THE FIRST FIVE PAGES
Capturing attention
Bestselling Irish author Faith Hogan explains why you can’t overstate the importance of making an impression on the reader with the beginning of a book
When it comes to the first five or six pages in any book, the reader can be sure of one thing. These are the pages the writer has gone over again and again. The words you read may flow or stumble forward, but they are unlikely to be the first words dashed off by the writer in a frenzy to tell the story in your hands.
It’s probably been said a million times, but every book is different. That’s to say, when I sit down to write, those first delicious moments, with a full three hundred pages at my disposal, it’s as if I’ve never done this before and it always feels like an exciting journey I’m starting out on.
The year before I started to write The Women At Ocean’s End, I jotted down about fifteen different ideas for what would potentially become my next book. There were moments when I had to hold myself back from beginning for various reasons, but mainly the fact that when I begin, the dream is, I will write to the very end – no stopping in between for edits or promotion or going to the dentist – okay, so the last one I don’t actually want to do at all, but even less so when I’m lost in a new book.