Reading · Andrea Bartz: Get It Write

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That’s right, it’s a guest post! Because I don’t actually know everything, I’m excited to share from-the-trenches pieces by authors and publishing professionals. This candid, comprehensive one is from Natalie Moss, whose electric thriller, The Night Hunter, is out now. (Be sure to check out the giveaway at the end.) Enjoy!

The opening lines of a novel are a bit of magic.

As a reader, I find them utterly addictive. I love picking up books and reading the first page, like a kid tasting all the samples at the fudge store. They’re that border crossing into a new world. But as a writer, unless you’re one of the lucky few that know their first line from the get-go, they can be a real pain in the ass.

It’s easy to become obsessed with them. Partly because they’re an easy thing for people to analyse in writing groups and podcasts (think , Print Run or Manuscript Academy) because you don’t need to read the rest of the book to understand it. They’re also really important. They’re the first things an agent, an editor and a reader will read and they make their decisions quickly.

But it’s also easy to drive yourself mad with it.

It happened to me.

There’s such a thing as the first-page disease, where writers keep rewriting that first page or chapter over and over again. I know it because I caught the bug. So let me start with a serious PSA to all of you writers who haven’t yet finished the end of the manuscript, save this post for later. For a lot of us, the first chapter is one of the last things you get right. So take the pressure off and finish the book first.

Remember that while the opening page is important, it’s just the opening. You need the entire rest of the book to work also, and that’s three-hundred-pages to go. So don’t get bogged down in it.

Now, without further ado I present you five versions of the opening page1 I wrote for what became The Night Hunter2, and the one that landed me a 50% agent request rate.3 (These aren’t even all the versions, I had more).

Number 1: The opener just for me

Elliot and I switch terminals at O.R Tambo international airport, from a double-decker airbus onto a little plane with ten rows of three seats. It’s not even half full. The pilot wrestles among the white fluffy clouds, which had looked serene and gentle in the bigger aircraft. We feel every little bump and jutter of the battle between wind, gravity and machine until we finally touch down in Hoedspruit. I step out of the plane…

Are you falling asleep too, or is that just me?

This was one of the first opening pages I tried and I knew it was wrong even as I was writing it. You learn nothing about the character or the plot. There are a lot of words setting the scene, but it’s the wrong scene–the airport rather than out in the bush.

There could be an argument for an opening similar to this if I wanted to highlight the contrast between the busy, international airport and the bush. But for this book I wanted to instill in the reader the claustrophobia and remoteness of the setting from page one.

And yet, I wrote it anyway. Because as a writer, I needed to write it. I needed to type my way into the story so I could finish that first draft.4 And in that sense, this opener was perfect.

Number 2: The opener focusing on the wrong thing

If my mother knew she would die in the hospital, surrounded by beeping machines and loved ones, she would have told her rescuers not to bother. She would have stayed and died here in the African bush. I feel her now. Caught in the descending trills of the cape turtle dove as it coos: where’s mo-ther, where’s mo-other, where’s mo-ther.

This one’s a bit better. We get a little of the correct setting, and a little specificity by mentioning the cape turtle doves. We also learn about the type of person my main character’s mother is and we hint at the plot (since her death starts the story). Some really good books successfully open like this, think, The Marsh Kings Daughter by Karen Dionne or Paper Cut by Rachel Taff. And it is true that the tense mother-daughter relationship drives a lot of the story.

But for me it didn’t quite fit.

Looking back, I don’t know that I gave a good enough explanation about the type of person who would prefer to die out in the wild than live in a hospital. It wasn’t interesting enough. Crucially, I knew that most psychological thriller readers won’t have yet encountered books set in the South African bush and for me I wanted to focus on introducing them to that setting first, then the mother as a secondary bit.

