Welcome to Write Wrong: A podcast that talks about writing from the point of view of someone who’s been doing it wrong for far too long. I’m Cortney Hamilton, and this is episode ten. Today I’ll be talking about:

 

Beginnings: Start with waking up!

 

First a tip, if you get nothing else from this episode you get this:  

 

Stab the center of Oreos with a fork to dunk them in a glass of milk to keep your fingers from getting milky. If you like milky fingers, soak mittens in a glass of milk, put them on, and grip an Oreo.

 

Moving On: 

 

Beginnings: Or the one thing that still makes a human cute no matter how much we slobber and poo on ourselves.  

 

Beginnings seem easy. I mean, you just start where the story starts, right? Where it feels natural. Start where you want to start. That’s the easy part. If you want difficult, try ending that novel you’ve already started. But fellow writers, I’m going to begin today by going against the grain and give you advice that no one in their right mind would give you. Advice that all agents and publishers would scoff at. But let them scoff with their privileged knowledge and abundance of experience. Did you know that doctors used to scoff at hand washing, engineers at the light bulb, and people who enjoy food at cheese in a can? 

 

So I’m here to point you in a different direction. Here are six ways the ‘establishment’ says not to start your novel, but I say maybe give it a try:  

 

1. Start with Waking up.

 

My friends, waking up in a novel, can be great. Trust me when I say, if you’ve ever woken up a night-person at seven in the morning, you learn so much about them really quick. Like how many curse words they know. And how good of an aim they are without even opening their eyes. 

 

They say having your character wake up in the first chapter is cliché and boring and the sign of a rookie writer. But I say, if all rookie writers listened to that advice, then no one’s starting novels with waking up anymore and it becomes new and fresh again, like roller-blading or fanny packs.

 

Waking up allows a reader a window into the personality of your character that few other settings provide. Like does your character spring or slink out of bed? Where does she scratch herself first upon rising? Is he a pajama person, or does he roll around in-the-raw, soiling the sheets with whatever raw thing he was rolling around in? 

 

All of these details are a rich drapery of characteristics that provide hints to your character’s backstory. Sure, people say these might be boring details, but that doesn’t mean you can’t include a fistfight in the scene. It just means that if you’re having your character wake up into a fistfight, make sure you let the reader know if they’ve removed their night guard before getting punched in the face. 

 

 

2. Start with lots of dialogue. 

 

This one seems like a no-brainer, in that you don’t need a brain to know how great it is. 

 

Dialogue is the poor man’s description because you don’t need to use fancy five-dollar words to describe a scene. Yes, some writers excel at imaginative, flowing prose that perfectly encapsulates mood and foreshadows plot while illuminating the backstory of the characters. And they can do it prolifically for pages and pages and pages. This is why we have speed listening on Audible. 

 

But the best stories, the ones that people actually love and pay money for are called movies. And movies open with dialogue all the time. And who writes those? People who don’t excel at good description, aka screenwriters. Because screenwriters know they don’t need a lot of words outside of quotes to start a good story. They only need what the characters say. 

 

And sure, some screenwriters might disagree, but only the ones who end up writing books so they can self-publish and have tangible proof to show their mother that their barista job really is just a side-gig.  

 

And in the age of Netflix and Amazon, Disney Plus and Apple TV, Hulu and HBO MAX, not to mention Youtube ripoffs and TikTok-tastics, nobody’s reading books anymore. So make your book read more like a movie. Sure, readers need to see some action, so throw them a bone between the dialogue to get them oriented, and they know who’s aiming the gun at whom. 

 

But I say if you’re going to write a book—and everyone within the sound of my voice should know you can’t write one without starting one—why not engage your readers by making them curious about who’s talking and why they’re talking and to whom they are talking to. Starting with dialogue adds mystery to keep them in anticipation.

 

It’s like throwing a starving person crumbs of Oreos with your milk-mittens, circling around them, teasing and taunting their malnourished body with tiny morsels until they froth with unbridled rage and lunge, thrashing you until you sate their ravenous desire.   

 

Now, the ‘establishment’ wants you to believe that starting with dialogue can be confusing. That your reader is not invested in your characters enough to want to hear what they have to say. And they’re not unwise to want you to believe that. So if you do decide to start with dialogue, I recommend that you do two things to keep a reader’s interest.   

