As promised, I have sent my agent a synopsis and first three chapters of a possible sequel to the latest novel. It needed to be done, and it is done, but as I have said, it’s not something I feel I’m particularly good at.
Those three chapters in particular…
They do the job. They set up the story and introduce all the important characters. We have mystery, a double dose of romance and the threat of violence. These pages, they say, will turn.
They’re OK. But is this their final form? Hardly. To quote my father’s Motto for Artists, “Perfection? There is no such stuff. But good enough is not enough.”
For me, when it comes to opening chapters, this is true twice and three times over. They get rewritten more than any other part of the novel. There are at least two reasons for this.
- To begin with, I am likely to be feeling my way. I will be experimenting a bit, not quite certain how I am going to do everything I need to do in these all-important opening pages. I have to introduce the setting, the characters, all the things the reader is going to need to know, and at the same time I have to keep the reader engaged. It’s quite difficult to land all of these at once. Careful explanations are going to want a trim. Any hesitancy I feel as I write will communicate itself to the reader. Let’s get it all down for now, but these pages are going to need a second look. And probably, a third.
- Writing is a process of discovery. No matter how well we have planned the story, things are going to occur as we write. We will want to add them in; or we may decide that something we were going to put in isn’t needed after all; or we will find we need more back-story to support what is going on. The opening chapters underpin the whole structure of the novel, so any significant change in later acts is likely to demand some corresponding tweak at the beginning, and quite possibly a complete re-draft. This has happened to me.
Taking the most recent manuscript as an example: by the time I had finished the second draft, I was feeling reasonably happy with the opening. Then I got my reader’s reports, which made me decide to strip out a lot of background detail and reorder the opening scenes, That amounted to a thorough re-write of the first quarter of the novel. So those chapters I sent off with the synopsis may seem OK for now, but no, I don’t expect they will stay as they are.
And if you are the sort of writer who is always totally convinced by their first act and never needs to revisit it, well, you have a gift. And that’s what I want for Christmas.
Last Updated on March 9, 2026 by John