As Silver Dragon and some other folks discovered here yesterday, editors and agents agree that the single biggest barrier to publication for many first-time writers is a bad beginning--a dull, dry opening or first page.
That's common sense, isn't it? If you don't find ways to engage your reader right away, how do you expect him or her to keep on reading?
Well, it's not that simple. I don't really believe a writer sets out to suck. So if his or her story doesn't grab right away, it's usually because the writer has no clear idea about his or her audience. I've written on this issue before, but I repeat it here because it's so important: The easiest way to win an audience's attention, to engage, to keep that audience glued to your page, is if you know exactly who you're writing for. Some writers think if they envision a "general" audience, they'll hit the mark somehow. But that's as silly as a fisherman casting his net into the open seas and hoping he catches something good. Won't he be better off if he studied the waters and cast his net where he could get the particular catch he wants?
Okay Ms. Expert, you say, but what if I'm writing for an audience of Guyanese males aged 20-something or thereabouts, and not for an over-worked, 50-something year old, American editor with a bad prostate and thick glasses? How will he relate to my story, smartass? He probably won't, but a good editor will be able to recognize by the first page or the first lines of your story whether or not your audience--or any audience desiring to find out what 20-something year-old Guyanese males care about--will become immediately engaged in the work.
Now you could sign up for this Writer's Digest sponsored course on Thursday to find out more of what I'm talking about here from the experts themselves. They promise they'll give you an insider’s perspective on how editors and agents can tell right away whether your manuscript is worth further consideration. They'll teach you how to avoid beginner mistakes that doom a manuscript from the first page. You'll experience (in real time, they promise) how an editor makes a decision to keep reading or not, and you'll get a checklist for self-editing and revision that will improve your manuscript overnight.
You could sign up for the course, or you could reread the first page of your manuscript, or the first lines of your story with a cold, harsh eye, and ask yourself if it was somebody else's work, would you want to read on?
And Silver Dragon could probably teach the course himself. After all, he does an exemplary job of writing for a specific audience on topics they care about. And he knows his audience so well (he actually works hard at finding out...I know), any editor with a keen eye on what would sell would immediately recognize Silver Dragon's success in engaging not only his target audience, but anyone else who might be interested in reading about how that audience thinks about gender issues.
