Now that I’m firmly back into writing a new draft of Toric, and have just wrapped up part 1, I wanted to discuss perhaps the most significant reason for why I needed to rework some things. Simply put, the beginning wasn’t working.

This revelation didn’t come as a surprise for me. Before I had my previous draft reviewed, one of the last things I did was redo the first ten pages, for what felt like the fifth or sixth time. Yet, when it came time for me to face the music, it was the same exact song and dance. I had to face the facts, my beginning was broken.

So, let’s take a step back and examine what the beginning of a book actually is. Your goal as an author is to capture your reader’s attention. You need to leave them wanting more. Well doesn’t that sound simple? If only things were so easy. I needed to go deeper to understand why my previous attempts at beginnings were falling flat. I needed to understand the mechanics behind what makes an effective starting point.

Before I go any further, I’d like to credit this episode from the writing excuses podcast with helping to put my thoughts in order as I planned this latest draft of my book. I’ve been a long time listener of the podcast, and I’m sure there are a number of episodes I’ve absorbed over the years about introductions, but this was one that stands out in particular.

Secondly, a quick disclaimer. There are any number of different ways to approach things like this. What works for one writer’s style may completely fall apart for another’s. I’ve attempted to make this as generic as possible, but don’t feel like this is a recipe you have to follow to the letter. These points are simple meant to get the creative juices flowing and help you to examine what might and might not be working well for you.

So, with that out of the way, let’s break down the key components of what I believe makes a good beginning into 5 concrete points.

1. Include appropriate promises to the reader
2. Ground the beginning in a compelling setting
3. Introduce interesting characters
4. Ensure there is a sense of dynamism throughout
5. Leave the reader with compelling questions that drive them to want to learn more

I’m planning to break this down into a few different posts, so I can properly dive into each of these points. In this post, I’m going to cover only point number 1. That of making promises. Promises are arguably the most important thing you need to be aware of when approaching a proper introduction.

What is a promise? In a nutshell, your promises are what you tell the reader they can expect from your book. This is both in a narrative sense and in a more meta/fourth-wall sense as well. If a romance fan picks up your book and sees page one of your book is about an intergalactic robot rebellion, well you are making a promise to them about what they can expect from the rest of your book, for better or for worse. If this is someone you want to grab, maybe because you are writing steamy robot erotica (not that I would know anything about that), make sure to make that clear right from page 1. 

You want to lead early on with what sort of book to expect. Don’t try to rug pull genres or anything else tricky like that. Perhaps if you are a well established author someday, then you might play around. But as a newer author, it’s best to be very up front about the type of book your reader has picked up.

From there we can get more specific with the nature of these promises. I have always been fascinated by heist stories, and I knew Toric would feature thief and rogue-like characters and that my climax would be a sort of heist job. It made all the sense in the world then to drop the reader into a heist in progress in chapter 1. This lets the reader see how I approach this kind of storytelling, and to see if the tone resonates with them.

Tone is a big one. I almost included it as one of the key points above, but ultimately rolled it into the promises point. Some readers may not want a heady and philosophical narrative, while others may crave it. Ensure you properly represent the different sort of tones up front as well, just like genre.

In the Writing Excuses podcast episode linked above, they discuss an author they knew who was struggling to pitch a middle grade book. The problem ended up being that the beginning was somewhat lighthearted about a goofy kid, but then the book gets into its actual story as a dark and brooding adventure novel. By doing this, the people who wanted that dark and brooding adventure never made it past your beginning, and the fans of the goofy beginning will feel somewhat betrayed as that’s not actually what the meat of the book is like. Setting the stage immediately with the proper tone is extremely important.

Lastly, you can make promises about topics within your book. Do you have magic? Find a way to show that. Is there interplanetary travel? Probably should be mentioned. Can animals talk in your world? Let us know this up front.

When I think about my previous versions of Toric’s beginning, and specifically the promises that were made but never fulfilled, and the promises that should have been made but weren’t, the reasons for my unhappiness with it start to come into focus. The old introduction told the very standard story of a group of thieves slipping into a city unnoticed to assassinate a king. It focused mostly on the characters, and had very little else in terms of promises. No wider world or plot relevant things were mentioned. It was a play by play of a scene straight out of every D&D campaign ever.

