When You Face Too Many Ways to Open a Novel

By Glynn Young

How many openings can a novel have? Let me count the ways.

I’d never experienced the problem of too many ways to open a novel. Five novels, and five fairly straightforward beginnings, meant that I never struggled over how to open a story. Somehow, I always knew, and it wasn’t an issue.

Until now.

I began to write the draft like I always had. I had an idea, and image, in my mind, and that’s how I’d start the story. I wrote it. I read it over several times. It seemed to work. I started writing beyond the opening, and I bogged down.

Something seemed slightly off, and I knew it was the opening. So, I reworked it. And reworked it. I revised it to the point where it was almost unrecognizable from the first version. It still didn’t work. I discarded it and started over. I tried something entirely different. At one point, I thought I had it, finally, only to realize I didn’t. I went back to the first and tried it again.

Then I looked at what I’d done. I’d written six entirely different openings, that is, six major ones, not counting the 18 to 20 variations on a theme. If you go by word count, the total came to more than 11,000 words, all devoted to about one fourth of the opening chapter.

Something was clearly wrong. This was the story idea I had nurtured for years. I’d thought through the major scenes, the major characters, and the twists and turns. I knew what this story was about and where it was going. How could I have this problem?

To get the answer, I stopped writing. For six weeks, I pondered what I was doing to trying to do. And I realized that my problem wasn’t the opening; it was how much I didn’t know about the story itself. You set a story is a historical period, and you better know the story of that period. I’d assumed I knew the basics and most of the details of the period. As it turns out, I didn’t even know enough to make me dangerous. I barely knew enough to make me superficial and boring.

The writing had to be put aside. I had some reading and research to do. And you might, or might not, be surprised to learn just how much information can’t be found on the worldwide web.

But I persisted. I’m still persisting. I resumed writing, but the reading and research are ongoing. I looked hard at those six major openings. I decided two of them needed to be deleted altogether. Three of them were scenes that belonged later in the story. That left the one that worked, and it worked because it showed what needed to be said to frame the entire story, even if I didn’t realize that when I wrote it. (If you’re interested, this opening was chronologically the third one I wrote.)

I learned three lessons with my problems with the opening. First, I hadn’t done what I needed to do to research what I was writing about. Second, I initially was attempting to set a mood; I should have let the characters do that for me. Third, the old saw “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” should be sent to the trite expression graveyard. It’s more a case of “If at first you don’t succeed, stop and focus on why.”

And yes, the writing of the story is now moving along at a steady pace.

Glynn Young is a national award-winning speechwriter, communications practitioner, and novelist. He’s the author of four published novels, Dancing Priest, A Light Shining, Dancing King, Dancing Prophet,  and Dancing Prince; and the non-fiction book Poetry at Work.   Visit Glynn on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, his blog, the Dancing Priest book page, and his business website.