In defence of slow beginnings

I know what you mean. It seems most books I pick up for leisure reading start off slow. I often wonder, if I was an agent, would I keep reading based on this beginning? Often times the answer is no, yet I keep reading because I generally like to finish books I start. However, in my own writing, I try to start off with fast, engaging and action-packed beginnings so that I can avoid those very comments that my story is slow to start. I look at it as though I don't want to write 300 plus pages and have pages 250-300 be solid, but have all the agents in the world reject it for those first fifty. I can't live with that. So I focus on the first fifty for that reason. For me, it's about getting the agent hooked and keeping them reading. Once my foot is in the door, we can always discuss tweaking the beginning anyways.

I don't mind slower beginnings as long as they're interesting. And plenty of gently-paced beginnings are interesting. The opening of Life of Pi goes on for like a third of the book before the boat capsized, but I enjoyed reading the beginning because it was still interesting and it fulfilled the purpose of introducing the character to us. So you can start slow, just make sure it's engaging and the pacing fulfills a purpose.

Slow can be wonderful. Boring is always terrible. Even a slow beginning needs story, character, and something from the first paragraph on that engages the reader.

I suspect "slow" is in the eye of the beholder, but my idea of the perfect slow opening can be found in The Talisman, the novel Stephen King and Peter Straub wrote together. For me, that opening has it all, story, character, an engaging line, and beautiful writing, but it's still very slow, compared to the majority of novels.

Whether your beginning is slow or fast, the key is that something interesting is happening. A character going about their normal life just isn't that interesting (unless their normal life is unusual in some way).

It's possible to do a slower beginning while still moving the story along.

To the OP,

If you feel your story is too slow starting - print it out from the second chapter on and read it. If the story makes sense then you don't need chapter 1, cut it. Now put it in a drawer, and come back to it tomorrow and try the same exercise again, only this time start with chapter 3. Repeat once a day until you can't throw out a chapter.

Kallithrix said:

£18.99?? This is why I don't buy hardbacks

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I very rarely buy HB these days, I think the last one was the latest Robert Fabbri and that was back in January, for £6 from Asda. I will probably buy the HB of the new Simon Scarrow and Robyn Young, but only if I can get them from Sainsbury's or Asda.

I miss the slow beginning too. I had to put a book down because by the time I turned to the second page the MC was in a fight to the death with some beast. If the beast had killed her it would have made no difference as I didn't really know her,so out went the book.
I read the back blurb - the only reason I know MC was a women.

Scattergorie said:

I feel your pain!

I'm always saddened when I see critiques (especially in threads like "The First Three Sentences...") that basically say "Where's the story??? When does it START???"

I fear that modern novel writing will soon be reduced to a single sentence presented on an index card.

"John exploded."​

The End​

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I agree. I've probably read To Kill a Mockingbird 50 times (I teach it), and I think if Harper Lee had posted the first 200 words of that novel on here, she would've been harrassed for not "starting where the story starts." That book is FULL of "infodumps" and backstory, sometimes greatly interrupting the flow of the narrative (for several paragraphs). It's one of the greatest novels ever published.

There is something to be said for stories that ease us into the world and introduce us to the characters before dropping us into the main conflict. Because the flip-side of the slow beginning is the one where we're thrust into a life or death situation involving characters we care nothing about. I find that MUCH more off-putting than a slow beginning.

Now, slow doesn't mean just oodles of scene setting and backstory, but it's okay to do a little of that while slowly working toward the main conflict(s).

And on an unrelated note, I love the Hound.

TheNighSwan said:

"We publish X because X works" is a suspicious statement. If publishers really knew in advance what would work, there wouldn't constantly be flops and surprise successes.

This boils down to argument from conformity: we publish X because we publish X.

If only books with fast beginings are published, then of course the majority of the reading public will be comprised of people who like fast beginning —since nothing is being published for those with different tastes.

I personally know people who hate books that start in media res, that don't explain anything about their characters, that give no context before several dozen pages in —because they can't care about the tension surrounding characters they know nothing about and thus haven't been allowed to emphatize with.

So of course, these people pretty much give up on modern novels and stop buying them.

If people want A or B, but you only give them A, then of course they only buy A —and then commercials conclude that people only want A, and so will never ever sell them any B.

That's the whole "video games are for boys" canard all over again.

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Give publishers some credit. When a book flops, it's seldom because it started slow or started fast. it's because story wasn't well told, and/or the characters weren't empathetic, etc.

Publishers do their best to publish whatever the reading public says it wants, and they do a pretty darned good job. The publish many books with fast opening, many with slow openings, and many that fall in the middle.

