by Morgan S. Hazelwood

The title of this sounds pretty lofty, doesn’t it? For those of you who don’t have a finished manuscript, though, this might not be so useful. Write your novel, edit it, then see if you can cut the first chapter. Don’t count the writing as a waste, YOU needed to know what was going on so you could write the rest of the book. Then, it’s time to tweak that 1st line.

The first line of a novel has a lot of work to do.

At Balticon51, I attended one workshop on opening sentences with Steve Lubs and another on opening pages with Meg Eden. This is a lot of what they said, combined with knowledge from other places. (I tried not to copy their hand-outs directly.)