Guest column by Jacqueline Faber

Jacqueline Faber holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University and has taught at New York University. Her work explores questions about memory, loss, language, and desire. Steeped in philosophical, psychological, and literary themes, her writing is grounded in studies of character. She lives with her family in Los Angeles. Connect with Jacqueline online at jacquelinefaber.com and Instagram at @jaxfaber.

No one owes you their attention. They don’t owe you their time or curiosity. They don’t owe you a first chance, let alone a second. In the frenetic, overstimulated, quick-reward, dopamine-hungry, boundaryless stream of existence, the reader owes you nothing. Not a single thing. What this means for writers is that we must fight for the reader’s attention. I’d go so far as to argue that that is our most important job. In a way, this should be empowering. It supplants the romantic myth of writer-as-genius in favor of a brass tacks approach. It’s about rolling up your sleeves and asking yourself one question: Have I earned the reader’s attention? If the answer is no, I’ve got work to do.

Big picture reality-check: There are many reasons a novel might not “work,” and there are skilled diagnosticians out there in the form of book coaches, freelance editors, and beta readers who can pinpoint specific problem areas. But for the sake of this article, I want to focus on the opening pages of your novel. Because if you don’t get those right, no one is going to care that your “all is lost” moment on page 275 isn’t particularly stirring. Nail the opening, and your reader will lend you a few extra moments of their most valuable asset.

If you’ve shared your writing with honest readers, you may have received this type of feedback:

●      “I didn’t connect with your main character.”
●      “I’m not sure what they want.”
●      “It just didn’t move me.”
●      “The pacing was off.”
●      “I liked it but didn’t love it.”

Acknowledging for a moment that readers are not a monolith, if you’re receiving this kind of critique across the board, it may be time to dig into your opening pages with a critical eye and a sharp scalpel.

In the spirit of bold assertions, I’d suggest that there are three primary reasons your opening pages are falling flat.

1. You’re not revealing character effectively.

Your character descriptions may be so stunning we could paint your protagonist down to the sun-kissed highlights in her beachy waves. We can see the fraying hem of your leading man’s plaid shirt. We can feel the icy stare of your MC’s new boss. But if we can’t connect through emotion and interiority, you have an uphill battle in getting us to stick around.

Because, as readers, we care less about beachy waves than those covert reasons your protagonist always has to steady her breath when her mother calls. Or that your MC has fallen down drunk every single night for the last five weeks, trying to blot out that one memory that won’t let him go. Or that the boss’s icy stare sets your character on edge not because of the implied workload, but because of her striking resemblance to that high school teacher who once whispered, “you’ll end up a loser just like your dad.”

If readers aren’t connecting with your characters, look back at your opening pages and ask yourself where you might lift the curtain just a bit on the private world of emotions and interiority. How does your protagonist feel? What does your character think? Pay close attention to opportunities to subvert expectations. What if he’s getting blotto drunk not to forget the painful memory, but to return to it uninhibited? Or what if she’s avoiding her mother’s calls not because of something her mother did, but because of something unspeakable she’s done behind her mother’s back? We don’t need long paragraphs of explanation. But we need a hint at the messy, ambivalent, unexpected workings of your characters’ internal lives.

2. You haven’t made the stakes clear.

The question of stakes is a doozy. Either writers delay the revelation of stakes until the plot is too far underway. Or they feel like they have to dump it all into the first few pages. The truth is, a character’s wishes and desires should be in flux over the course of a novel. Their wants change as their circumstances change. And often their true, underlying needs are at odds with whatever they thought they wanted in the first place.

All this notwithstanding, you must establish some kind of stakes from the outset. Ideally, every scene in the book reveals a tension between wanting and having. We are striving beings. We relate to creatures, like us, who want things they can’t have. So even if your protagonist’s greatest wish in chapter one is to find an authentic carne asada taco in the Greater Tri-State Area, let us feel that desire deeply.

To do this, you, as the writer, have to understand why it’s so important for your character to achieve this end. Yes, okay, maybe he likes carne asada. But is there something more profound at work? Does it remind him of home, of backyard parties, of running along the steep concrete banks of the L.A. River, when childhood felt like a wide-open expanse and nothing was determined, and everything was possible. His quest for that carne asada will feel more urgent to him–and to us–if we sense something percolating underneath.

3. You’re not tantalizing us with enough mystery.

Every novel should be a thriller. I don’t mean dark, deadly, and dangerous. I mean that every novel should play with tension and release, keeping readers turning pages late into the night. The surest way to do this is to tease out mystery, hinting at backstories untold and motivations only partially revealed.

It’s useful to think of your opening as an act of seduction.

Imagine a woman sitting at her window, watching for the mail truck. When it turns onto the lane, she can’t help herself. She runs outside, impatient as the mailman sorts through his stack for her letters. She stands there on the lawn, rifling through them, letting the bills and advertisements and credit card offerings sail to the grass. The letter she’s waiting for isn’t there, just like yesterday. Just like the day before. She could fall down right where she’s standing, collapse onto that still-damp lawn, but she doesn’t. She collects the scattered pieces of mail and trudges inside, drops the envelopes on the table, and retreats to her bedroom. Twenty-three long hours until the mailman comes again.

In this version, we know some things. A woman is waiting for a piece of mail that does not arrive. We know it was not there yesterday and that she’ll run outside and repeat it all tomorrow. We don’t know other things. What is the letter about? Who is it from? How does it affect her life?

Some of these mysteries will be resolved soon. They must be or we’ll lose interest. Some will carry on into further chapters. New mysteries will emerge. Your opening pages have to manage this interplay of revelation and withholding. Look for places that might be strengthened by delaying revelation a bit. Maybe a page, half a page even. Just enough to get us leaning forward in our seats. When you do this, you make a pact with the reader. You make it clear that this will be a game of cat and mouse, where information will be meted out. Where the reader will be asked to step up and pay attention. In exchange, they will offer you their trust and their attention because they are confident they are in good hands.

The Department

The Department by Jacqueline Faber

Neil Weber is a struggling philosophy professor whose wife has left him and whose career has plateaued with the opportunity for tenure feeling more unlikely than ever. His uninspiring life gets a shake up though, when Lucia, a student at his university, goes missing. He becomes obsessed with solving the case and as he does, dives into not only Lucia’s secrets, but the underground lives of his colleagues in this dark academia thriller.

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