A number of years back, I went to a Donald Maass (literary agent) event on “The Emotional Craft of Fiction.” (There’s also a book: The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface.) I really enjoyed it and learned some new craft tools to apply to my work. If you ever get a chance to hear him speak, I strongly recommend going. His website is here and to read specifically about Donald and where he is speaking, go here.
A portion of his talk that really struck me is the six elements of openings. Some were familiar, and some were presented in a way new to me. Here they are:
- Mood?
- Story question?
- Life or death?
- Language/style?
- Need/urgency?
- Strength
Note they all are questions, but the latter. We want strength in some way from a main character. This allows us to trust that the protagonist is going to lead us on an interesting journey.
Donald illuminated these ideas with sample passages from several books and one unpublished manuscript. I’m going to briefly show these elements with an example from a book I’ve read, Alone (Aladdin, 2021) by Megan E. Freeman. This is all from the first poem, which you can read on Amazon’s read sample. (You may want to stop here and read it first.)
Does it make you want to read on? It definitely did so for me. It’s not even the most active scene. But I was hooked.
Here’s how I answered those six element questions:
The mood – lonely existence
Story questions – Why is she alone? How has she been surviving? Where is her family? What happened three years ago?!
Life or death – life and death
Language/style – poetic
Need/urgency – survival
Strength – Yes! This is one strong girl who has to make decisions most of us will never have to make.
For me when I look at the opening of a book, the most difficult element question to answer is language/style. Since this one was a novel in verse, it was easier in this case.
We can analyze the openings of our own manuscripts by using these elements. Or ask our critique group or beta readers to answer these questions for us. If their answers aren’t what we expect, that may be okay. But if the answers are not where we wanted the opening to take them, it’s back to the keyboard.
For further reading, additional posts on my blog:
