Hello, dreamers. I am now in week two of work on #OctoWIP, and so far it’s going incredibly well. I’ve enjoyed digging into the pasts of my characters, exploring their interiority. I’ve learned a lot about them, and though I currently have no plans to publish any of the shorts, they’ve turned out great. More than once I’ve been moved to tears.

However, now that I’ve finished editing my latest short story, I expect the work on these shorts to progress quickly. At present, I believe I’m a little over a week at most from starting work on the novel itself. And that means I need to decide where, exactly, I’d like to start.

Aquarius 1

In science fiction, perhaps more than any other genre, it’s painfully easy for things to become formulaic. Most of my novels revolve around a space mission, whether colonial or exploratory. So it’s easy to fall into a pattern: the crew arrives at their destination, they are revived, they drop out of FTL, they engage sublight engines, and blah blah blah.

Look, it’s not necessarily that I think nobody will want to read that; it’s that I think they’ll have already read it before. Countless times, in countless sci-fi novels. I want to show readers something new. Something that will set the tone early, and make it clear that this story is unlike anything you’ve ever read before.

That, incidentally, was the motivation behind the opening of the novel I’m querying, Seven Days on Samarkand.

As I’ve mentioned in past posts, when I first attempted to write the novel, my initial attempt fell apart mainly because it felt so formulaic. So the crew is revived, they get to the planet, they thaw out the colonists, they start exploring the planet, and blah blah blah. I got halfway through what was then the third chapter before I sat up and thought, What the hell am I doing?

So I went back to the drawing board. I had to find a way to start things off differently. The result was an opening in which the crew is revived, then discovers an errant comet has been nudged into their path. With fuel restraints prohibiting a correction burn to avoid it, they must put their heads together and devise a solution.

It was, I dare say, an elegant solution. By starting the story with just the crew, keeping the colonists out of it, I was able to introduce the readers to my fictional world through their experiences. I felt better about launching into the slow plotbuilding of planning the colony because I’d already kicked things off with a daring gravity-assist maneuver around a comet. And it went over surprisingly well with my beta readers, several of whom worked hard to talk me out of simply ditching the entire comet subplot.

So now I’m faced with the question of how to kick things off with Aquarius 1. I don’t want to fall back into the formulaic trap of slowly building things, forcing readers to slog through multiple chapters of scene-setting and character development. I want action. I want to move swiftly through to something cool. And that’s been my big task over the past week.

In literature, as in life, first impressions are everything. With a book, you only have so many pages to suck a reader in, and make them feel that they just need to know what happens next. Curiosity will only get you so far. So if you can’t catch a reader’s attention through the sample pages they’ll find online, or the number of pages they might thumb through while browsing at a book store, you’re out of luck. There’s a reason most agents only request either the first five pages or first chapter. If you can’t hook someone eager to sell your book, what chance do you have with readers?

I’ve learned my lessons. Before I set out to actually start writing Aquarius 1, I need to know exactly where I’m starting things off. My initial (very short) chapter is, I dare say, intriguing. It’s what happens after I need to fine-tune. Ideally, I’ll want to introduce the main characters while simultaneously introducing the initial tension.

I know I can do it. And I will. This story is just too cool to not start with a bang. – MK