How to Start a Novel

He knew they had been expecting him.

That sentence, which begins my first published novel, Pandora's Genes, literally came to me in a dream. I had a vague vision of a good man who has knowingly agreed to do something bad. I began writing out of a compelling need to find out who this man was, what he had agreed to do, and, most important, why he had agreed to do it. I wrote compulsively, every day, as Charlene Baumbich, author of the "Dearest Dorothy" series (Penguin Books) says she does: "Waking up early every day to see what happens next... I find out just like readers do: by following the storyline-but I'm squinting into 'where ever' and trying to get out of my own way enough to see it. It runs like a movie in my head."

This is one of two ways to start a fiction piece: begin at the beginning and keep going till you'reach the end. The other way, of course, is to begin anywhere, with something that turns you on, and work forward and backward until all the pieces fit together. That is how I wrote my children's mainstream novel, Going to See Grassy Ella. I had a number of scenes in mind and wrote them separately, without a very clear idea of how they connected until I was about halfway through. The opening paragraph was one of the last things I wrote, and I had to rewrite it'several times until I got it right.

How to begin, then, depends on the project. It may also partly depend on your own writing process. Claire Tristram, whose first novel, After, will be released by Farrar, Strauss, Giroux in May, finds she must always begin at the beginning: "... then [I] write the middle, then the end. Then I go back and see what I need to add. Things tend to be sketchy the first time around and to need filling in."

Sally Wiener Grotta, who is finishing her first novel, works in much the same way as Claire. "I need a first sentence," she says. "It can'take forever to get that first sentence right. Once I have that, the story will just flow with obvious stops and restarts... On occasion, the first sentence arrives complete and almost perfect, before I even know who is speaking, so I just write it and let the words come out of me."

Of course, we can't always count on that first sentence or paragraph being right from the beginning. Sometimes it's best just to go ahead with the work, realizing that you will need to go back and make changes-sometime major changes-later. Barbara DeMarco-Barrett uses this process in her novel-in-progress, which takes place between San Francisco and Mt. Abu, India: "I'm just having fun, writing scenes, not necessarily in order," she says. "I may run into steep trouble later, but right now it's fun."

Hayford Peirce, a prolific science fiction and mystery author, says he doesn't necessarily start at the beginning, but "I absolutely have to have a detailed outline before I can write anything, whether a short story or a novel. I have to know the beginning, the middle, and the end... .I've tried writing with just an opening scene in my mind and, no matter how great That scene turns out to be, I have never been able to complete That'story by just continuing on from that point."

A common problem of both novice and experienced fiction writers is beginning the story too early. When we're excited and in the throes of creative discovery, we sometimes write more than the reader needs to know. I can't tell you how many times I've had to throw out the first sentences... first paragraphs... even, on occasion, whole first chapters. In every case, though, the writing had a purpose; it helped me to better understand my characters and the situation that propelled them into the story.

In fact, as I often advise my novel-writing students, sometimes it's important to write about what happened before the story opens so you can find the true beginning. One of my students, who was working on a mystery with a novice priest as detective, wrote dozens of pages about her protagonist's childhood. Though these pages never made it into the finished work, they helped her to find the actual moment when the story began for that character and therefore for the reader. Whenever you're having trouble getting started, this technique may well be the answer to getting you on track.

The bottom line? As Charlene Baumbich advises, "start with anything that comes into your head, then go from there. And have some fun!"

Next time we'll take a look at the sometimes messy business of plotting.