Is there anything harder than looking at the blank page and wishing that you had more talent, ideas, and inspiration to pen an incredible opening sentence? The blankness of the page in front of you can leave you feeling trapped, unable to forge ahead with what you want to say. Don’t let yourself fall victim to thinking you have to have the perfect sentence to kickstart your manuscript.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
I would caution you not to be too precious about the first words you put on the page. The odds are that you will go back over them several times in revision. At that point, you will know more about who your characters are, what they want, and where their character arc ultimately takes them.
This will allow you to craft a poignant opening scene that resonates with the final image at the close of the book.
My 3X Rule for Writing Beginnings
For right now, you need to get comfortable putting words on the page that you know aren’t going to stay. It’s enough to just get started. A blank page doesn’t give you any material to work with in the future, so you need to put down something sooner rather than later.
I have a strategy that I use to craft my opening scene and set up my book before I get too far into the outlining process. It’s simple and it doesn’t require any additional reading or tools to get it done, but it might require the assistance of a friend, beta reader, editor, or book coach (like me!) to offer you feedback and perspective.
The strategy is as simple as it comes: write the opening scene three times.
But each time needs to be slightly different. Play around with the best place to introduce a main character. Start at different points in the story timeline. Maybe you should show the scene where her husband asks her for a divorce. Maybe you should show her moving out of their marital home. Maybe she should already be in therapy.
Do you see how each of these scenes differs from the next and gives me fresh material to play with? From here, you can start to flesh out the rest of your story, so I would recommend doing this exercise before you follow the tips in my last article on how to write a killer manuscript.
The Details: How to Execute The 3X Rule
You are already mulling over three creative points of entry you could use to kickstart your story. Each one gives us a different glimpse of your character and where they are starting their journey. There are only a handful of rules for this process:
- Don’t go overboard. You don’t need to write a 5,000-word scene to get to the heart of which opening is going to be best. Instead, you should be limiting how much time you will spend on these opening scenes. Usually, I write about 2,000 words or work for about an hour on each one.
- Don’t do it all in one day. Spend some time mulling over what you want to say. Many of the writers I coach don’t have three hours to sit down and capture all three ideas. Maybe you have the time, but your creative reservoir is running low on ideas for how you can reframe the story. Give it a few days to move through the entire exercise.
- Read through them all when you finish. Once you have all three options in front of you, read through them and think about which one will make the most dynamic entrance and which one aligns most closely with your vision for the book’s start and end.
- Give them to alpha readers. It can be hard to objectively take a look at what you wrote and judge which one is the best. After all, you worked hard on each option! Just because it was easy to write doesn’t necessarily mean that it was the best option. Let others who know you weigh in about which one made them interested in reading the rest of the book.
The hard part of this practice is simply having the discipline to write three scenes knowing that at least two of them are going straight to the recycle bin. Sure, you may be able to mine them for a few good gems that you can incorporate into the book at a later point, but most of the words you write in the 3X Rule are, by their definition, going to be discarded.
Don’t get too precious about the words you write. Maybe you can work them into a future scene and maybe you can’t. Don’t try to force something to work just because you spent an hour or two on it. You want your book to be strong, and sometimes that requires experimentation. Nothing is ever truly wasted if it helps you write a better book.
Keep Writing and Applying The 3X Rule
That’s all it takes to finally put a few words on the page. Doing something over and over again can reinforce what an iterative process this is. Very rarely do I write an opening scene for a book and nail it the first time around. Most openings are tossed in the trash – and that’s okay!
In the end, I know that my story is stronger for every round of revision and experimentation that I took in these early drafts.
Looking for even more ideas for how to create a rockstar entrance for your protagonist? Follow the same steps to write the final scene of the book. Then, you can mix and match beginnings and endings until you find a combination that fully embodies their character arc.
You may not use the endings by the time you make it to the final scene, but that’s okay. Think of this exercise as a warmup to get to the finish line and stop staring at a blank screen.