Birth of a Novel: Chapter One

The magic is happening!

You remember my friend Elizabeth’s idea, and outline? She is off to the races! Today, I want to share her first chapter’s first draft, and talk about how it came to be.

First, the background: Elizabeth’s writing about a middle-aged woman who wakes up from her colonoscopy (LOL) and finds that the wrong man is there to pick her up. Instead of her husband of many years, this is the guy she dated in her twenties, the one she thought she’d marry – but didn’t. Now she’s in this alternate reality where they’re together, and she has a completely different life – one with professional success and no kids. She has to figure out what happened, how to get back to her real life…and if she even wants that.

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

Beginnings are hard, and beginning this kind of book, with a big twist, is especially challenging.

You have to do all the things a standard-issue domestic fiction or romance does – establish your characters, establish your conflict, tell your reader what your protagonists wants, and what’s standing in the way of her getting it. You also need to also establish the specifics and the rules of your universe. And you need to do all of that without overwhelming your reader with too much exposition.

The biggest note I had for Elizabeth when she sent me the first draft was to tell us more about Brooke, her main character. I wrote “I think we need another beat or two about Brooke’s relationship with Andy – how long they were together, how it ended – and maybe a little less about her ‘real life.’ It’s all about finding the balance, and I think the more you write the easier it will be.”

Beyond that, most of what I suggested was very small: there were notes were about word choices, punctuation, and how, if you are setting your opening scene in a colonoscopy suite and not making a single poop joke, you are basically leaving Chekov’s gun on the mantle.

I think this is a great example of how to start right in the middle of things, how to make your character relatable, how to ground the story in real-life details (the purple granny panties!) while also hinting at the magic.