himself up. Don't start with an intro that turns out to be just a dream or a prophecy or something that will be retconned later. Don't start with the character waking up and getting ready in the morning unless you make it interesting. This can work if you do it right, but sometimes it can be clumsy to sort of start where it's like a TV show where there's a record scratch, the screen pauses, and the character says “you might be wondering how I got here” and that can work. However, it's best to only do that if you can do it well and you can do it in a way that's interesting.

The fifth bad way to start your book is with a line of dialogue. While this can be done well, it can be a hook to draw on readers, but it's hard to do and it's very easy to annoy or confuse the reader. It can be good for an in media res situation where the character is an intense situation, but you should only do it if it's very clear who is speaking and what is going on.

The sixth bad way to start your book is in a way that is stylistically not representative of the rest of the book, such as starting with an omniscient narrator and then switching over to first person for the rest of the book or a book starts with an action scene and the book that is otherwise not very action oriented or starts with a long historical tangent in a book that is very action oriented.

And finally, the seventh way to start your book in a bad way is the prologue. Or more to the point, an ineffective prologue. I used to write prologues from time to time, but I personally don't care for them and really have come to consider them extraneous. The kind of information that is included in prologue can usually be better parceled out throughout the book in a way that pulls in the reader and draws your interest.

Prologues that don't match the first chapter or immediately tie into the first chapter’s action can annoy and lose the reader. A prologue needs stakes to be interesting, and prologues need to be short and ideally some kind of cliffhanger that gives weight or tension to what you're about to introduce. The absolute worst kind of prologues (in my opinion) are those that introduce a character who disappears and does not reappear for like 200 or 300 pages into the book, by which time the reader has likely forgotten all about that character.

So those are several ways to open your book that are less than effective and hopefully that will help you with your own writing to write introductions and openings to your book that are interesting and hold the reader's attention.

So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy, and we'll see you all next week.