Authors highlight different ways of starting to write a book

[John Dean]

I have just started writing my next crime novel and I have more time to concentrate on it now that Kirkcudbright Book Week, which I help organise, has come to an end for this year.

In fact, the subject of how best to begin a story cropped up during Book Week, not least when I chaired an in-conversation event at the Selkirk Arms, featuring crime writers Traude Ailinger, Ian Robinson and James Davidson who are all, like me, published by The Book Folks.

The subject featured in a number of the 22 other events as well and what emerged was a stark difference in approach between two very distinct ways of starting to write a new book.

One option favoured by a number of authors, myself included, is to do a lot of the planning before you start writing so that you have a decent idea of the story when you begin.

That can be useful because it gives you a roadmap to follow and, if the author has got it right, they will find the story gradually assuming a life of its own, introducing new plotlines and even necessitating the scrapping of elements of the original synopsis.

However, there is another way of starting writing and it was one favoured by quite a few authors who talked about their craft during Book Week, and that is just starting to write and see where it takes you.

I tried that with one novel and the result was a rambling plot that kept running into dead-ends and required me to go back and rewrite. However, the authors who championed the method during Book Week said that it worked well for them. It’s a case of whatever works for you.

Whatever technique you use, the finished product needs to achieve an awful lot in its opening paragraphs because the modern reader, when presented with so many books, is  perfectly capable of discarding a book if the opening paragraphs do not engage them. The day of the patient reader who will give a book a couple of chapters to ease themselves into the plot are fast disappearing.

That was something with which the authors talking at Book Week agreed. The key thing that a crime writer, indeed any writer, must bear in mind is that a good start is as if the author has reached out of the page, grabbed the reader by the lapel and said ‘don’t you dare go away, this is going to be good!’

You need to create momentum right from the off, to make sure that the reader is so intrigued by what they are encountering that they keep turning the pages.

The first rule of opening lines is that they should possess most of the individual elements that make up the story. The opening paragraphs should have a distinctive voice, a point of view, a rudimentary plot, some hint of characterisation and a sense of a drama already under way, the latter because all stories begin in the middle, things have happened in the past, will happen in the future.

Also important for the beginning of a story is The Question, something that piques the reader’s interest right from the off. Why have the police been called to the church, what is a 96-year-old woman doing with a gun, whose body has been found on the railway line etc etc?

All in all, few paragraphs work harder than the ones that herald the beginning of a new novel!