How to Write Your Novel's First Page 

I hope you're teaching at a local college as this is gold. Some oh-so simple things that make so much sense. Never heard any of this before. At least not this simplistic and easy to understand.

I pulled my hand-written rough draft out that I made forty years ago and misplaced. All these years I never wrote more but anytime I saw a TV show or learned something more about life and writing, it was placed in my pages in my head. And now I've written it out and have some 21,000 words written (with more to write, and a sequel), and with your videos I am going through it line editing and all the other things. It's amazing because it doesn't sound like me, it seems like a good writer!! It's nicely written, thank you for your help. But something I find amazing is you don't seem to age! You seem even younger in your newer videos! Do you have a painting in your attic by chance? And I agree with others, I hope you're teaching at one of the most bestest colleges in the world. You make it so understandable.

Great advice! It's a tricky balance in finding a way to organically build a story on the first page, while still grabbing the attention of the reader (or agent).

I repeatedly come back to your videos for advice. You've got such great stuff to say. It's not elaborate or complicated. It's straight forward and practical coaching that very effectively covers the problems I have. Bottom line, you take me from writer's block to writing, virtually every time.

Thanks for taking time in your busy schedule to put these videos out. This is the very best information I've ever heard/read on how to write the first page. So many instruct the writer to start with a "hook" of some sort (whatever that means?) and possibly that would be the exciting scene that you mentioned that makes more sense to hold back for a little later chapter. It makes such perfect sense to use this first page to "set the tone" of your novel; identify its genre; its voice; its intent. Such great advice. I can't thank you enough.

Thank you Ms. Brock. This video gives very practical advice without all the histrionics that some editors like to add to their advice videos. You win Advice Award!

this is the most humbling video yet. Not only do i need to rewrite my entire book, but i need to finish it first. thanks for the reality check

Oh! I'm so excited that you're making videos again. Take your time with videos and stuff. You probably have piles of manuscripts to look through.

Wow, I really needed that clear message that it's ok and even needed to re-write the first chapter so much. Most of the time, writing advice goes like, "Don't spend too much time on the first chapter, go on or you'll never get to the end", so I was a bit insecure about wanting to change so many details of the first chapter for so long. I still knew that I would probably re-write it again when the story was finished (you know, "finished"), but I got the feeling that I should let it rest during the writing process and now I have more confidence that I can work on it as much as I like. Thank you :)

Our hair looks so similar now. Thank God you uploaded, I was feeling unmotivated with writing. Great advice as usual :D

As a growing writer your videos REALLY help me, so I really can't thank you enough.

The first page is a promise woah I’ve never thought of that!!

Great that you're back. It immediately makes me want to write right away! Thanks!

So happy to see you making videos again :)

Great to see you're back, looking forward to more writing videos!

Thank you so much for your advice. Being that I’m writing my first real novel, I’ve scoured your channel trying to find every bit of helpful information. After watching this I have a better idea of how to make my first page more impactful :)

Fantastic, Ellen Brock! I love your videos.

Excellent video and more helpful than many I've watched. Thank you for sharing your time and your experience with all.

This was extremely helpful, especially for the novel I am currently writing. Thank you!:)

I only recently started to watch your videos, nice to have a new one. ^-^ Looking forward to the rest of the videos regarding the Novel Boot Camp!

I've just been watching Brandon Sanderson's lectures and he also mentions the 'promise' of your book. It's something I have to admit I had never really considered but now I am I will have to check my first page! : )

Wow, this really helps! I never knew how important the first page of a book was . . .

Thank you so much for these videos! I'm learning so much about how to properly write a novel.

it is a joy listening to you giving valuable advice!

Hi, Ellen. Thank you for sharing. Your videos offer valuable insight and inspiration.

The videos were a great idea. They've helped me sooo much

Always love these writer nuggets!

subscribed! Excellent videos. I have had a passion for writing and creating stories since I could remember. These videos are very helpful, thankyou!

This is very interesting/helpful. I think I have some thinking to do now about my first page! Best wishes x

I love your videos and your advice has been very helpful. Thank you.

Where have you been! Your blogs were top of my list. Your common sense approach is so refreshing.

Love your very enlightening videos Blue-eyed Wonder. I feel I have been learning a lot from them. Hopefully it pays of someday.

This video is actually right on time for me. I've been trying to rework the opening page of a comic book I've been writing. The tone of my original opening didn't fit the atmosphere of the rest of the story.

This helped me so much! Thank you!

Finally you made a video!

Really good advice, Ellen. I think a really good opening is like getting into a warm bath; you kind of ease into it until you're totally immersed. The in medias res approach is sometimes like throwing the hot bathwater on a person. Though it's hard at times to forecast the thematic elements on the first page. I believe a person could write a how to book just on constructing the first chapter of a novel lol

Great advice as always!

