Meeting #2

Met with the new writing group again this morning. . . and I actually, gasp, handed out the first 20 pages of the book I've been working on. It represents about 1/5 of what I've written so far, but the first part is always the most important thing to get right. It is, perhaps, the ONLY thing.

My good friend Misha Strauss was the first person to get this through my skull, though many writing teachers tried. The first 'graf is ALL. The way she, a philosophy grad student, put it was: A professor has decided by the end of the first page of an essay what grade they're going to give you. There is something a wee bit scary about the fact that the "grade" metaphor delved into my cortex more firmly than any other attempt to explain this concept to me. Decades of being a goody-goody and grade-grubber apparently . . .

BUT, the point is that after Misha told me that, I finally got it. I could, in fact, look at papers I wrote (I was taking courses in Philosophy of Science at UMD at the time) and point at the exact sentence on the first page that turned my A into a B+. And I pretty much never had the problem again.

Whether it's a book proposal or an article or a novel or a query or, hell, a letter trying to get out of paying for a parking ticket, you've pretty much got the first paragraph to convince the reader of your worth.

In the case of this book, I've got the first bit to convince

--a publisher to publish it
--a publisher to give me LOTS of money for it
--a reader to buy it
--a reader to read it
--a reviewer to like it

Now it is, of course, entirely possible that I could write a glowing first chapter and then a horrible book and lose any chance at the above . . . but the opposite isn't true. No matter how good the book becomes, it's entirely impossible to get a decent grade without that glowing first chapter.

So, I handed out the first 20 pages, and hopefully we can hone that baby over and over until it's perfect.