I'm Better With the Middle Bit

Hello!

On the blog this week, I wrote about beginnings. As you know, it's something that's been on my mind lately as I try to capture the right agent's attention with just a few pages from my novel. My worry grew when, last week, I received a rejection that directly stated the agent "didn't connect" with the opening pages. Knife to the heart, I tell you.

I am madly in love with The Other Women. There's a reason we authors talk about our "book babies" - because, much like our own children, we are enamored by our words and entirely convinced they're perfect and beautiful and everyone else should love them just as much as we do.

But, unlike with my actual children, I constantly fear my blind devotion is misplaced. For that reason, I have written no fewer than five beginnings for this book to date.

The first draft started with a lot of detail and zero character. I mean, there were characters in the book - a lot of them - but none of them had any personality and the scene itself was a dud.

Next I started with a prologue. It was too divorced from the story. So I wrote another prologue, which was backstory and whose characters we never see again in the book.

I learned two things after writing those prologues. First, those prologues were good as companion content but not at all good as a part of the book itself. And second, prologues are almost always unnecessary. Why? you ask. Shh. *pats your arm* I'll tell you later.

Another draft began with a baby being born then jumped to when the child was 6 years old, which was also ill-advised. The average reader won’t be likely to stick with you for that kind of jump, unless they picked up the book expecting that kind of thing.

Yet another version started out inside the greenhouse, one of the main backdrops of the story. It was better, but feedback was that there wasn't enough action and tension to hold readers' interest. There wasn't a big enough sense of what Lucinda was trying to achieve and what was keeping her from it. So back to the drawing board I went.

The current version of the opening begins just before that greenhouse scene, with a simple (but tense) conversation between two characters. It shows their love and fear for one another. It introduces the world (what’s a birthing suite and why is Celeste stuck in there?) and hints at both the backstory and what might come next. It suggests what's at stake for both of them if things don't go as planned.

Sure, it’s quiet. But I read a lot of books, and the overwhelming majority of them do start out quiet. It certainly gets louder right about chapter 3, and after that there's a rock concert worth of noise to follow. And the stage is set well, I think, with the version of the opening that I'm sending out to agents right now.

I have had an agent tell me the beginning is fine, it's just not the right book for her. I've had several agents, in their rejections, tell me they're confident I'll find the right agent to champion the book. So maybe I'm simply not looking in the right places. Maybe I haven't had a yes yet because I haven't found the right person, and not because there's something wrong with my book baby.

After spending hours and hours on Monday writing a new beginning, only to realize it's trash and the current first pages accomplish (quite well, I think) what I want to accomplish, I'm going to stop worrying about the opening and keep researching until I find the right agent - who will certainly fall as in love with this book as I am.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Until next time!