The First Chapter as Threshold

By Anne Hamilton

• An opening paragraph of 50 pages. Yep, that’s right. It’s not a typo: 50 pages, not 50 words.
• A sentence in the first paragraph in excess of 80 words. With nested clauses, rather than a progressive linear thought.
• A prologue of five manuscript pages, entirely presented in an eye-straining font with baroque flourishes.
• An appeal to readers half way through the first chapter—no kidding, a striking full-page direct marketing ad with big black borders for maximum impact—asking them to take to social media and tell the world how much they’re enjoying the book.
• A sentence with four adverbs: one to start, one to finish and two in the middle. On the first page.

Elementary mistakes. Careless, you might think. The sort of errors made only by inexperienced or ignorant writers. Yet, don’t be too quick to decide you wouldn’t make a similar mindblowingly-simple blunder!

When I first started appraising fiction, I made myself a checklist of common mistakes to look out for. It started at four pages. It’s grown to nine. But, as I’ve worked with authors, I actually think that the First Chapter Blues I wrote about last week are not primarily symptomatic of problems with writing. I think the issue is spiritual.

It’s rarely about mastering the finer points of writing. First chapters are, in fact, the intersection of writing as a craft and as a spiritual beachhead. To look only at craft issues is to ignore what for many writers is real problem.

First chapters are thresholds. This is why so many of us self-sabotage at the very beginning. The problem isn’t really first chapters (or even first books—how many authors are ripped off by unscrupulous companies on their initial foray into the world of publishing?); it’s about our propensity to sacrifice on thresholds. The more significant the threshold, the greater the sacrifice.

Sometimes the sacrifice, paradoxically, is the book itself.

Most Christians have never heard of threshold covenants (also called ‘cornerstone covenants’). Yet, instinctively we ‘know’ thresholds require sacrifices. We are aware, without ever being told, of the real nature of the spiritual dynamic. We sense we aren’t going to cross the threshold from ‘unpublished’ to ‘published’ without paying a price.

Several options are present at the threshold but most Christians, being nice, choose not to sacrifice others. (A lot of the problem is that that ‘nice’ is not a fruit of the Spirit.) Instead we sacrifice ourselves through sabotaging our books. I see it all the time with authors whose writing suddenly takes a quantum leap upwards in Chapter 4—just after the most generous commissioning editor will have given up. Trust me, I recognise the behaviour—because I’ve done it myself.

Authors who regularly engage in this sort of behaviour need to realise it’s not about technique. It’s not about learning how better to craft an opening chapter. Once that’s perfect, they’ll find other ways to shoot themselves in the foot. Like the author who couldn’t re-submit to a waiting publisher because she decided there were half a dozen possible inconsistencies in her professionally-edited novel. It would take less than five minutes to fix the lot, but two years later, she was still in a spiral of anxiety about them and unable to decide whether or not they really were inconsistencies. Normally she’s not a ditherer.

At the threshold, our behaviour changes.

Not everyone has a threshold problem. But if your attempts to come into God’s calling for you are repeatedly met by constriction and wasting—then it’s not about your ability, it’s about you. You’ve got much more to get sorted in your life than a narrative hook, the rise and fall of tension across a dozen pages or whether you’ve Resisted the Urge to Explain.

Make no mistake—a threshold is a complex place. Its dangerous nature is attested throughout Scripture by the fact that, more often than not, a godly threshold moment has a pair of angels standing guard.

Many people try to run the gauntlet of the threshold and wonder why God wasn’t there for them. They feel betrayed. Of all the soul-destroying, faith-annihilating, hope-crushing events in life, this is often the worst. You finally get to move into the calling you believe God has always prepared for you but you are so seriously mutilated financially or emotionally or mentally as you step up to the doorway, you’re not sure you can ever risk going back.

You are indeed called to make a sacrifice, but never to be a sacrifice. If you don’t understand that at a heart level, then you’ll simply find ever more subtle ways of throwing yourself on your sword.

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Anne Hamilton has spent the last three years researching threshold covenants and prayer-counselling others about them. She was surprised to discover how easily they can be spotted in writing.

First Chapter Blues

By Anne Hamilton

The human brain is ‘wired for story’, according to Lisa Cron, when discussing brain science to craft stories. Probably even before Scheherazade invented the cliff-hanger so her husband wouldn’t kill her, humans have felt a sense of satisfaction with some story-telling styles and not with others.

Sure there can be cultural differences. In the west, we like an underpinning of logic. In Japan, mood and atmosphere are the all important features. Master story-tellers know how to spin out a tale so the audience, like Goldilocks, feels it sits just right. Such knowledge comes from lots of practice and discovering when and where the audience responds.

In the last few centuries, genre fiction has acquired the air of being very formulaic. To a degree this is true. As an editor, I often encounter authors wanting to break the mould. However, there’s a very good reason for the formula: it is the one publishers have found from long experience most satisfies the human craving for story. If you’re going to break the formula, you need to think hard and long about why.

First chapters have to be an author’s best writing for many reasons: not least because often it’s all a commissioning editor will look at. (And often they won’t even look at all of it.) So what makes a good first chapter? Most writers today realise that opening with a narrative hook is almost essential. Tick that as pretty much common knowledge.

However, beyond that, it can be uncharted territory. Let’s look at mistakes to avoid. Most common problems fall into two categories: structure and character development.

• The narrative hook should be integral to your story, not a tacked-on introduction of high-level drama or mystery. The story shouldn’t fall after the opening and flatten out, it should dip before rising again to a mini-crisis at the end of the first chapter.
  
• If, just past the narrative hook, the story pauses to spill an information dump on the reader or fill in several paragraphs of backstory, all the momentum of the opening is lost.
  
• If the story backtracks after the opening to reveal what led up to the narrative hook, then the forward movement is stalled and it’s usually immensely difficult to retrieve it.
  
• If the beginning features nameless characters performing vague, mysterious actions, it’s not necessarily intriguing. The author may be aware of the significance of it all but, for the reader, there’s a risk of losing the plot before it’s even started.
  
• Perhaps the biggest mistake, however—because it doesn’t seem like a mistake—is revealing the protagonist’s trauma too soon. This is an issue I increasingly encounter. Way back in the character’s past, there’s a critical incident that’s the key to their behaviour. Without this, nothing about their actions makes true sense. Unfortunately because authors wants readers to like their characters from the start, they can be premature in their revelations.

Instead of dropping little hints, building up a list of clues and letting the reader savour the mini-mystery, authors are increasingly tending to adopt this counter-productive strategy. Just as the emotional impact of hearing about a friend’s trauma is much greater than that of hearing about a stranger’s, so too it is with characters we’ve come to know through the course of a story. It’s better to leave it until a much later chapter where it can deepen our appreciation of a chara
cter and create a rounder, more full-bodied impression.

These five structural/developmental points are ones that tend to put me off, right from the start. Do you share this? Or find there are others annoy you more?

Anne Hamilton is an editor and author. She once taught mathematics for three decades. Her new book analyses the mathematics of one of the greatest of all English poems, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.