It really isn't about slow openings versus fast openings, anyway, it's about good, engaging slow openings versus bad, boring slow openings. Slow, fast, or anywhere between, the opening still needs story, character, good writing, and whatever it takes to make the book a page turned.

Publishers seldom reject slow, they reject boring, and it's readers who tell them which is which.

I don't believe for a second that anyone stops reading modern novels because all of them open to fast. If so, they just aren't looking around to see what's out there. Modern novels with slow openings are common.

I suppose I've read as many classic novels as anyone, and while many of them start slower than a lot of current novels, they don't stay slow for long, unless, just like now, the writer is telling a slow, non-action story. Most classic novels get to story and character pretty darned fast.

So do most modern novels. In media res doesn't mean you have to start with explosions and murders, it just means you start at a point in the story where character and events matter. It certainly doesn't mean a writer can't explain enough to make readers care about the characters before the whole world goes to hell.

PamelaC said:

I agree. I've probably read To Kill a Mockingbird 50 times (I teach it), and I think if Harper Lee had posted the first 200 words of that novel on here, she would've been harrassed for not "starting where the story starts." That book is FULL of "infodumps" and backstory, sometimes greatly interrupting the flow of the narrative (for several paragraphs). It's one of the greatest novels ever published.

There is something to be said for stories that ease us into the world and introduce us to the characters before dropping us into the main conflict. Because the flip-side of the slow beginning is the one where we're thrust into a life or death situation involving characters we care nothing about. I find that MUCH more off-putting than a slow beginning.

Now, slow doesn't mean just oodles of scene setting and backstory, but it's okay to do a little of that while slowly working toward the main conflict(s).

And on an unrelated note, I love the Hound.

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Yes, it is one of the greatest, but it also, like most novels, ha sits flaws. There's noting wrong with taking two hundred words to do what she did. An editor bought the book, didn't he? But some of those info dumps really do get in the way of the story.

Though things like this are why I generally hate critique groups. They seldom think the same way good editors, or even non-writing readers, do.

Scattergorie said:

I feel your pain!

I'm always saddened when I see critiques (especially in threads like "The First Three Sentences...") that basically say "Where's the story??? When does it START???"

I fear that modern novel writing will soon be reduced to a single sentence presented on an index card.

"John exploded."

The End
​

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I see these critiques sometimes when they really aren't merited, in my opinion. Some people have no patience, and sometimes I just want to say it's fucking getting there. Just wait.

I think this is a problem for a lot of fantasy as well. A lot of people need a dragon or action right at the beginning. They can't handle that fantasy can start off mundane and boring, and have no fantasy for the first chapter or two, even.

Phillip Pullman pulls this off extremely well. The only notion we get of fantasy within the first chapter is really the daemon, the rest is science fiction speculation, which is nebulous at best.


At the end of the day just trust your gut. If your beginning sucks, oh well. I'd rather be a horrible writer, than an acclaimed one who just followed everyone else's advice.

Define "slow".

Are we talking lack of action? Lack of conflict? Lack of tension? Pacing?

There is the Japanese concept of jo-ha-kyū, which describes the movement of beginning slowly, speeding up, and ending swiftly, and is often applied to dramatic structure, especially in Noh theater and traditional poetry.

kuwisdelu said:

Define "slow".

Are we talking lack of action? Lack of conflict? Lack of tension? Pacing?

There is the Japanese concept of jo-ha-kyū, which describes the movement of beginning slowly, speeding up, and ending swiftly, and is often applied to dramatic structure, especially in Noh theater and traditional poetry.

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I don't know. Slow is subjective. But I'll just say I know it when I see it.

NeuroFizz said:

A story can be slow at moving into the major story arc, but still have a beginning that captivates the reader's imagination, sympathy, empathy, righteous indignation, or any other emotion that pulls that reader in.

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Kallithrix said:

I don't need a dead body on page 1 to keep me reading, but I need a reason to want to see what happens on page 2.

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Jamesaritchie said:

Slow can be wonderful. Boring is always terrible. Even a slow beginning needs story, character, and something from the first paragraph on that engages the reader.

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I think these quotes spell it out completely. "Slow" is subjective, "interesting" is too - but give the reader a reason to keep going.

What works for one reader won't work for another - you can't please everyone. And maybe some people will close the book after a page or two while others read avidly to the end.

Kallithrix said:

but I need a reason to want to see what happens on page 2.

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And that's it, isn't it? You need to give the reader a reason to turn to page two.

lise8 said:

I think this is exactly what I need to find. I thought I was doing that by showing the MC's relationship with her daughter, but failed because of a few variants. I am searching for a situation that would make the reader empathise with my MC, so that they learn about her and her strange way of being without giving up too much of the plot line... still searching...

