Off to a bad start: Part 1 of 3

To dream the impossible...

Don’t forget to check out the recommended writer resource at the bottom of this week’s article, this week on the Novel-in-Progress Book Camp and Writer Retreat in Racine, Wisconsin — one of the best programs of its kind anywhere.

Introduction

Over the next three weeks, we’ll talk about some not-very-good ways to open your novel. These are bad mainly because they have been so overdone they’ve become cliche.

There can always be rare exceptions, and I never like to say never. Except I just did, didn’t I?

Photo by Santa Barbara on Unsplash

We’ll look at three opening scenes that have been done to death. I’ve read articles and heard presentations from agents and publishers who hold these up as examples of what can generate a rejection after one chapter.

Or one page. First up:

The impossible dream

Quite a few years ago, I was asked to judge a first-chapter contest, where writers (mostly new and/or young) submitted their first chapters for fun and prizes, which included the possibility of getting their manuscript seen by a literary agent.

Over the course of a few weeks, I read more than a hundred opening chapters.

By the time I’d finished, I never wanted to see a dream sequence open a book ever again in my life.

That’s an opening I’d heard agents and editors rail against for years. You know the one: you don’t know it’s a dream until the end of the scene and the character wakes up.

I’m sure each of those thirty or forty writers thought they’d come up with a great idea that no one else had ever thought of before. So creative and original.

And I’ve seen more since then. In the more than two hundred novels I’ve edited in the past eighteen years, I’ve seen (and cringed) at this opening at least a couple dozen times.

These scenes generally follow the same pattern:

• Our main character, usually a teenage girl, is running through the woods, at night of course, being pursued by:

  • A wolf or bear or some other scary beast

  • A criminal gang

  • A maniacal serial killer

  • A supernatural being of some sort (werewolf, vampire, ghost, headless horseman, generic swamp monster)

    

    Photo by Rosie Sun on Unsplash

• Often, this was a scene that felt directly from a fantasy genre story, perhaps a magical or eerie woods of some sort, or the protagonist needed to rely on her magical powers to evade or confront the person/being chasing her.

• Just as the poor lass was about to be torn to shreds or was casting a divination spell to ward off the evil force…

• A ringing noise echoes through the magical woods… her alarm clock. She wakes up, in bed, somewhere in the boring suburbs, realizes she’s once again late for school and will likely get detention… again. She sighs and rushes to get ready to face yet another boring day in her boring life.

A few major issues that readers in general (not just agents and literary types) have with this opener.

It’s trickery. Readers don’t like being deceived quite so blatantly. It’s an exciting scene, although often the reader is dropped into this (in medias res) with no grounding whatsoever. We don’t know the character who is running, we don’t know who/what is chasing them or why, and most important, we don’t know why we should care.

Most readers will probably stick with it, assuming those questions will be answered in short order.

Then a huge letdown. Disappointment.

It turns out that the answers to our questions are: the character is bored and boring, no one was chasing her, and there was no reason for her to be chased. It was all just a dream that perhaps has nothing to do with the story. Or maybe it will eventually.

But we’ve answered the last question: we don’t care.

Often, these opening dream scenes are meant as characterization and foreshadowing, because this bored teenager in a boring life will discover she does indeed have supernatural powers, inherited from her father the wizard and her mother the mage, which of course she knew nothing about, but she will soon need those powers (after learning how to use them, of course) to defeat her evil nemesis, who she always thought was just the class bully but was actually a sorcerer intent on stealing her powers and using them for evil intent.

Or it’s intended to grab the reader’s attention and then hope they stick through the boring parts for it to get good again.

I am not exaggerating when I tell you that at least twenty of these one hundred contest submissions pretty much followed that plot outline.

But readers can feel tricked into reading an exciting scene only to find out none of it was real, and then the story drops us into a boring life for the next chapter or two. We tend to fling the book across the room at that point.

Maybe the book gets better later, but we’ll never know.

As for agents, I now feel their pain. I read a hundred opening chapters in about three weeks. Imagine how it would feel to read a hundred or more every single week as part of your day job.

Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash

And that’s a great segue to next week’s bad opener: ‘Wake up, little Suzy.’

Summary

Starting with a dream scene when readers don’t know it’s a dream can be deceitful and irritating. They can feel misled when the dream ends and the story reverts to a routine, boring situation, not whatever exciting event they’d been tricked into believing was happening.

Discussion

• Have you seen this opening in books you’ve read? Did it bother you?

• Have you seen a dream scene done well to start a novel?

Recommended resource for writers

Since the annual Novel-in-Progress Book Camp and Writing Retreat takes place every June (this year starting on the day this article posts), I recommend bookmarking this link.

Held in Racine, Wisconsin, on the shores of beautiful Lake Michigan, NIP opens for applications sometime this fall for the 2026 session, so mark your calendar early and follow them on Facebook or on Substack for announcements.

Registration is by application, with a limited number of applicants accepted, (small groups), and it lasts an entire week, so you’ll want to plan early.

I’ve been to quite a number of writer conferences and retreats, and this is one of the best. It’s a weeklong set of classes, seminars, meetings, networking, talking with industry pros, working on your manuscript, and getting personalized feedback.

You’ll also make lifelong writer friends.

I was honored to serve as an instructor for NIP in their 2023 program, along with some much better known authors, literary agents, and phenomenal writing instructors and book coaches/mentors.

Not sure how I snuck in, but it was fantastic.

Books by Robb Grindstaff

Newest release: St. Izzy of F Street — Now on Substack

Available through your favorite bookstore or online bookseller, in print, ebook, and audiobook formats.