Four things to keep in mind when writing leads

These are my opinions; not necessarily anyone else’s.

1. Don’t obsess on the lead. Some people spend all kinds of time working on the lead to their book when they are starting the first draft. Usually, that’s a waste of time, because by the time you finish the book, you will likely have a totally different lead in mind. So put something down and keep writing. Go back to the lead when you have the first draft done.

2. See that the rest of the book delivers what you promise. The lead has to be connected to the rest of the story. In other words, you can’t just give a rip-roaring lead and grab the reader and then have the book turn into something entirely different. If the book is a romance, it has to have a lead that promises a hint of romance. If it’s a mystery, there should be a glimpse of trouble to come. And so forth.

3. Sustain the mood and the feel of the lead for at least the first couple of pages. Too often, the inexperienced author has a great first couple of lines, but then switches into an explanatory or descriptive voice, as if all you need to do is hook the reader and then you can hit him over the head with all the background details you think he needs to know in order to understand the characters and the story. Instead, keep the reader guessing a little bit longer, and bring in those details slowly and carefully. In other words, you may have the reader hooked with your first couple of lines, but you have to reel her in slowly and carefully.

4. If you decide to have a prologue at the beginning, make it a real prologue. In other words, I really am not a fan of prologues that are really part of a scene later on in the book, and are put at the beginning only because they bring some immediate action. I feel it’s a sneaky way to try to grab the reader, and you’re better to have less “action” and more of a genuine lead.

The two exceptions are:

A. When there is actually something that happened some time before the story begins that has a direct impact on the story, and is important for the reader to know before the story (and can’t be readily worked in later).

B. When the story is being told by someone in it at a later date - as for example, the adult Scout narrates the story in To Kill a Mockingbird - and the reader needs to know this.

And that’s it for today.

Examples of crafting leads

I can read other people’s leads and select those I think are great and those that don’t work for me, but the rubber really hits the road when I have to create a lead myself. In addition, the only leads I know well enough to explain are my own. So I’ll try to explain a couple and hope we all don’t end up giving me 1’s out of 5.

Okay, Example 1:

My target audience for my book, Glitter of Diamonds, is people who like whodunit-style mysteries. A subset would be people who like baseball, but you don’t have to like baseball to like the book. You do have to like mysteries and not absolutely hate baseball.

This is what I wrote.

“Shouting in Spanish, pitcher Rico Velasquez stormed from the bullpen into the clubhouse lounge, where three players sat playing cards and watching the July holiday afternoon baseball game on a television monitor. Spotting an open box of new baseballs waiting to be autographed, Rico picked up one of them and threw a 90-mile-an-hour fastball into the middle of the television set.”

The questions I hope you are asking include: Who is Rico? Why is he so angry? Why are the other players afraid of him? What is going to happen next, both to Rico and to the other players? How will the team do this year?

I wanted my lead to introduce a major character. I wanted to show that baseball is a big part of the story (putting in enough baseball information so that a real fan will know I really do know baseball, without using language that a non-baseball fan would find off-putting - eg. anyone can figure out a fastball, but if I said “curveball” or “splitter,” I’d be in danger of losing potential readers by putting in too much lingo). I wanted to contrast the trouble gathering around Rico with the calm of the other players and the July holiday. And I wanted to foreshadow the trouble to come (e.g. using the word “stormed” into the clubhouse to foreshadow the “thunder and lightning” to come; having him throw the ball through the TV) .

Example 2:

My target audience for my book, Shaded Light , is also people who like whodunit-style mysteries. But this time there is no specific sub-theme going. A number of my characters are corporate lawyers, but that is only in the background.

I wanted my lead to introduce a couple of major characters, show a bit of the setting, and show that all is no well. I tried a number of different leads with different characters. This is what I ended up using:

“You self-righteous liar! But then you never think of anyone but yourself!” As Peter Martin stepped into the front hallway of his penthouse in an exclusive residential area of downtown Toronto, he was surprised to hear his wife’s angry voice. The voice he’d been hearing a lot lately. The one he hadn’t realized she possessed until several months ago. But this time she wasn’t speaking to him.

I hope you are asking, Who is Peter Martin and why does he live in a penthouse? Who is his wife? Who is his wife talking to? Why didn’t he know she could get angry? How long did Peter know her before they were married? Why has she been angry with Peter lately? What’s going to happen next? How long will this marriage last?

There’s also a degree of irony in the first line that the sophisticated reader might suspect - if anyone is self-centered, it is Peter’s wife.