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Have you, or have you considered, putting the mother and daughter in conflict? Not 'mom I want to run away and join the circus' but 'mom, I'm so tiiiired and I don't have a morning class, why do I have to get up early'? It would still show the relationship and we still see the character in a prestory tension moment?

Just a thought.

virtue_summer said:

. . . no matter where you start in terms of the plot of your story, make sure your beginning sets up the right tone and begins to deliver to the reader what they're there for. Until a reader has read the entire book they won't know everything about what connects to the plot and where the story should start anyway. What they will know is whether or not they were interested enough to keep reading.

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I think this best summarizes the situation, especially the bolded part.

Just curious but does everyone think the three act structure is dead in modern writing? Giving that there is pressure to get to the inciting incident as quivkly as possible, does this render Act Ones not useful in modern novels?

Echo what Kuwis asked, above. To say the beginning is "slow" really doesn't do much good. The real question lies below that: Why does reader X think the beginning is slow? Too leisurely a slug of static description, scene-setting? Too much background info-dump? Just plain flat, flabby prose that could be tightened and made sharper? Or is it maybe genre-related, with some people addicted to reading stories that begin with dragons exploding.

Maybe you could post that beginning in SYW and let us have a look. I'd like to see why that comment was made, but without seeing the section addressed, it's impossible to discuss in specific.

caw

I wonder how much of this modern "gotta plunge right in" mindset comes from editors and agents who've see too many boring starts, and have come to conflate "boring" with "slow" (because boring stuff tends to feel slow-moving).

For getting to know a character, kinda like the difference between:

...starting off with John frying eggs for breakfast. (Boring.)

and

...starting off with John being forced to wrangle eggs away from the hens first. (At least there's something potentially interesting, if not relevant to the rest of the story.)

there is a choice

The trouble with starting slow is that you have to be a really good writer. The type of writer that is so good you read just to feel the words fall off the page. Or, the character and descriptions have to be wonderful. Which takes great writing.

There have been a lot of novels where the opening sentences are just so well written I know I'm in for the long haul. But I can't write like that, so I'd better make something happen.

If not much is happening, your writing has to compete novels that have conflict, suspense, mystery, tension, whatever your genre is. Is it up to the task?

tko said:

The trouble with starting slow is that you have to be a really good writer. The type of writer that is so good you read just to feel the words fall off the page. Or, the character and descriptions have to be wonderful. Which takes great writing.

There have been a lot of novels where the opening sentences are just so well written I know I'm in for the long haul. But I can't write like that, so I'd better make something happen.

If not much is happening, your writing has to compete novels that have conflict, suspense, mystery, tension, whatever your genre is. Is it up to the task?

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I don't think it had anything to do with how well-written the intro is. If you're a famous writer you can just get away with a slower start because your reader already assumes it's going to get better. I can't tell how many times Stephen King made me roll my eyes at his annoyingly slow starts but I kept plunging through because its him and I know it might be worth the patience. Although that doesn't always work for me but I'm willing to take the chance.

I also think it's generational. Many older books have slow starts, especially the literary ones. Maybe the older generations had the patience to read until it got good, but I don't think mine can wait. Heck, as whole, we barely read novels as it is.

To me, slow is a lack of something to keep me interested. Even if the intro is all actions and jokes and whatever. It can go nowhere and become tiresome. I've put down many books because of it.

Something can move at a slower pace and still be evocative, even full of tension if necessary, before accelerating.

tko said:

The trouble with starting slow is that you have to be a really good writer. The type of writer that is so good you read just to feel the words fall off the page. Or, the character and descriptions have to be wonderful. Which takes great writing.

There have been a lot of novels where the opening sentences are just so well written I know I'm in for the long haul. But I can't write like that, so I'd better make something happen.

If not much is happening, your writing has to compete novels that have conflict, suspense, mystery, tension, whatever your genre is. Is it up to the task?

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Water for Elephants has one of the best openings I've ever read in my life. It has the right mixture between slow and fast.

alexaherself said:

Yes.

The story starts where the story starts (i.e. not where the background starts).

Many people's manuscripts would last longer on a "from-the-slush-pile" glance-through (you couldn't call it a "reading", really?) if they simply swapped around their first and second chapters, starting the book where the story starts and giving the background a little later.



It's ok for self-publishing, perhaps: it more or less closes the door on anything else, and there are reasons for that.

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Unfortunately, just so. Very wise advice, I think.

Since the advent of personal computers, editors and agents are so inundated with submissions that one really can’t blame them for such cursory consideration. It sometimes cost them more than the authors as eventual bestsellers having been oft rejected attests to. Nevertheless, it seem inevitable.