Each week for as long as it takes, I’m going to discuss a craft element every author should consider on the first page of every story. As always, I hope the posts will help you take a look at your work and find ways to improve it.
The first page has a rotten job; it must convince a stranger that it’s worth their time, and it must do it in the blink of an eye. Imagine if that was your job, all day, every day. “Love me! Look how compelling I am! Don’t you want to come inside and see what else this book has to offer?”
Pretty rough, right? It’s the literary equivalent of getting into a sandwich suit and dancing at an intersection with a big sign.
Luckily, you can equip your first pages with tools that make their job a lot easier. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to go over a number of those tools, and I’m starting with the most important one today: on your first page, you must establish a voice for the novel.
Voice is one of the hardest aspects of craft to define, but I’ll do my best for you here. When I say voice, I mean which words you use to tell the story and what promises those words make to the reader.
One of my favorite first pages is that of Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself. Really, you should read the whole first chapter (hell, the whole book) if you want to study voice, but I’ll pluck out a line to pick apart for you. It’s the third paragraph of the book, the eighth line (moving down vertically), the twelfth and thirteenth sentences. In short, it comes very early.
“There was a spear coming at him. A cruel-looking spear, coming at him fast with a Shanka on the other end of it.”
That line does a great job of establishing voice. It promises the reader a number of things:
- This will be a stylistically rendered novel (Look at the repetition—not strictly necessary but used to artistic effect).
- This will be a humorous novel (Look at the way this information is delivered—cleverly and with a hint of sarcasm: “Yep, there’s a spear coming…oh, and it has an effing monster attached to one end.” Abercrombie could have written, “A Shanka threw a cruel-looking spear at him,” but that would be a very different voice).
- This will be a novel where the language is sometimes plain, sometimes beautiful. (Roll the words “cruel-looking spear” around in your mouth. There’s poetry there; that’s one reason the repetition works. Then look at “There was a spear coming at him.” Much more journalism than poetry there.)
- This will be a novel in which the characters tell the story in their own words (This is an assumption made by the reader at this point based upon the idiosyncrasy of the language; it won’t be confirmed until we get another point of view and it uses a different voice).
- This will be a novel in which the author knows what the heck he’s doing (This is the cumulative effect of all of the above, plus the other things happening on the page).
All of those promises are important. They give the reader information necessary to decide whether to keep reading or not, and they offer a vision of the book to come that many readers find compelling.
Voice is the vehicle for many of the promises the first page delivers, and it delivers them at a level that’s often beneath the reader’s consciousness. Most readers don’t pick the technical elements of a page apart. They may not be able to tell you why they kept reading one book and didn’t keep reading another, but you may hear this a lot: “I just like the way he/she writes.” or “I was three pages in before I realized it.” Those are signs that the author’s voice is working.
So when you’re revising your first page, ask yourself the following questions related to voice:
- What promises am I making to the reader with my language, and do I keep them in the rest of the novel?
- What stylistic elements (sentence fragments; witty dialogue; long descriptive passages; short, snappy sentences; humor; wordplay; onomatopoeia; cursing; sarcasm; direct address; internal monologue; poetic descriptions; journalistic descriptions; strange typography or formatting; etc., etc., etc.) appear frequently enough in the novel that I should show them to the reader right away so that they can decide whether or not they want more?
- Does one character have a stronger voice than the others, and if so, am I leading with their point of view?
- Does the narrator of my first page sound like she’s a good storyteller? If not, why not, and how can I get her there?
If you can answer those questions in a way that satisfies you, chances are you’re well on your way to having strong voice on your first page.
