In the draft I’m currently revising, I have a hook at the beginning, then I kind of establish some stuff, and then something Really Exciting happens at the end of Chapter Three. I used to cross my fingers and hope readers would just hang on until the end of Chapter Three, because then I gave myself decent odds of hooking them for the rest of the story.
Yesterday, with the help of a critique partner, I had a rather embarrassingly belated epiphany: move the end of Chapter Three to the end of Chapter One. Duh.
The thing is, I knew starting in the wrong place was a common problem. In the book I wrote after this one I’m revising, I sat down with the specific intent of starting in the right place, with the inciting incident happening in Chapter One, and the results were fantastic. I should have known ages ago that this was what I needed to do.
But I had it in my head for this ms that the hook at the beginning was the inciting incident, and then I knew a couple of months had to elapse before the Really Exciting Thing. So I had two chapters of montage, basically, before I got to the really good part.
This was a terrible idea. I can admit it now.
I had to challenge my fixed ideas about what order events happened in, and ask myself whether there was any real reason the Really Exciting Thing couldn’t happen right away, and then we could allow time to pass. And there were reasons, but none of them were things I couldn’t get around with a little revision work.
I’m doing that revision work right now. It’ll be a few days before I’m ready to field test the results with beta readers, and I’m sure it’ll need further tweaking, but I can already tell I made the right decision. I no longer have this big chunk of timelapse montage weighing down the opening chapters of my book, which are so critical.
It’s good to remind myself that just because the story is “the way it happened” in my head doesn’t mean I can’t rip it up and move things around if it’s better for dramatic tension.
Melissa Caruso 