Now, that’s not necessarily a problem, if I was writing a D&D style group adventure story. But I’m not. Not really. The story I am trying to tell is one I hope that will be continent spanning, eventually. I plan to have lots of factions and races and powers pushing against each other, with my characters feeling a little like they are leaves caught in a hurricane at times. I’m planning on having a fantastical world full of interesting and eye catching magical spectacles. By focusing so narrowly on a few thieves for as many pages as I was, I wasn’t doing a good job of setting expectations for the story I wanted to tell. The first time I cut away to mysterious demi-gods plotting mysteriously, it must have been extremely jarring for a reader going in blind.

So how did I end up rethinking my promises with the beginning then? I looked at what I thought was the strongest part of my previous draft (the climactic heist job my characters end up attempting), and tried to think of ways I could get that same feeling across, in miniature, to craft an effective beginning. A teaser, if you will, for the great parts to come. I even crafted my beginning scenes in a small three act format, hoping to mirror the magic of the strong ending that it would eventually lead to.

I remember thinking in previous drafts that I needed to start simple, and slowly build up to the big reveals about the world and the conflicts facing it. But, I no longer believe that to be true. My opinion now, and the driving force behind this latest iteration of Toric’s beginning, is that I want to craft a spectacle using every tool in my toolbox that I possibly can. I want wild magic. I want incredibly powerful beings. I want to show off some of the coolest ideas I’ve had for weapons and combat. I want to blow the reader away with alien and otherworldly settings. Why hold these things in reserve? Lead with them. Show the reader that this is the kind of story you are dying to tell, and that they should be dying to read.

So, by the end of the beginning, the reader should fully understand exactly the type of book they have picked up. That doesn’t mean they understand all of the nuances of what is going on. We’ll talk more about effectively utilizing a sense of mystery and wonder to keep the reader guessing and wanting more in a future post, probably the one in this series that covers point 5 above about prompting compelling questions.

There’s a ton more I could say about promises. I think they are among the most important things you can keep in mind when crafting any one of your introductions. Whether that is the beginning of the book, or any other moment that fits the idea of an introduction (new characters, settings, subplots, etc…).

However, I’ll let this topic breathe for now. In the next post in this series I plan on covering character and setting, and once again discussing where my previous opening scenes for Toric failed, and what I have done to hopefully remedy those issues.

Until next time!

Well hello there. All of a sudden, it’s 2023. I realize that it has been over two years since the last blog post, and I think it’s finally time to address things here and talk about what’s been happening and what’s going to come next from this whole thing.

Fair warning, this is a long blog post that is mostly self-indulgent. I’m kind of putting things down here for posterity and to explain what I’ve been doing for the past two years. I don’t plan on doing posts like this often, but I felt this was as good a way as any to reinvigorate this place. Look for more posts about the mechanics of writing and storytelling in the future!

The story starts in late 2020. I had just completed my first draft of Toric. There were several stages that went into this milestone. I finished the first complete draft in the late summer, then spent the last 4-5 months of the year on long, arduous editing passes. I have learned a ton about editing since then and I think it will make for a great series of blog posts someday, but that’s not what I’m here for right now. By the beginning of the new year, 2021, I finally felt like the manuscript was in a solid enough place to share. So I did. I sent it out to a few beta readers and the initial feedback was very positive! So much so, that I figured that maybe this actually had a shot at publication.

I took that time in January 2021, while my beta readers were busy actually reading the thing, to put together the website that you are reading this blog post on now. There were two reasons for this. One, I’m a software engineer in my professional life, so this did end up being a fun and interesting challenge. But more importantly, this was yet another box to tick in that slow march towards potential publication. I read the articles, I followed the experts’ advice, and I knew that having a website and a social presence could only help me out. It was a somewhat cynical driving force. Here I was building this space, but I was unpublished and barely even starting my journey. The website as it stood, served no real purpose. I didn’t have dedicated fans. Even my close family and friends never once asked me when I was going to upload a new blog post.

