10/09/2020 – Starting with a Bang

I’m part of a facebook group where writers and editors discuss various technical and business issues. Recently, someone on this group posted an article talking about a subject that always gets my teeth grinding: How quickly should a novel’s plot kick in?

The TL;DR of the article was: It used to be a novel could take as long as it wanted to start the story, then it had to be within the first 30 pages, then 20 pages, then 15 and now you have to get things started within the first 10 pages.

Personally, having read a bunch of classis Science Fiction and Fantasy novels, only to be frustrated by the authors insisting on opening their novels with a load of irrelevant drivel, this sounds fine to me. People want their stories to start at the start of the novel, this shouldn’t be massively controversial. People may complain about short attention spans, but I think it’s more likely to be there are a surplus of good books being published regularly now, so we don’t have to put up with glacial storytelling.

My problem, conversely, is over-correcting. As with Sense of Place last week, I tend to want to get things started on the first page rather than let things breathe and start at their own pace. It’s something I’m working on.