I can't believe I didn't find this before now; these are questions that I've had for years. A few of my friends are writers, so I'll share some of these on Facebook-G.P.

I'm starting a novel myself. Still I don't get it, so this is the right time for me. I'm so glad a picked this video

Great video, Ellen! I'll watch this a few more times to really absorb it -- and once to turn on the notoriously inaccurate close captioning and see how funny reading them will become.

Thanks for your video Ellen. I am writing a book about my backpacking experience in Australia. The pitfalls and perks of being a solo traveler, my thought process is black and white and I mucked the content with my unique humor. I have been going for three weeks and already over 60 pages. I try to target 20 pages per week. My book illustrates that you can travel the world on a limited budget, and you can practically survive with sustaining yourself in foreign country with little money. I am trying to not to just tell a story, but at the same time inspiring people to uproot from a life that they aren’t satisfied with. I point out that things aren’t necessarily greener on the other side and mentioned some interesting characters along the way. I mentioned the evils and complexity of racism, media, and reality out the environment and human greed. Once again, Thank You and other like you for keeping up my motivation. I have a long way to go…

I would love it if you showed us on the computer how to write a few paragraph of some first pages. You can choose a random topic and just go for it. You can show us what to do and what not to do by actually writing and showing us. That would be really helpful. I love you videos btw.

You are awesome! I will now change where I was going to start my book. Thank you!

Your words are gold

You should turn up the sound on your videos a little. They are really quiet compared to others here on youtube, making it a must to change your volume when coming to your channel. Otherwise keep up the great work :)

love your videos!

Another great video.

Thank you this is very helpful.

Thank you for the information. I realized my prologue was wrong in that it pretty much told the whole plot rather than a microversion of the plot. The prologue will be broken apart and seen in flashbacks throughout the book.

Oh thank goodness I REALLY needed help with this...

Thanks for the great advice :)

Hey long time no see! Awesome!

Thank you!

good advice, thanks! :)

Elmore Leonard said he left out the dull parts. If there is a substaintial passage of time without much in the way of pertinent action, it makes sense to use a prologue. Otherwise, be prepared to write a doorstop.

I don't know if it's a compliment but you have a writer face xd uf I imagine wtiter it's someone like you :3

I remember reading the first few pages of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. I really didn't like the tone or the weird premise, and the only reason why I kept on reading was because I had used some of my hard-earned money to buy it and I didn't want them to be wasted. But as I kept on reading, it improved significantly and it turned out to be a great book (at least in my opinion).

"And I promise I will seek your help when the times comes, because I will need it!:

Great! Thanks

The post office's reign of terror will end!

Excellent video! I certainly understood the general point, that you need to set an authentic, consistent tone for the story right from the start, but I kept coming back to one essential question. What's a first page? I know that sounds silly, but I read and write in completely digital formats. I write each chapter in a separate word doc and essentially the entire chapter is "one page" since it's just a matter of continuing to scroll. Obviously I know I could go to my print preview button or something to see where a page would fall on physical paper, but that wouldn't really be accurate either, because I have poor vision but am physically uncomfortable using glasses at my computer, so I set my fonts much larger than most people and zoom in quite a bit. Same for when I'm reading on my Kindle. I have it set so large that a "page" is about one long paragraph, or 1 1/2 shorter paragraphs. I guess that might just be me and I could look up defaults or something, but don't most people set their fonts/screen sizes up or down to suit their individual preferences? A "page" seems like a bit of an arbitrary length to my way of thinking. So I guess my actual question is, in terms of words/paragraphs, what's a page? Second, is that still pertinent and representative for today's reader, especially if they read in a digital format? I feel like digital readers (or modern readers in general) may have shorter attention spans and may not give the story a full, old-fashioned page length to draw them in.

Hi. The one gripe I have about this advice is that you make "choosing a tone" sound simplistic. I know that I'm probably getting into more complex ideas about tone than you could possibly convey in a video, but when I think about tone I see it as something far greater than a matter of genre. I see tone as getting into matters of voice and experience as well: any David Foster Wallace book is going to sound like David Foster Wallace. Also ask DWF to write something heartwarming (or macabre) "the tone" would be different than if you asked Flannery O'Connor to do the same. I think developing your tone is about the same as finding your voice. I do agree the first page is your promise to the reader.

Hello Ellen ,your ideas i found it so helpeful,i want to ask you how can i find a tittle of my ideas which i'm going to write ?

Please do a video on writing convincing dialogue

Hi Ellen, thanks so much for sharing your insight. Do you have any books in mind that exemplify a great first page?