Number 3: The opener for another book

The severed impala head gazes down from the marula tree with vacant eyes. Its face is clean of violence. No marks on the buck’s nose, cheeks, or along its curved horns, but its neck ends in shreds of muscle and sinew. Blood paints a dark trail down the bark to the base of the old tree, where the remains of the lower body still lie. Likely a leopard had been dragging its food up to safety when a lion or pack of hyenas ripped half of it away.

There’s no shortage of predators out here, even this close to the entrance of the park.

This is the opening I wrote after I finished my first draft. I wanted to get us right into the heart of the setting, and I wanted to foreshadow the violence and wildness of the bush. I still think it’s good writing, and looking at it now, I think it would make a good opener to another chapter, but not the first chapter.

First I’m starting with a scene that might confuse some readers. You might not know what an impala or a marula is, and while I give enough context clues to help you work it out, you immediately start wrong-footed and have to keep up. Any amount of confusion is bad for a first page because if your readers aren’t all in, they’ll close the book.

It’s also fairly gory. It would make more sense to open an action-adventure novel, but not mine. While yes, there is a little violence and gore in my book, at its heart, it’s a psychological thriller with some family drama elements, and I don’t want to give those readers–my target readers–the wrong idea.

Number 4: The opener no one liked

The elephants got to the last of the water.

I twist hard on the tap, imprinting the metal into my soft skin, but no droplets emerge. A herd must have broken in through the fence and gorged themselves on the rainwater tanks. It’s no wonder, with the rains this late. I stifle a sigh, twisting the tap shut and wiping a hand across my sweaty forehead. Not for the first time, I’m grateful the tiny public bathroom is empty.

The courier package mocks me from where it’s propped against the mirror ledge. The lawyers told me they were sending the keys to her house. Which they did. But they said nothing about a letter.

By this point I was driving myself mad. I’d finished my fourth full draft of the novel, and I’d written up a list of five possible openers—This was one of them. I put it to a vote, and…no one voted for this one. I was trying to correct for the previous opener that was all setting and gore, to have a little setting and a little character.

Again I think there’s an issue of grounding. An average American reader might see the words public bathroom and be confused as to why elephants are there. They might think of a zoo rather than a game park. While we get some character details here, and there’s momentum because we she’s upset about a letter, it’s pretty generic. We have the dreaded ‘stifled sigh’ and ‘sweaty foreheads’ which might be fine in the middle of the book, but less so as the first image.

But the main problem, I think, is it’s missing that bit of special sauce that, in my opinion, the next two versions have.

Number 5: The opener everyone liked

I saw my first kill when I was twelve years old.

I remember the anticipation almost as much as the deed itself. Sweltering heat radiated up the metal chassis of the safari truck, sucking me into the cracked-leather seats. The lioness was all but invisible in the thicket, betrayed only by the soft triangles of her ear tips. She was patient. I shifted in my seat to keep the feeling of bugs crawling over my skin at bay.

I wasn’t ready when she pounced. Blood spurted onto her tawny fur and splayed across the grass around her. I squeezed my eyes shut but I could still hear the panicked braying of the parents, and the screaming of its baby in the death throes. I wanted to scream at it to stop but my chest was too tight for breath. My mother’s muscular arms swooped in and cradled me to her chest.

For a second, my tears slowed. Then her fingers grip into my shoulders. Hard.

This one was a crowd favourite. Almost all of my beta readers really liked this one and encouraged me to use it. And I like it, a lot. To me, that first line has the automatic zing that the other openers were missing. We have immediate tension and curiosity for why a twelve-year-old is witnessing a kill–even if readers might think it’s another type of kill, rather than an animal one, that confusion doesn’t draw away from the curiosity to learn more. Because it was based on an experience I had, there are a lot of good sensory details here.

We get some interesting character backstory for our main character, and also the tension with her mother, and an immediate sense of why, as a bonus.

But the reason I didn’t keep it as my opening page is that it starts in the past. We aren’t grounded in the current timeline and I found it was awkward and clunky to bring us back to the present. And actually, the meaning and emphasis of this scene is a lot more interesting once you already know some of the context of the present day. In other words, this scene lands harder when we learn that this mother dies and not only leaves her daughter a house in the game park, but also leaves behind one, shocking, final request.

