What Does A Reader Want?

Do you just sit down at the typewriter and say, “Page One?” If you can do that, go for it! I suggest developing a plan, by the time you sit down to write that first page, you will feel right at home. Let us first get a view of the issue at hand, what does the reader want from me?

A story. Everyone is looking for a new adventure. Or, “Give me a new, sexy life. Make me rich.” My point is that your reader is going to identify with someone in your book.

Whatever you choose to write about, you have to assure the reader in the first sentence that you are going to introduce him to his new identity. A new world. In the opening line of The Moon and Sixpence by Somerset Maugham: “I confess that when first I made acquaintance with Charles Strickland I never for a moment discerned that there was in him anything out of the ordinary.”

HHmmm, I am about to delve into someone else’s life, through the narrator, and I am going to witness something strange. Curiosity turns pages. Your opening line should arouse the readers curiosity.

O.K., so thats the opening line….what about the rest of the story? It is the thought of tackling a whole novel that is terrifying.

It shouldn’t be.

It’s a story. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That’s all there is and we can handle that, right? Right.

The simple truth is that if you do not write it, you can’t get it published. Want to change the world? Build your own little world – on paper.