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In today’s episode of 12 Chapters to A Finished Novel, we begin with Chapter One: Menace!

Today, you begin typing your story. Today you begin your novel with The Kick in the Pants to Adventure.

Wait! What about establishing Regular Joe World? “Don’t I need to tell my reader exactly what my character does for a living, and what her apartment looks like, and how annoying her mother is?”

Do not. The clock’s ticking, Buckaroo, and someone is about to phone your reader and ask him if he wants to go out for a ultramegagrande sugarbomb latte. He’ll say, “Yes,” to his friend if he knows your main character’s fine. Your main character needs to be unfine from sentence number one.

In mythic structure, this is called The Call to Adventure. I call it The Kick in the Pants. The Bludgeon About the Head. The Point at Which Fate Rips Off Her Arm and Beats Her with the Soggy End. But not literally. That would really turn readers off.

Here’s your story in a nutshell: Something is really screwed up in the world. I mean seriously screwed up, and your main character sees it in sentence number one. She may not see it clearly. It may just be something out of place… but it should have some sort of menace. 

To some extent, the Kick in the Pants is going to be determined by the genre you picked a couple of days ago:

1. Romance: the hero and heroine have to meet (or there has to be mention of the love interest by the main character) on the first page. The two of them are going to be thrown together by the Kick…, or Bludgeon…, or Soggy End…, or whatever you want to call it.

2. In noir and thrillers, the Kick is more subtle. It’s more of the femme fatale making a proposition. You (and everyone else) just know it’s not going to end well.

3. In horror, and sometimes thrillers, the Kick scares the begeepers out of the main character and they have to be scared, and scared, and scared a few more times before they finally decide they have to deal with it. 

However you do it, try to make the main character’s goal as clear as possible from the beginning. If the reader knows what she’s after, he’s likely to say, “No,” to his friend with the latte and keep reading. Most importantly, your main character absolutely cannot return to Regular Joe World, again. There has to be no way back. Your hero is in The Wild World of Adventure, now. Woo-hoo!

Still here? Go type!

Stumble It!

4 Days until NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month.

Reading isn’t dead, but readers are getting harder and harder to hold. The competition for entertainment is fierce. They have a lot of places to escape into: internet, television, movies, game consoles, books of all kinds. If your writing doesn’t grab the reader from the beginning, your manuscript won’t make it over an agent’s desk, let alone an editor’s. And once you have a reader’s attention, you can’t let go for a moment.

 That’s why I’m going to go against Joseph Campbell. Sacrilege. In The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Campbell talks about how the beginning of most of the stories through the long centuries have begun by showing the listener or reader the main character’s regular world. The story will soon force them into The Wild World of Adventure, but it’s Regular Joe World to begin with.

Down with Campbell.

Modern authors don’t have time. Readers don’t care. I’ll explain some of the things that need to be in the beginning of your story, but the reality is that The Kick In the Pants to Adventure has to come on page one of your novel, or you’ll lose people to The Starter Wife on USA Network. So, make sure you have everything in the following list, but don’t try to start writing until you read about the next part, or you’ll have to rewrite. Just make sure you have:

1. Your hero needs an internal problem, a weakness. But it has to be something they have to fight against through the story: fear, feelings of inadequacy, addiction, trauma, etc.

2. Your hero has to be likable. Even Dr. House in the television show House is likable because he’ll do and risk anything to save the life of someone who has no other chance of survival. Even the darkest of heroes have to be likable on page one. Make them do at least one noble thing, however small.

3. Remember that every actor likes to make an entrance. Your main character can only be “normal” if everything else in the story is Crazy with a capital “C”.

4. The stakes have to be established early on–and generally–the bigger, the better.

This is the first part of the Eternal Story–the core story that has been the predominant backbone of storytelling throughout the centuries. This used to be Chapter One. Now, it’s part of Chapter One. The more important part of Chapter One comes tomorrow, and it is really what needs to be the star of the show: The Kick in the Pants to Adventure. Are you ready? Don’t skip the four steps above. Make sure you have them ready.

5 Days until NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month . I just signed up!

That’s the starting gun… and you need a starting gun (or something else really exciting) on your first page, or no one will read page two. Sorry. That’s just how it is.

And I know you’re about to get started on your story. However, I have to tell you something really important, first. This is what you’re cannot do on your first page. If you want your book to sell, on page one, you cannot have:

1. Your main character wallowing in misery. This is only allowed if you somehow make it incredibly funny, and then make the rest of the book incredibly funny.

2. You cannot start with a dream sequence. When the reader realizes that they haven’t been getting a feel for the real world of the rest of the book, they will throw your novel across the room and go find something else to read.

3. Although some authors get away with it, you are not going to start with a punchy prologue because the actual first page of chapter one is as dull as dishwater. Your first page of chapter one is going to be exciting, isn’t it?

4. You will not have your main character doing something awful to make it “real”. Readers don’t read genre fiction for “reality”. They read genre fiction for entertainment. Period. A main character who hurts others, steals from the helpless, abandons people, or is drunk/on drugs (without being incredibly funny) isn’t a hero. No one will ever find out about his redeeming qualities because they won’t read past page two.

5. You will not set one tone, and then change it later. If you have blood on page one (or two, or three), there has to be a river of blood by the last chapter. If there is an action sequence near the beginning of the story, the novel can’t suddenly turn introspective later on with people having coffee for chapters at a time and just talking.

So check that your idea doesn’t do any of the above, then get ready to write your exciting first pages. I can’t wait to read them!

Now that you’ve chosen a genre and a basic plot (and I mean basic!), you’re going to need an overview of what you’re going to do. This will help you understand where you are on the path. When you can see the end, it’s always easier to keep walking… er, writing.

Open a new document in your word processor program and do a couple of things with it:

1. Add a page number to the top of the page. Use the program to do it so the numbers will refresh automatically and… drumroll, please… you can write in your working title for your novel. You really need a working title, even if you end up choosing something else by the end. You need a name so you can save an easily find the file, and so you can talk about your work-in-progress to someone who will encourage you. If you can’t even tell them a title, well… you look like a wannabe-writer who can’t even come up with a title.

2. Just like I’ve added numbers to the beginning of these paragraphs, write the numbers 1-13 on the page, each number on its own line. These are going to be your “chapters”, for now. You may end up with more or less than this number, but this is a good place to start.

3. Think of an interesting twist that can come right, smack in the middle of the novel. It has to be something that’s going to turn everything around. What the hero wanted isn’t actually the right thing, or she can’t reach it, or his identity isn’t what everyone thought it was. This is going to be section 8… kind of like in the military. Everything goes crazy for a moment.

But you have to make certain that the twist doesn’t change the genre of the story. A romance can’t suddenly become a murder mystery. A police procedural can’t suddenly become sci-fi. The twist has to be within the genre.