The opening of a novel is difficult to get right. The first page must set the tone, voice and location of the story, but it must also encourage the reader to turn the page and read on. This challenge informed an international competition which invited writers to submit the first 250 words of a crime novel. I submitted two pieces: the actual opening page of my crime novel, and the alternative opening page of the novel, which I ended up not using. I’m delighted to say that both my entries were selected for publication by none other than Val McDermid, and will appear in the anthology ‘Crimebits2’ this August, along with her introduction.
I’ve been writing and publishing poetry for over twenty years, but these first publications in an entirely new arena are very special to me. I began to write a novel to see if I could do it, and soon discovered that writing poetry and writing fiction are very different endeavours. Most obviously, a poem is often a series of lines on a single page, while a novel is around 100,000 words. But it’s not only about scale. It is how you unfold those 100,000 words in terms of narration, dialogue and plot. How you create a fictional world which is populated by characters that are authentic, engaging and who develop over the course of the story. How you encourage expectations in the reader and how you take those expectations forward into twists and turns that surprise them. And so on… I’ve been writing and rewriting my novel for three years now. I’ve learned a lot and I’m still learning.
https://blackspringpressgroup.com/pages/crimebits-2
