There are a lot of checklists for building a first chapter, and sometimes they can get overwhelming. MBT has an advanced checklist we use to help people build their Frasier Contest Scene (it’s the same checklist I use when building my first chapters!). However, I admit, it can get overwhelming. So, let’s start building that chapter one with 5 essential elements. In fact, this is step two in your process. As Sally and I talked about yesterday in Conversations, sometimes it just helps the writing process to let your characters walk on the page and wander around a bit. We can hear them, talk to them, discover if we have profiled them correctly. No, these wanderings probably won’t be the final first chapter, but it gives you a chance to […]
Read the RestTag Archives | first chapter
Conversations: First Chapter Essentials
“I’m angry with you!” Sally said as she sat down. She was smiling, so I frowned. “You let me write the first chapter before I was ready.” “Oh, that,” I said. “Yes, I did, knowing you weren’t quite ready. But I knew you had so much story in you that if you didn’t get started you’d only get frustrated. I know why you weren’t ready, but you tell me.” “I didn’t really know what my character wanted, nor how to hint at his greatest fear in the first chapter, so I created exactly the wrong scene.” “You created the scene that helped you jump start your story. You were doing a lot of “Wax On, Wax Off” and getting ansty. So, I told you to simply let your character walk […]
Read the RestPutting it all together: Adding the Romance beats to your first chapter
For the last two weeks on the blog, I’ve been going through the 10 beats of a romance that we discussed last February so as to refresh our minds before we start putting the elements together. This week, we’re going to dive into taking those beats and combining them with our story structure so that we can actually build our novel. Just to sum up, we’re going to be working with the first three beats as we start putting together Act 1. Beat 1: Boy Meets Girl: In this component, there is an event, goal or circumstance that occurs to bring our hero and heroine together—Usually this happens in the first chapter, but it definitely needs to happen by Chapter 3. Some examples that you thought up […]
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