When I got serious about writing a novel (way back in the 1990s), I read and studied everything I could get my hands on about the craft of fiction. I’d seen a number of articles, interviews, and blog posts from literary agents, editors, and writing instructors about story beginnings that resulted in nearly automatic rejections.
All the articles would say, in one way or another, that these were cliché openings that had been overdone, yet every novice writer seemed to think they were the first one to ever come up with this idea.
Some years later, I was asked to be a judge in a first-chapter contest. Writers submitted the first chapters of their novels-in-progress for critique, and judges (including me) would select the best to pass on to round two of the contest.
I read the first chapter of more than a hundred novels. My experience with those 100+ first chapters confirmed what I’d read from agents and editors. I don’t remember the precise numbers, so these…
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