So then, where was I? I had written a couple blogs, posted on twitter for a month or two semi-regularly, and had implemented some small changes and tweaks suggested by my beta readers. At that point, development and updates of my website and blog ceased. I moved on to researching potential agents that might be a fit for my shiny new draft of Toric, and then actually blasted out a series of submissions, tracking everything diligently in a Google sheet. Then, all I had to do was wait for those positive responses. So I waited. And waited…

Well, long story short, I didn’t get any bites from my initial query efforts. Thankfully, I knew not to press my luck and ceased my query submissions pretty quickly, not wanting to burn all my opportunities (many agents will only let you submit a particular manuscript to them once, so you better be confident that you’ve done everything you can on it). This took me back to the drawing board in a somewhat confused state. The wind had been taken out of my sails.

At this point I think it is important to discuss what was going on in the world. Let’s transport you back to spring 2021. Here I was, mentally exhausted from the mad dash to get the book ready in 2020, and for the first time in over a year, things were looking up in the world. The first vaccines were arriving, people were extremely excited to get out and do things again, and I got swept up in all of it. It wasn’t until summer that life started to feel normal again, and I sat back down and started to examine what I had with my manuscript and what needed to happen to get it back into a position that I could be happy with it.

The thing I quickly settled on was that I had to be 100% confident in my manuscript before beginning the query submission process again. I set myself a goal. I wanted to have the next version of my completed manuscript of Toric done before the end of the year. There were three things that went into this.

1. I needed a plan.
2. Once my plan was established, I had to actually do the rewrites and edits.
3. Once I was done, I decided I needed to hire a professional editor to actually give it to me straight. Again, I can only query an agent once. It is extremely valuable to me to properly understand whether my manuscript is even ready for that.

By fall 2021, I had my plan. This centered on three driving points.

1. From a mechanics perspective, I was being far too cavalier and amateurish with my perspectives. Third Person Limited is a limited perspective. I not only had sections of chapters where I swapped perspectives too often, but I found myself head hopping and dipping back to third person omniscient far more than I had realized at first. I had to tighten up everything.
2. The beginning had to be completely redone. I still had sections of chapters that were largely untouched from when I had first written them, almost a decade ago, and it was clear that they were not up to my current standards. The beginning is so important in grabbing a reader’s attention, that I felt like it was better just to get a fresh start.
3. Most importantly, the manuscript was simply too long.

Point number three was my biggest hurdle. My manuscript at its peak was approaching 190k words. Sure, compared to a Brandon Sanderson or George R. R. Martin novel, a sub 200k word count is child’s play. But, for an agent looking at a first time author’s submission, that number is a massive red flag. All it tells them is that I don’t know how to edit my work properly. Most novels for an adult audience come in at 120k words or so. Sure, the research I did mentioned that some genres would go longer, and fantasy, especially epic fantasy, was often cited as an example. But, they were talking about more like 150k words, not 200k+. So I set myself a target. I wanted to cut 30k words. Ideally, I’d be under that 150k cutoff.

So, for the remainder of 2021, and stretching into the first half of 2022, I worked diligently towards these objectives. I cleaned up my perspective issues, the new beginning was getting rave reviews, and most importantly, after a lot of painstaking work, I ended my quest for a slim word count around 153k words. My compromise was that I left in two backstory chapters that I was coming around to the idea of cutting, which would have saved me another 7-8k words. I decided to leave them in for the moment, just to see what the editor thought.

So, there I was in late spring 2022, ready to go for a second time. I found an editor who had actually worked as an agent as well, a perfect fit for me, and hired them to read my manuscript and then meet with me afterwards to discuss their thoughts. Many freelance editors offer editorial services, but I was laser focused on simply getting feedback about my readiness for querying.

I sent the manuscript off, extremely confident that this time I had nailed it. The manuscript had come together brilliantly. Feedback from a couple beta readers was great again. It had been tightened up significantly and felt like a roller coaster ride from start to end. I dreamed about how well the conversation was going to go and just how impressed the editor was going to be.  

Everything was great, right up until the day before the call. I was suddenly nervous. I didn’t know what the structure of the call was going to look like, and figured I should prepare some questions to ask them, just in case they mostly opened it to me to drive the conversation. The more I started to rack my brain about the questions I had about my manuscript, the more the doubts started to flow out of me that I had never consciously considered before. They must have been there all along, I just got great at ignoring them.

