Beginnings
W e all struggle with beginnings. Some people get better at it, but then you pick up a book by a bestselling author and the beginning just doesn’t grab you for some reason. So, we talk about hooks and throwing the reader into the middle of the action, but we also talk about setup and getting the reader to like the character. Sometimes, I think it would do us good to just practice writing beginnings. Don’t write another novel until we’ve written one hundred beginnings or something like that. How do we do all of that? How do we begin with action and still give the reader the proper setup? When we read discussions of how to begin, it is easy to get the idea that we should put the inciting incident on page one, so that something happens on page one that causes the protagonist to decide to do something. I’m going to give you a rule that we must never break. There are many writing rules out there that are just firm suggestions, but here is one that you should never break: Never put the inc...