Anyway, those are some of my leads and I think/hope they encapsulate the mood of the books and are true to the stories I tell.

What you should do is go back to a few of your leads and analyze them the same way: Who is your target audience? Is this lead perfect for them? What mood do you want to convey? Does your lead convey it? What questions do you want the reader to be asking? Does this make them ask those questions?

If you want to read the first chapters of these books, and see how I continued from these openings, you can find them both at www.murderwillout.com

And yet more great leads

I have a few more favorite leads I thought I’d post. Some of them are the kind that make you feel something terrible is coming, but others promise something different - fun, for instance. The trick is that whatever you promise in your lead (suspense, humour, romance, an engaging quest), you deliver in the rest of the book.

As you read each one, pretend you’ve never read the books and ask yourself what questions or expectations the various leads brings to your mind.

“At CBA Television News headquarters in New York, the initial report of a stricken Airbus A300, on fire and approaching Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, came only minutes before the network’s first feed of the National Evening News.” Arthur Hailey, The Evening News

“This is the story of an adventure that happened in Narnia and Calormen and the lands between, in the Golden Age when Peter was High King in Narnia and his brother and his two sisters were Kings and Queens under him. In those days, far south in Calormen on a little creek of the sea, there lived a poor fisherman called Arsheesh, and with him there lived a boy who called him Father.” C. S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

“Sunday morning Clarence Bunsen stepped into the shower and turned on the water–which was cold, but he’s Norwegian , he knows you have to take what you get–and stood until it got warm, and was reaching for the soap when he thought for sure he was having a heart attack.” Garrison Keillor, Leaving Home

“As I left the railway station at Worchester and set out on the three-mile walk to Ransom’s cottage, I reflected that no one on that platform could possibly guess the truth about the man I was going to visit.” C. S. Lewis, Voyage to Venus

“It was growing late and still there was no sign of Engaine.” Thomas B. Costain, The Black Rose

“‘Tom!’ No Answer. ‘Tom!’ No answer. ‘What’s wrong with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!’”Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

“Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversation in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?’” Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

“Rob Nevin looked from his friend to the application form on the table between them and back to his friend again. ‘You’re kidding.’” Gordon Korman, No Coins Please

“A fire rages in Albion. A strange, hidden fire, dark-flamed, invisible to the eye. Seething and churning, it burns, gathering flames of darkness into its hot black heart. Unseen and unknown, it burns.” Stephen Lawhead, The Endless Knot

“The nice thing about pain is that it comes in all sorts of sizes - from the …Mini: ‘Excuse-me-you’re-stepping-on-my-bare-feet-with-your-baseball-cleats’ type of pain, to the Medium: ‘I-sure-wish-we-weren’t-going-through-this-red-light-with-that-semi-truck-coming-from-the-other-direction’ type of pain, to the Maxi-Econo-Sized: ‘What-does-this-bully-mean-when-he-says-he’s-going-to-give-me-some-free-dental-work?’ type of pain. Then of course, there’s the…Giant Industrial Strength version which I was about to experience…” Bill Myers, My Life as a Human Hockey Puck

“When my brother Tom began telling people in Adenville, Utah, that he had a great brain everybody laughed at him, including his own family. We all thought he was trying to play some kind of kid’s joke on us. But after he had used his great brain to swindle all the kids in town and make fools of most of the grownups nobody laughed at my brother any more.“ John D. Fitzgerald, The Great Brain at the Academy

More strong fiction leads that grabbed me

I am continuing to post leads that I consider very strong. Now, since we are all different, what grabs me may not grab you. But I will try to tell you why they grab me. And you might learn from that.

“A cold wind blew off Hanging Dog Mountain and I had no fire, nor dared I strike so much as a spark that might betray my hiding place. Somewhere near an enemy lurked, waiting.” Louis L’Amour, Jubal Sackett

The word “cold” implies trouble. I don’t like being cold. Something’s wrong. “Hanging Dog mountain.” Could you get more eerie than that? “I had no fire.” I see the image of someone with no fire in a campfire pit, huddled up and maybe shivering. “Nor dared I strike so much as a spark” - Ah, not any person. Someone who is thoughtful, who knows language, who has a poetic turn. And of course, the inevitable questions - why doesn’t the person dare? Why is the person here? What’s wrong? What’s going to happen? Will the person survive? Who else is there lurking in the cold, maybe watching? Ah, “an enemy lurking, waiting.” I can’t possible stop myself from reading on. I want to know who this person is and if he or she is able to survive.