I eventually broke my questions up into 8 topics. I worried about whether I jumped around PoVs too liberally, especially in brief little sprints during action scenes. Conversely, I wondered if I was too focused on my main character, especially early on, and whether I should incorporate more looks at other characters in the first half of the book, rather than just brief asides before returning to my primary main character. I worried about chapter 1 again, was it too long before we got to the point? I worried about the final chapter, it felt like it should be a denouement, but it had a surprise action scene and I wondered if it felt too disjointed. I worried about the backstory chapters that rip the reader out of the current narrative. I worried about a cutaway I did for three or four pages to tell a folktale rendition of a local legend. I worried my ultimate antagonist for the climactic scenes was underwhelming and underdeveloped, thrown in way too late in the book. But mostly, I worried that the second half of the book, the part I slaved away on in 2020, no longer worked with the setup and promises of the first half that had been slowly cultivated over the decade prior.

That was the moment when it hit me. This was not going to be a victory lap. In fact, I didn’t even really need this editorial review. I already knew it wasn’t good enough and I already knew what I needed to do. Still, I went into it hopeful that maybe I was just being too harsh on myself. The end result was… eye opening in many ways.

First of all, the feedback they had for my plot and characters was almost a 100% point for point match to the issues I had detailed the day before. This was gratifying at least in a way. I could trust myself that I actually did know what I needed to do. I wasn’t a ship adrift at sea with no way of getting home.

Secondly, they praised the mechanical aspects of my manuscript. In fact, I was told it was one of the cleanest, most well edited manuscripts they had ever received. This was a huge weight off my shoulders, as I had long worried whether my writing style, and editing efforts, were actually up to the standards of professionals in the industry.

Lastly, they raised one extremely interesting point. It wasn’t just that my beginning was not making the right promises. I was told to consider whether my beginning was even starting in the right spot at all. This blew my mind. Up until this point, I had made tons of changes and edited the heck out of things. But, I had never actually reworked plot in this way before. I had never considered that maybe I should change the entire foundation of my characters, change the entire timeline, change who is present where and what the motivations are for kicking things off. It was mind boggling, and made every cent that went into this review worth it.

So now, we finally are closing in on current day. I was once again drained after this whole process, and took a few months off. But by fall 2022, I was back at it, outlining again. This took a lot longer than previous drafts, as I was rethinking a ton of foundational stuff that I had been building off of for the greater part of a decade. Eventually though, I felt confident enough to start, and by November, I was setting out to write a third edition of this manuscript. Starting with a brand new introduction, from a brand new character’s perspective.

I won’t go into things much more. I am currently four completed chapters into this effort. I will detail the changes between this draft and the last in another post, talking more about what I’ve learned. Some of the changes to my process now include bringing in beta readers early and often. I used to dump completed drafts on people without much warning. Now, I’m sending out one chapter at a time to get much more immediate feedback. If you read all the way to the bottom of this post, you are exactly the type of person I would love to work with. Please do reach out and let me know if you’d like to beta read this new draft.

So, where do we go from here? I’m immensely proud of the new beginning so far, and I’m excited, though also intimidated, by what will be required from here. It’s one thing to write a new part of a manuscript from scratch, but working in all these changes to sections that won’t be rewritten is almost more daunting. Lots and lots of small modifications and edits will be required. Keep an eye on the website. I do plan on finally utilizing my progress bars to update my progress as I go.

Lastly, do expect some additional blog posts from time to time. I have a lot of lessons that I’ve learned so far. I promise, not all of them will be this long. I’d love to talk about things I’ve learned about introductions. The three act structure. Book structure as a whole. Character writing and perspective. Foreshadowing and promises. All these sorts of interesting things. They won’t be every week, they might not even be every month. But, it certainly won’t be one post every two years anymore. I’m settling into the idea that this is how things will be for the long haul.

So, thanks for sticking with me. I know this has been a long journey, and I’m immensely grateful for the support of my friends and family during this process. I can’t wait until I can proudly say that I’ve moved beyond this initial stage of creation. Until then, however, I’ll detail the process here. I hope to see you then!

In lieu of a comments section, please feel free to tweet at me if you have any thoughts on this post. Normally I would link a specific tweet you could reply to pointing to this post, but given this is a more personal post, I'm not going to promote it directly from twitter this time.