PLEASE keep making videos :S

What about if I write a prologue that includes infomation on my main character? My prologue is an action sequence showing how she got sent to The Dome (A Prison)

Very helpful! Although, you did scare me about having a "flashback" scene as the first page shouldn't be used, unless I guess used properly. It took me so many rewrites to writing the first chapter. Since you are an editor, do you think that if I were to consult with one myself, they would critique the work and let me revise it if necessary? I'm 19 so I don't know how the writing process works. Thanks so much.

I really enjoyed this, though my first chapter is dark and the following ones are more comic because of the characters involved. Do you know of any successful books that do this well?

is there a place I can send you my first few pages of my novel to get some editing help and tips :)

Thank you very much. I went back and reread the first page of my novel, and it reads like the first page of a book about oceanography. Oops! It's supposed to be a fantasy. I have some rewriting to do.

Is it ok to start with a dream if dreams are a plot point ( multiverses exist and the dream world is the closest world to our own, meaning people can slip into it, most commonly at night but in the case of the protagonist at will?)

"All my life, I thought I was a White Guy." (opening line of my novel-in-progress, "Freedom Fields."

Welcome back =) ! , thanks for the video =) .. I agree about the dream or action scene cliche .. but isn't the prologue tip a bit harsh ? almost all masterpieces i had read started with prologues ..

That's why I write my first page AFTER my book is done. Cos then it can tie it up and also start it

How do you best go about the first page when you want the tone to change gradually across the novel as a major part of the premise. E.g. you want to start with a sort of idyllic/cheery/funny atmosphere and end up with something dark/apocalyptic/dystopian. I find this a bit of a dilemma. If your first page/prologue starts idyllic, people may think that that's how the whole book is going to be. If you do some heavy foreshadowing or something like "oh, but I didn't know what fate would have in store for me", or you start with some moderately dark tone and then go "back" to the initial ton right after, that may give a way too much of the premise. Thoughts?

Thanks for posting. :) If you get a chance, I'd like your thoughts on how to write a satisfying ending.

I started a short story today, I have got the first few sentences, but I cant figure out how to get my story going. As he came to the door of the cabin, he started wondering what had happened to his father. It was the same thing every day, when he thought of his father. Where was he, was he still alive.

Like a first page, do you cover an effective synopsis?

"So you do have a Post Office box-number, and your first page would really be a Two-Page of double spaced?"

If your book doesn't naturally HAVE a strong first opening hook, does that mean it should be scrapped altogether from the get-go, or do you need to somehow REwrite this story/first chapter in order to eventually come up with a better one? Please let me know as soon as you can, Ellen. Thank you for your time.

I'm writing a book about a family that grows apart because of a death in the family, but the story is taking place year's after the death, So I want to tell how and why the person died but I'm not Sure how too, I don't know if my main character should have a flash back or if I should start the story from when the person died then skip forward, Is there a right or wrong answer? Help me please Ellen Brock thank you.

How long should, or can a prologue be?

do you ever blink?

what happens when your beginning page doesnt really have much to do with the actual story? it does, but it needs to be there to be able to tell the story. because without it, you wont know where the character is coming from before he gets to the actual point of the story

Cool

Another fantastic video! Keep up the good work. Can I request a video?

So, basically, you advocate rewriting first pages AFTER the story is done.

I want to start writing a novel soon. And im reading a lot. But there is something i don`t understand. Sometimes the writer writes the scene as if it happed in the past, and sometimes as if it`s happening now. I don`t understand that. Hope you can help

This is why I always read the last sentence of a book before reading it.

Hey I have been creative writing for awhile and I still have a lot of challenges getting a story written. I don't ever get past the first chapter or second chapter. I don't get how to get pass the first couple of chapters. I get bored with my stories easy.

would you consider the prologue to the first Harry Potter bad or because harry was included as a baby it was a good introduction?

I was thinking about writing an epic fantasy book and are the creation of the world + the wars of the ancients a good start for such a book?

💚

Is it good, therefore, to write the entire first draft, and then go back and re-do the first page? Seems like it.

Ellen are you a writer?

Hey Ellen, if you have time for a question: Is it okay to have a prologue from the POV of a character who never again appears (alive,) in the book thereafter, (say, perhaps, because they die in said prologue) if I feel the information delivered is A. Doing good foreshadowing, and B. is completely relevant to the over-all plot as well as directly linked to the context of the immediate following chapter?

I'm finding it so hard to form a plot, let alone anything else. Maybe I could put it by you sometime?

Damn, that's exactly the problem i felt with the cartoon 'Up'. I wanted a story about the cool sciency couple i saw at the very beginning, and instead got to observe some goofy kid i couldn't care less about.

I get the point you were making at 6:40 but I don't understand how you would do this when the goal of the book is saving a family member held captive.