“There were two men in one village, and they had the same name–each was called Claus; but one had four horses, and the other only a single horse.” Hans Christian Anderson, Little Claus and Big Claus

This is from a fairly tale, not a book, but the implied threat in those simple words “the other only a single horse” resonates with me and I want to know what happened, because of course, something did happen. And I want to know who these two men are, and what they do to one another.

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.” J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

There is no threat here, but what keeps me going is curiosity. What is a hobbit? What kind of comfort can you have in a hole in the ground? And the writing, with its vivid description of the “nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell” leads me to think there will be more of this sort of hole in the story, too. And more great writing. But most of all I want to know who this creature is that lives in a hole in the ground in comfort.
“I must make it clear from the start that ultimately I did have a choice: but that’s always easy to say in hindsight. Right? You hear about this sort of thing all the time: the ‘I don’t want to get involved” syndrome. To myself, I’d rationalized my behaviour over the years as ‘minding my own business,’ something I’d honed to a razor’s edge.”Rick Blechta, When Hell Freezes Over

I relate to this person who would rather not get involved. But it’s clear that there was a choice, and the person chose to get involved. What happened as a result? Who is this person who wanted to stay uninvolved and had honed “minding my own business…to a razor’s edge”? Will I like this person? Is this person like me?

A challenge for you.

1. Take 20 of your favorite books and read the first 2 or 3 lines and analyze them. What questions do they bring to your mind? What feelings do they bring up in you? Do they arouse your curiosity? Your sense of justice? Your interest in a character or a situation?

2. Write down what you can learn from them. Share some of the best here in the comments section.
3. Then go and read some of your own leads and see how they compare.

A business plan template for writers

I’ve always been good at coming up with goals and steps to take to achieve those goals. Okay, the truth is, I’m one of those people who can easily go overboard and come up a million intricate little steps - 1, 2, 3… a,b,c… - and then get busy and forget all about half of them. In other words, the planning is more fun for me than the doing.

 

 

But when Linda Wegner posted a blog about how writers and editors need to have a business plan, I had to sit up. I’m a freelance writer; but because I’ve never had to support myself by my writing, I had never really thought of it in quite that way. Plan? Yes. Business? Not really.

 

 

And yet… it made sense. Most of us would like to at least break even, if not earn some income doing this.

 

 

Since I did have goals for 2007, and since I do think of writing as my career path, I decided to do the business plan thing. There were a few difficulties. It was hard to find a template that gave me the categories I needed to use. And it’s hard to say what will happen in something as tentative as writing. You can do all the right things and not make a sale. Or you can do one little thing and come up big.

 

 

But anyway, I forged ahead. And because I have this inborn need to share whatever I learn, I came up with some basic questions a writer could use to begin putting together a business plan.

 

 

1. What is my overall long-term goal (strategic plan)? (Write a book, become a full-time journalist, earn x amount of money per year through writing, develop a ministry using my writing skills…)

 

 

2. What do I need to do this year to move closer to achieving my long-term goals (tactical plan)?

 

 

3. What resources do I already have that will help me learn the skills I need and keep me motivated? (books I’ve bought but need to read; yahoo groups I’m on; organizations I belong to; friendships with other writers, etc.) What can I do to make better use of these resources? (read the books, get more involved with the organization, start/join a critique group, etc.)

 

 

4. How much money can I invest in buying books, getting the equipment I need, taking classes, membership in writers’ organizations, attending conferences, doing research, etc.?

 

 

5. How much time can I invest in writing? (an hour a day, one day a week, two months out of the year?

 

 

 

6. When will I write? (first thing in the morning, from 9 to 12 PM, Saturdays…

 

7. When do I need to begin earning money, and how much do I need to earn to make this viable for me?

 

 

8. Are there any writing-related ways I can earn money that are less open to chance (editing, critiquing, speaking, etc.)

 

I think answering these questions will give you a good start. Please leave a comment or suggestion if I’ve missed something!

 

 

Some suggestions for people just starting out:

 

 

1. Think in terms of five years. Where do I want to be in five years? What do I need to do this year to get myself closer to where I want to be?

 

 

2. Think in terms of building a resume. Start with small tasks, local or denominational markets, and then when you have learned the basics, look for bigger challenges.

 

 

3. Look for things you are good at and leverage the skills you already have before worrying about learning new skills. (eg. if you are a nurse, consider starting by writing articles about nursing and related things rather than jumping into a whole new area you don’t know much about.)

 

 

4. The kinds of writing more likely to earn you income: technical writing, journalism, fillers, business writing

 

 

5. The kinds of writing least likely to earn you income: poetry, fiction, memoir, personal opinion