Tag Archives: Big Bang

START YOUR STORY WITH A BANG!

By Alan Sitomer

If your novel doesn’t pass the bang test, chances are high it will fail. Are you familiar with the, “Start with a BANG!” theory of authorship in modern times? If not, stop and pay heed.

Why “Start with a BANG!”? Because these days very few readers will give a book 30 pages to “let things develop.” Scores of publishing industry professionals are so, so busy (and so, so swamped, more than even the rest of us) that even if you can get them to consider your work – and it’s no easy task to get an agent or editor to read anything these days – the unspoken truth is that if they are not feeling the love by page 25 of your work, there are too many other things they need to/want to read.

Objective number one has to be to prevent the following sentiment from floating through the mind of the reader at all costs: “Sorry Charlie… I gave ya a shot but my time with you is done and I’m gone-zo! Good luck in the future.”

TRUMPED BY TMZ.COM?
Let’s be honest for a sec, do you give new books more than 25 pages to prove themselves any longer? If your “I am thinking about ditching this book” antennae are up by page 10, and you are still skeptical by page 15, we all know the writer will be lucky for any of us to make it to page 20.

In truth, by this point of any book, something better have “wowed” us cause life’s too short and who doesn’t have things like Twitter, FB, email, the Huffington Post, and TMZ.com to go check?

Ugly truth for all of us: celebrity gossip that took five minutes to invent will trump literary prose that took hours and hours to craft, 9 ¾ out of 10 times.

THAT READING FEELING
On the other hand, there’s good news! Is there a “reading feeling” anyone likes better than hitting page 20 of a book and thinking to
yourself, “Holy Shy-skee, this thing is so good!” You don’t want readers merely turning to page 21 of your novel; you want readers
hungering for page 21.

This is why you want to make sure your books start with a bang. Set the bar high and then ascend. You can backfill backstory later on. (Most writers do.) But make no mistake, everything we are talking about is conceptualized as a page 1 experience.

Consider your own reading experience. By the time you are on page 2, ya better have felt, you ought to have felt, you need to have felt, (and you deserve to have felt) something. If it’s a comedy, you better have laughed. If it’s a thriller, you better have had your pulse quicken.

Maybe it’s a punch in the mouth, maybe it’s total immersion in a dynamic new world which bubbles with life, energy and action, but if you pick up a book, that author better have conscientiously worked towards making sure that the reader is getting something wonderful from the text immediately. It can be exciting, threatening, tantalizing, humorous, or whatever but it better happen right out of the gate.

My advice: Launch your book with a BANG! If it ain’t there by page 5, no one might ever see page 6. (And yes, that’s regardless of how awesome page 184 truly is.)

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Alan Sitomer is a California Teacher of the Year award winner who’s authored 16 published books for biggies like Disney, Scholastic, Penguin and so on. In addition to being the founder of The Writer’s Success Academy (http://writersuccess.com/) he’s also a nationally acclaimed keynote speaker specializing in the field of middle/high school literacy. Hit him up on TW@alansitomer.