 

1. Have your characters curse. 

 

Because cursing catches people’s attention. There’s nothing like a good F-bomb shrewdly placed as the very first word of a novel to make people feel engaged. And if you’re worried your readers don’t like cursing, just remember everyone likes cursing. Because everyone does it. Even the people who say they don’t. They like it even more because, like fine china, they save it for those rare special moments like forgetting their mother’s birthday or catching their spouse cheating on them with an uglier version of themselves.  

 

Cursing is like colors in a color wheel. We use them to paint over our failures, disappointments, and deep-emotional trauma that has yet to surface. Things we can’t escape. I mean, have you ever seen old photos of yourself, looked at the neon chartreuse fanny pack and parfait pink roller-blades you were wearing and thought: “What the fuck was I thinking?”   

 

It’s okay. We’ve all been there. Which is why when you start your novel with a curse word, readers automatically identify with the character, remembering their own curse-word moments and saying, “Poor guy, he must really be hurting.” 

 

The second thing to remember is that if you open with dialogue, then make sure you’re naming your characters right away. You want the reader to be grounded as quickly as possible, and to know who is shooting whom. Things like, “Hey, Mike, hand me that gun.” And “Sure, Charlie, here ya go.” and “Thanks, Mike, can you toss me those bullets too?” Ground your reader with names. Unless, of course, in the rare artistic decision, your characters don’t have names. Then identify them by their race and/or genitalia and/or hats. Oh, and give your character a hat.    

 

Opening with dialogue can be a compelling way to throw the reader into the story and pique their curiosity, Forcing provocative questions like ‘Who are these people? What’s their relationship? What’s with the F-bombs? Why should I care?’ 

 

Now, another great way to start your novel is…

 

3. Start with huge blocks of text.

 

So, maybe you aren’t great at dialogue. Maybe you’re more comfortable describing scenes in granular detail about the shire and the weather and the hobbits within who talk about the weather and the shire.  

 

You can start your novel with lots of description. Sure, like cannibalism or soul patches on men, they say it’s taboo. But guess who did it? Oh, I don’t know Charles Dickens, Tolstoy, John Grisham. Have you ever started to read The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky? I thumbed through it. You have to read a novel before you even get to the novel that has dialogue.

Just be aware that if you do have large blocks of text in the beginning of your novel, readers who might pick up your book suddenly don’t want to read. Especially if those words are so close together. 

 

So here’s my literary hack for you: spacing. 

 

If you start with pages and pages of description, separate the text after every few sentences. Yes, some people will say that writers only do this when there’s a change in time or point of view or even setting, but I say they aren’t capitalizing on an opportunity to keep the reader’s interest. 

And if you start doing this on page one, then you’re teaching the reader how to read your novel. And the sooner they get with the program and learn your style, the sooner you’ve successfully caught their attention, making them forget the torturous burden that they’re reading at all.  

 

Now, agents might balk at this suggestion. But consider this: when you submit a query letter to an agent, they recommend that you write it in several small two to three sentence paragraphs. And why? Because blocks of text make a reader’s eyes glaze over faster than Twitter can dox a Karen. So if adding space is going to get your query letter read by an agent more easily, think of how many are going to want to read your novel. That’s a trade secret, right there, in that I’d trade it for an actual secret. 

 

4. Backstory

 

Maybe you’re fine with dialogue and description, but you just don’t know what to describe? How about some backstory? 

 

Telling your readers about your protagonist’s backstory can have a meaningful impact, especially if you do it in a prologue. 

 

Now, prologues are controversial in the same way that whistling is an acceptable form of passing the time. It only makes people mad if you’re bad at it, or in the middle of a movie theater watching Star Wars. But the benefit of prologues is that you can shove your backstory in there, and get it out of the way so you can get right to the dialogue and cursing on the first page. In fact, having a prologue will make the dialogue more coherent because you can introduce all your characters and set up the plot before they’ve even read the first page of your story.  

 

I know some people will say, “Why not just start the story and incorporate backstory throughout the novel?” And they have a point. But it’s tricky because if you look at any Hollywood movie that actually makes money, it starts with action and not backstory. So this method isn’t for everyone. And sometimes, people need context for all the punching going on when your character wakes up. So what’s it going to hurt to include a prologue? Because if you’re anything like me, as a reader, you’ll just skip it anyway. But this way you’re covered, because if your reader is confused since they skipped the prologue, it’s their own fault for not doing their due diligence when their diligence was due.

