I’m in the first week of the National Novel Writing Month. I live with trepidation, again.
This is the third time I’ve done it – set out to write a 50,000-word novel in exactly one month, November.
The hardest part is the first sentence, because that’s when you first narrow your subject. Like a sculptor, you’re cutting off possibilities every time you make a stroke.
Consider “Call me Ishmael” as a first line. If you’re doing Novel in a Month – 1,667 words a day – there’s no time to change your mind and make it “Call me Priscilla.”
That would change the story forever. I think it’d make a livelier yarn. But it’s an impossible rewrite. Could a Priscilla haul out to sea and chase a whale?
Or consider “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” It’s a run-on sentence. Also untrue.
But it’s a far, far better thing than “It was mediocre times, but, yeah, sometimes stuff happened.”
Want to know my current first sentence? “Tamar would come to a bad end, everyone agreed.”
Stay tuned.
