Writing strong first pages requires a great hook, a strong voice, and a clear premise. The first sentence should immediately catch the reader’s attention. The subsequent text should leave the reader wanting to dive further into the pages of the manuscript. Making the first pages of your story absolutely enthralling takes practice, patience, revision, and an eye for detail.
One of the most effective ways to make your setting come alive is to use sensory details and imagery that appeal to your readers’ five senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. Show, don’t tell, how your setting looks, sounds, smells, feels, and tastes, and how it affects your characters’ emotions and actions.
Think about when you’re reading a really good book. You become so immersed in the story that you forget you’re reading. It’s like you’re inside the story, experiencing its events vicariously and viscerally. Your body is tensing and heart pounding, or you are tearing up when the character loses someone close to them. That is your job, as an author, to immerse your reader into the story.
Use visualization:
Go into your mind’s eye and remember (or imagine) the specific sensory details of the setting, characters, actions, and so on. You need to include what you see, hear, smell, taste, feel on and within your body. Your mind’s eye is like a multi-sensory camera, enabling you to see the pores on your character’s skin, see the tears forming in the corners of her eye, feel the wetness on her cheek. Pull the camera back and view the scene as from above, hear the wind howling the trees, hear the crack of lightning in the distance.
Literary scenes come alive with CONFLICT and ACTION in language, narration, story, and dialogue. Writers and storytellers are dependent on these basics:
- literature is written works that have merit and lasting potential as an art form, and
- fiction creates imagined events and characters.
Setting or scenes
Ask yourself, what makes your setting essential to the story. If you don’t have a good answer, you need to work on finding a setting that not only fits the tone, mood, and dynamics of the narrative, but one that also feeds it.
A novel’s setting is the foundation that anchors it, giving historical context and meaning to the narrative. Treat the setting like any other character. Examine whether it serves the plot, tone, and theme of the book. The author must know the setting inside and out and be able to clearly map its features to bring it to life.
Build a Solid Foundation
Buildings, neighborhoods, and towns are like people. They all have a character of their own complete with a past, present, and future. The author should endeavor to understand the history, desires, and obstacles facing the places they write about. Create a character sketch for your setting as though it were a character in the book. How old is it? Who built it? Appearance? What is its purpose? What does it want? Are there secrets? How does it feel? How does it change because of the story? Why is this setting essential to the narrative?
Frame the Story
Think about historical mysteries. They take place in aging buildings – clues to the past with bullet holes, graffiti, lost items, and buried secrets.
Add Structural Connections
Every character should have a relationship, a connection, with the setting. Imagine a place steeped in the history, and the character’s backstory – be it love, hate, fear, or ambivalence. Uncovering that relationship can propel an entire narrative. Uncovering the links between your setting, your characters, and the past will lend depth and dimension to the story, if not become the story itself.
Every scene should either advance the plot, reveal character, or both. You want strong pacing, showing rather than telling, and to create empathy for your protagonist. Plus, you want mystery and conflict in every scene to keep readers turning the pages.
Unleash the novel inside you
with compelling characters,
intricate worlds,
and fine-tuned prose.
“Linda has published twenty books. She blogs about the publishing world, posts useful tips on the challenges a writer faces, including marketing and promoting your work, how to build your online platform, how to get reviews and how to self-publish. She has mentored many authors and edited their work.”
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