 

And remember, if you do write a prologue with large blocks of text, separate that text into smaller bites so, at the very least, potential agents you submit to won’t suffer the burden of trying to read an entire paragraph. 

 

Oh, and note, don’t make those bites too small because your potential reader will just mistake your book for poetry, and then no one will want to read it. 

 

5. Start with action scenes

 

Now you might be surprised to hear advice that says don’t open your novel on an action scene. I know I was. This is like saying, don’t take off your clothes when having sex. 

 

The logic behind this so-called counsel is that if you start on an action scene, your readers won’t care enough about your characters to be invested in the scene. So, sure, your protagonist might kick the fillings out of a guy’s mouth using only a feather and a mannequin leg, but if the reader doesn’t know who she is, then why would they care that she’s keeping the fillings in a glass for a game of mouth Yahtzee later. 

 

Of course, I don’t disagree with this advice, but nor do I don’t not disagree. If you’d like to start with an action scene, then maybe, perhaps, you might refer to this podcast just a few seconds ago, where I told you to write a prologue full of backstory. So readers—who the experts say won’t be invested—are now totally invested because you jam-packed that prologue with so much backstory they’ve skimmed it just enough to get the gist of the story to enjoy the action in chapter one.  

 

But if you do want to start with an action scene but don’t want to write a prologue, make sure you ground the reader in lots of dialogue that incorporates backstory. Have your protagonist say things like: “Hey, jerkwad, I’m gonna kick your fillings out with this mannequin leg because I’m so pissed you stole my fanny pack which my now-dead grandmother gave me last week for my birthday which was last week by the way.” Now, I just made that up on the fly, and it needs polishing, but you can see how I slipped in that it was the protagonist’s birthday last week, her grandmother died, and she got a new fanny pack that jerkwad has stolen. Boom. Backstory.

 

If you think of dialogue like little drops, nuggets if you will, of character history, then you can write a kick-ass action scene that invigorates a reader, adds depth to the story, and keeps the momentum going. Warning though: you will have to add some description if you want the reader to see the fillings pop out of the guy’s mouth. And, for a good action scene, there should probably be a lot of fillings. 

 

6. Start with a Dream

 

My friends, like shaving your beard into a chin-strap or lighting your farts on fire, some people will tell you that starting a novel with a dream is a bad idea. The reason, they say, is because you’re fooling the reader into something that’s not true. Like if you have your protagonist riding a hippo on her way to the school decathlon, and just as she arrives and is pelted by snowballs from an ornery snowman, she wakes up, and the reader is mad because it wasn’t real at all. Well, guess what, my friends? It’s fiction. It’s all not real. And maybe the sooner your readers realize this, the sooner they’ll be able to relax and let the story do its job. 

 

And I’m guessing the naysayers who want to put these kinds of restrictions on writers have probably never had a really cool hippo dream that seemed very real anyway. Not to mention, dreams are just symbols for deep-seated desires and latent childhood traumas, which, if I do recall, hm, is backstory. 

 

But if you do start with a dream, a couple of things to remember: 

 

1. Make the dream interesting. Going to the school decathlon, not interesting. Going there on a hippo in the snow? Attention-grabber. 

 

And...

 

2. Don’t let the dream go on for too long. We all know that guy. The one who starts a conversation with “I had the craziest dream last night,” and ends twenty minutes later with “then I woke up.” I’m okay with listening to someone’s dream for a minute or two, especially if that dream entails some psychological weakness I might be able to exploit later, but the truth of the matter is all dreams end the same. You wake up. And there’s not a lot of tension in that. So, make it short and sweet. The last thing you want is a protagonist who keeps on vaguely describing things: “It’s like a Ferris wheel but not a Ferris wheel. More like a merry-go-around but vertical. That looked like my mother’s womb. But not, you know?” 

“I don’t know, Bobby. Did the clown end up eating you or not? Get to the point.” 

 

Of course, dreams in fiction can be so much more engaging as long as you adhere to these two rules. And probably many others I haven’t mentioned. 

 

Now, fellow writers, there are a lot more of these so-called clichés they say not to use. But I’m going to move on and give you three things they tell you to use that I have my doubts about. 

 

1. You don’t have to write your beginning in the beginning. 

 

Um, yeah, you do. The first words you put down in your novel is the beginning of your novel. Now you might rearrange things later and decide, ‘oh, yeah, this is really the end.’ But if you wrote it first, it’s the beginning. And don’t let the know-it-alls tell you it’s not.

