Beginning the Novel

How do you start this thing?

When I’m writing a novel, I rewrite the first pages for years.

It’s not efficient, but it’s how I figure out what kind of creature I’m working with. The beginning of a novel is an entryway. For readers, of course. But also for me as a writer. It’s where I get my bearings in my own work, where I start to glimpse the intricacies of it, all the little nooks and crannies that I’ll explore as I move through the drafting.

Zadie Smith on Beginnings

I’m something like what Zadie Smith calls a “micro manager.” In “That Crafty Feeling,” an essay from Changing My Mind that I find myself returning to again and again as I try to understand what it is to write a novel, she outlines two different approaches to novel writing: “Macro Planning” and “Micro Managing.” The macro planner, Smith tells us, is all about structure:

“A Macro Planner makes notes, organizes material, configures a plot and creates a structure–all before he writes the title page. The structural security gives him a great deal of freedom of movement. It's not uncommon for Macro Planners to start writing their novels in the middle…I know Macro Planners who obsessively exchange possible endings for one another, who take characters out and put them back in, reverse the order of chapters and perform frequent–for me, unthinkable–radical surgery on their novels: moving the setting of a book from London to Berlin, for example, or changing the title. ”

This is in contrast to the micro manager, which Zadie Smith tells us she is, who begins at the beginning and writes to the end of the novel, following the thread of the writing and often revising as they go, until the story is complete.

Unlike Zadie Smith, I don’t usually write completely linearly. I often write in fragments that I then stitch together, but at some point, I am working through the novel from beginning to end. And, in the beginning—and this is why I feel myself to be akin to the micro manager that Smith describes—I rewrite obsessively.

Smith discusses how, as she writes and rewrites her beginnings, she figures out what novel she’s writing:

“It’s as if you are winding the key of a toy car tighter and tighter…When you finally let go, it travels at a crazy speed. When I finally settled on a tone, the rest of the book was finished in five months.”

Now, I’m much slower than finishing a book in five months, but I do, similarly, feel that once I know what my beginning is, I’m able to write the rest of the book more freely. It starts to move on its own.

A Study in Beginning

I love novel beginnings. I study them. Some of the best, I think, are like microcosms of the whole of the novel. They’re seeds. They’re bulbs. The whole exists, un-grown, within them. The reading of the novel is just watching that seed open, that plant unfurl out of it. You knew it was there from the start. You just couldn’t see it fully yet.

That’s how I feel writing novels too. A novel is a revelation. It feels less like I’m creating it than finding it and observing it take form.

One of my favorite classes to teach—and I’m teaching it online starting this upcoming Tuesday—is about novel beginnings. In this class, we really look at those first novel pages, turn them over in our hands and see how the light hits them. We think about the pages as writers. We think from the perspectives of readers. We consider how an editor or agent or contest judge will encounter those pages. We experiment and rewrite and revise and polish them up. We read and study the beginnings of other writers. We do exercises to help us think through our own beginnings differently. We workshop and critique. Every time I teach this class, I come away with a renewed appreciation for those first novel pages and all the potential magic they hold within them.

The First 10 Pages: A Revision Workshop

Hone the first ten pages of your fiction or nonfiction manuscript. We’ll revise twice over the course of these six weeks so you get those pages really dialed in. Begins July 7.

Below the paywall is an exercise for exploring where to begin your novel, followed by a list of some of my favorite novel beginnings. These are materials from my upcoming course, which is why I’m paywalling the full exercise this time.