Nothing is more important than the opening paragraph of a novel. You want to start strong and build from there. For practice, find a great opening from a bestselling novelist, copy the work, and see if you can make it even better.
Here’s a great paragraph from The Choice by Nicholas Sparks:
“Tell me again why I agreed to help you with this.” Matt, red-faced and grunting, continued to push the spa toward the recently cut square at the far edge of the deck. His feet slipped, and he could feel sweat pouring from his forehead into the corners of his eyes, making them sting. It was hot, way too hot for early May. Too damn hot for this, that’s for sure. Even Travis’s dog, Moby, was hiding in the shade and panting, his tongue hanging out.
What we might see for an improved version:
“Tell me again why I agreed to help you with this.” Matt, red-faced and grunting, pushed the spa a few more inches toward the far edge of the deck. His feet slipped, and he braced for better traction. Sweat poured from his forehead, stinging his eyes. It was way too hot for early May. Too damn hot for work like this, that was for sure. Even Travis’s dog, Moby, was hiding in the shade, his tongue hanging out, panting.
Logic for making improvements:
- “Continued” is merely descriptive of the action, with the strength of the action hidden in the prepositional phrase. “Pushed” is better than “continued.”
- “Recently cut square” suggests a work in progress, but is that detail important? What we need is emphasis on the hard work Matt is doing. We’ll improve the sentence by leaving out “recently cut square” and adding a picture of the pushing difficulty, that it was “a few more inches.”
- What is the significance of his feet slipping? Was he wearing leather-soled dress shoes? Surely not. Even with running shoes, he couldn’t get traction, so we need to create that picture, adding the clause “he braced for better traction.”
- Unless Matt had some nerve disorder, we know he could feel the sweat. We don’t need to know he if he could. We need to know that he felt. In Matt’s deep point of view, we want to leave out “he could feel” and describe what he felt: “Sweat poured from his forehead, stinging his eyes.”
- When sweat stings the eyes, do we need the detail that it entered the corner of the eyes? An observer would say that, but the point-of-view character would just feel the sting. We should leave out “corner of the eyes.”
- “Stinging” is a stronger verb than “making,” so we’ll do better to write “stinging the eyes” instead of “making them sting.”
- “It was hot, way too hot for early May.” We don’t need “hot” twice in this sentence, not with the heat emphasis that follows.
- “That’s” is a contraction for “that is,” present tense. We want the past tense: “that was for sure.”
- Visualization precedes interpretation. Matt saw the dog hiding in the shade, his tongue hanging out. “Panting” is an interpretation of what Matt saw, so that word works best at the end of the sentence.
