I didn’t manage to get a blog post in last week. The confluence of a variety of life-stuff conspired against me.
Alas…
This week, I’m just going to describe a situation in hopes that some other writers might respond and share their own experiences.
About six weeks ago, I sent out ten copies of Cravings to a set of beta-readers. Their objective was to tear the book apart to find weak or slow sections and straight up mistakes. One comment that I’ve heard from several those readers can be paraphrased as:
- I love the first sentence/paragraph
- It starts strong
- It gets stronger as the story progresses.
You know what?
I think I agree with that commentary.
I also think that all of this means that I need to rewrite the beginning of the book. I don’t think it needs to begin differently, I just don’t feel like it’s written as well as the rest of the book. Perhaps it took me a while to get warmed up. ;-P
Whatever. I don’t feel like a book should grab the reader from the first line and then struggle to hold them through the first 25%. Especially not when the remaining 75% is a fast, fun read.
Authors? Have you noticed the same thing with your own stories? Is it different for; stand alone novels, the first novel of a series, later novels in a series?
