(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

The delicious aspect of reading Chuck Sambuchino’s article in The Write Life article on the worst ways to begin your novel, is that you know these Outrageous Openings have been tried many times. You know that, because the opinions come from literary agents, who every month read hundreds of “first pages,” or maybe only first paragraphs, sentences, or words submitted by hopeful authors. Some of their advice is right up there with one literary agency’s strict warning to writers not to accompany their query letter with baked goods or anything hand-knit. (Your desperation is showing!)

Since, they say, everyone has a book in them, and since nearly everyone who finds out I’m a writer says, “I’ve always wanted to write a book,” there should be a ready audience for this advice.

1. Avoid prologues and lengthy first-chapter descriptions (“scene-setting”) and jump right into the action. (Thankfully, this wasn’t the preference in Dickens’s time, or we would have lost “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .”) Get right to the plot, they say, characters’ backstory “is in their DNA.” It stays with them.

2. Agent Dan Lazar puts it a different way. He dislikes openers where characters are doing “essentially nothing. Washing dishes and thinking, staring out the window and thinking, tying shoes, thinking.” Perhaps such openers are meant to contrast with the many thrillers in which not much thinking is done.

3. Love this one: “The [adjective] [adjective] sun rose in the [adjective] [adjective] sky, shedding its [adjective] light across the [adjective] [adjective] [adjective] land.” Fail.

4. Similarly, “laundry list” character descriptions. I recently read one so long its parts had to be separated with semi-colons, including this bit: “porcelain skin, white as china; pale green eyes.” If only they’d been Wedgwood blue eyes, we’d have a whole place-setting. As writing coach Lauren Davis says, description should tell who your characters are, not just what they look like.

5. Cliché openers. In crime novels, a really bad hangover. In fantasy, a battle or (apparently this is common) herb-gathering. The battle thing seems to go against the advice to start with action, but this agent says the problem is, “I don’t know any of the characters yet so why should I care about this battle?” In romance, waking to find a stranger in the bed. More ill-conceived action.

Finally, one of the agents reveals what she actually likes in an opener—one that makes her curious about your characters and fills her with questions. You have the rest of the book for the who, where, when, and how.