 

2. Your first sentence is the most important

 

Now, I hear this piece of advice all the time. And you could say I’ve already addressed this by recommending that you drop an F-bomb in the first sentence. But, the reality is, if all of you did that, then it might lose its impact. And so there’s pressure to write something that still grabs a reader’s attention, but maybe with more of a cupping motion.  

 

But I’m here to tell you your first sentence isn’t the most important. Yes, it’s important, you want a potential reader to open your book and be immediately hooked. But there are plenty of other sentences that can be equally, if not more than equally, important. My most important sentence in my first novel happens to be on page 251, a third of the way down. I won’t tell you what it is. But you’ll know when you get there. 

 

And then there’s the conundrum of how do you make your first sentence the most important. “By making it compelling,” they say.

 

And sure you can do that. But you have to also consider what’s compelling to you won’t be compelling to me and vice versa. And so this idea that we can just write a compelling sentence lets the gatekeepers out there hide behind the truth: They don’t know what’s compelling until they see it. But how can they see it if we haven’t written it? And if we haven’t written it, is it compelling? No. It’s not. So don’t get caught up in the vague and amorphous vocabulary that allows agents and publishers and mentors and podcast hosts to tell you what’s the correct way as if they know. 

 

Listen to me. Don’t do it.  

 

And one more note: if your first sentence is the most important sentence, how are the other sentences going to feel? Not to mention, why would a reader keep reading? They’ve already read the best part. If they knew every other sentence in that book is playing second fiddle to the very first one, they’re gonna watch an action movie without a backstory and no fiddles.  

 

3. Introduce your main character right away. 

 

Now, I don’t totally disagree with this one. You have to let the reader know who they’re reading about, and if you don’t include them on the first page, it can be confusing. But what I don’t like is the tyrannical idea that it always has to be this way. The truth is, your protagonist is a story hog. They’re in the entire book. Maybe they should give up some of that real estate to other characters? Can’t they check their egomania at the door? And what if your character isn’t actually an egomaniac? Aren’t you as the writer sending mixed messages about them? And, yes, I can hear you say, “But in the beginning, Hamilton? C’mon, really? Really?”

 

All I’m saying is that there’s more than one way to introduce your protagonist on the first page, and you should find what’s right for you even if it’s on page thirty-three. 

 

My fellow writers, there are more of these must-do’s and don’t-forgets that many a learnéd people will tell you to include. And you should probably listen to them. But you should also consider the alternatives, and not just blindly follow sage advice that can shackle you into a decent first draft. You have to find your own way. You are unique. You are one-of-a-kind. You are like no one else that has existed on this earth before you. That’s what creativity is all about. That’s why we write. Why shouldn’t your writing be as unparalleled as you are? Why should it suffer under so-called rules or best practices or common logic?  

 

My friends, people have been writing for so long they didn’t even start doing it with words. They just contentedly painted pictures on a cave wall before someone strolled by and told them they were doing it wrong. But as creative beings who wander this earth wishing we were better at everything, we have to find our own way, make our own path, and excel with our own flair. So begin that novel. Fire it up. Pull the ripcord. But do it with the full creative knowledge that no matter how you start your novel, you’ll probably need to rewrite the whole damn thing anyway. 

 

That’s it for this one. It was a little different. A little controversial. A bit left of center, or as I like to call it: “left.” But hopefully, it provided a dose of whatever it was you came to this podcast to be dosed with. 

 

As always, I want to hear from you. Tell me how you start your novel. What lessons you’ve learned. Go to my website Cortwrites.com. That’s C-O-R-T writes.com and leave an email and, if it’s not abusive, I might read it on air. Leave a voice message, and I could play it on air. Or maybe I can interview you, and you can tell me how you go about it. Oh, and tell other writers I’m here. Or leave a review on iTunes so that people out there won’t be deprived of wisdom they won’t hear from just any wise person. And when you do leave a review, Apple will finally stop holding my photos for ransom in the Cloud. 

 

The quote today is from Seneca, the philosopher, not the apple juice. He said: 

 

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”

 

Thank you, Seneca! Wait, wasn’t that the inspiration for the movie The Human Centipede? I could be wrong.  

 

And just a quick note: I’m taking three weeks off. So for those of you following along, I will be back. I promise. For those of you catching up on these episodes, I’m probably already back. See how fast that was? 

 

And until then: Write. Write, my friends. Write like you’re saving a baby from a burning car. Because that baby is your novel. And that car is time.