Yesterday, I finished the first round of edits for my newest manuscript while my kids watched Return of the Jedi for the first time. (They loved it – and now I have an appreciation for the stupid CGI song they added to Jabba’s palace in the late 90s because the kids asked to watch that scene twice in a row, but that’s another story.)
The manuscript is the second book of a YA trilogy that takes place in an alternate earth timeline with dragons. I started writing the second book while querying the first one to agents because everyone always advises to keep writing new books while querying. So far, the querying has gone nowhere (three rounds of queries over a year, totaling in the 60s). But the advice is spot on because writing the second book helped me understand why the beginning of the first book wasn’t working.
The problem was that, originally, the first book opened with what seems like a standard beginning to any medieval fantasy novel. But the story actually takes place in an alternate version of our world in which different regions have vastly different levels of technology. We just happen to open on one of the regions with less tech.
So when an agent requests only the first five pages, they don’t get to the first piece of technology that tells the reader this world isn’t quite what they might expect. The book just seems like standard fantasy.
Writing Book Two helped me realize that Book One needed just a tiny intro, a Chapter Zero, to set the stage for the world that we know but not as we know it. I took a page out of Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind – the first page, actually. His first chapter is called “A Silence in Three Parts,” and it’s one page long. It absolutely enthralled me the first time I read it. I must have read and re-read it a dozen times before moving on to page two. More than anything, that intro sets the tone for Rothfuss’s epic fantasy story.
So I wrote a single page Chapter Zero for Book One. It talks about technology. It lays out the geography of the world, with some recognizable place names and some strange ones. And it sets up the reveals for the first two chapters. My hope is that this new opening will ground the reader in the version of our world that I’m inviting them to visit and make them curious enough to turn the page, which are two of the things a good opening should do.
Also, the novel now has a new first line that I love:
Into the midnight sky above the Alliance capital, three stolen drones soared.
Secret Dragon, First Sentence
Hopefully, the new opening of Book One will catch an agent’s eye when I do Round Four of my queries this fall.
Speaking of first pages, I invite you to check out my fantasy novel The Islands of Shattered Glass, which begins with homages to two of the best films of all time, back-to-back Best Picture Oscar winners The Godfather and The Sting. The book takes place in the same fantasy world as all the novels you can currently find on this site. It is a standalone story, but it links into the Shields of Sularil series if you make it all the way to the series’ last book.
Adam Thomas, Author 