So, despite lots of people telling me otherwise, I decided I wanted to ground the reader in the present-day story.

(Don’t worry, I kept these words. An improved version of this starts off my chapter two.)

The opening page that got me a 50% request rate

People come here for the killers.

Blinking through the sting of sweat and sunscreen, I study the dry clumps of grass and pools of rocky shade in front of me. Unlike the tourists, I’m not here to see the leopards or lions that live in the South African parks. I’m here because of the creature that killed my mother. One that could perch on the palm of my hand.

The wind picks up, carrying the dust-heavy air into my face. The heat of it coats the back of my throat, warming my lungs with each breath. Beyond the eight-foot game fence is the bush, as my mother called it, said with the same reverence that some reserved for church. It’s all grass, dirt and thicket. Thorny tangles of acacias battle with the red and russet bushwillows, their leaves brushed brown with thirst.

It’s hard not to think about her now that I’m here. She would have laughed at me – out here pacing, needing to walk, to process. She would have never been so sentimental. Which is why I didn’t expect the letters.

I knew I got it right when I finally figured out the opening line. We have an immediate bit of curiosity, and a subtle difference set up between the ‘people’ who come here, and the main character. We get a lot of setting detail, but I quickly establish that we’re in a park with wild animals so we’re grounded. We get a little of the plot, because we know about the character’s mother’s death and we are curious to know about the letters. We also get a hint of character. We know the main character is the type that needs to walk to process her thoughts, but I’d argue that we also see a little juxtaposition between her self-ascribed sentimentality and the brutal way she describes the landscape or the blunt way she refers to her recently deceased mother.

It’s funny, back when I was querying, I was really happy with this opener. And it worked well for me. But first-page disease is a hard one to shake. Looking at it now, I still don’t think it’s good enough and I was almost too embarrassed to share this one with you.

The final version I finally landed on after I got my book deal, which is a lot like this one above but better, really is the very best version. And it’s the one I’m going to stick with. If you are curious and would like to read it, I would be endlessly grateful if you’d consider picking up my debut, The Night Hunter. And to prove I’m not only trying to sell you my book, you’re also more than welcome to check out the sneak peek for free on the PRH page, or on any of the main retailer sites.

Please let me know what you think! Do you agree with the opener I used in the end? What was your favourite, or least favourite? Do you agree that the published one really is better than the one that got me my agent?

Giveaway!

Natalie’s publisher will send a copy of The Night Hunter to one lucky subscriber. (US only; enter by 11:59pm ET on Friday, August 7).

In a remote corner of the South African bush, two sisters reunite to bury a family secret once and for all, but when they’re stranded among the wild animals, they find a predator far more dangerous waiting for them in the shadows. . . .

When their conservationist mother passes, Danielle and her estranged sister Grace must return to their isolated family house nestled within a wild-game reserve. While Grace, their mother’s favorite, clings to nostalgia, only Danielle carries the knowledge of her final request: “Find the storehouse . . . Burn everything inside.”

To ease the pain of their homecoming—and the tension between them—each sister invites two friends on the two-day journey into the bush. What starts as a safari adventure, turns into a nightmare when one of them is murdered the first morning at the campsite. In the chaos that follows, they crash their vehicle, stranding them, with no way to call for help.

Now, with dwindling supplies and only one rifle, Danielle must lead them on foot across miles of merciless savannah. They have days of walking ahead…if they survive that long. As the group navigates land where every rustle could mean death, a truth emerges: someone is sabotaging their escape.

Breathtaking and tense, The Night Hunter maps the treacherous terrain of family duty and loyalty as the two sisters confront what they’ve spent years trying to forget.

To enter, comment #hunter below.

Guest post: The opening page that landed me a 50% request rate