All of us at the Algonkian Pitch Conference in New York last month focused on how to craft the perfect elevator speech about our books. For homework we had to prepare a pitch that could be delivered in one minute to an agent or publisher. The pitch, if done right, should work as book jacket copy that sells the book to the book shopper.
For three months I worked on doing just that, packing the who, what, when, where, and how into punchy sentences that ended in a way to make the listener primed to hear more. All of us arrived at the conference a little self-conscious about giving our pitches live, in front of our fellow writers, and our group leader Paula Munier, who is a real live, GASP! – literary agent. As we practiced and received critiques our pitches got better and we started feeling more comfortable giving them. On the second day Paula announced an activity that wasn’t advertised in the conference lit. The surprise exercise was a first page read-and-critique session. This was entirely optional, but who’s not going jump at the chance to read his or her first page to an agent and a publisher? The format was simple — they listened attentively while we read our first pages, and then provided feedback on each one.
Early on Paula reminded us that our first page must grab the reader and make them feel like they are exactly where they thought they’d be, given a book’s genre. That is; the reader must know within the first few sentences, or okay, paragraphs, that this is a romance, an historical piece, a fantasy or mystery. The first few sentences have to be true to the genre. How simple is this for a writer to understand? It makes utterly good sense. The first impression is the lasting one. No matter how simple or logical, I knew I had a problem, a huge one. My problem was, I had written a mystery/suspense thriller, and built the book chronologically. The story opened with a young boy working on the sailboat he inherited from his grandfather. There in the heady fumes of varnish and dreams of sailing over the horizon, my story began like a Norman Rockwell painting. That was a complete disaster for an edgy book that ends in a hostage scene complete with a murder before winding down in a shootout in front of a burning building. No way would a mystery/suspense reader see this coming.
With the first-page critique a day away I set out to fix the problem. The solution was to bookend my story. To do this I pulled an action scene from the end of the story forward, allowing me to start off the book with a bang – literally. Then I told the story pretty much the way it was, leaning on flash back and flash forward as it was necessary to keep things clear, and the plot moving. When I reached the copy that I used as my opener I wrote through it and beyond. Yes, the reader would see, and possibly recognize two pages from the opening, but they would soon enough be past that point into the conclusion.
Sometimes I kick myself for missing the obvious, but not too hard this time. I learned the lesson and made the repair. I’ve already gone back and restructured the front end of my first mystery novel, making sure the first page, indeed the first twenty pages, are true to the genre, and effective in rounding out my characters and setting them in motion.
Till later,
Ken