Your opening is the first thing an agent or editor will read—and you don’t want it to be the last. But you’ve seen your own first page so often that its strengths, flaws, gaps, and even typos are invisible to you now. So often, all we can think to do to polish the opening up is add more descriptors—perhaps the last thing it needs. In this class we’ll hone the crucial elements of reader orientation, clarity, intrigue, promise, diction, and perspective—the elements that make a reader keep reading, or move on. We’ll also talk about how to get a story really going, even in its first paragraphs, without sounding desperate—something harder than it seems.
Writers who want to volunteer for (kind!) public editing should send in their first page (double space, 12-point font) as a Word document to [email protected] one week before the class. Rebecca will pick three or four contributions, looking for issues we all can learn from, and we’ll work together to make each opening the best possible invitation to the rest of the work.
This course is part of our Visiting Author Series; to learn more and purchase discounted tickets, please click here.
Rebecca Makkai is the author of New York Times bestselling I Have Some Questions For You as well as the novels The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, and the short story collection Music for Wartime. The Great Believers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize among other honors. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca teaches graduate fiction writing at Northwestern University, UNR Tahoe, and Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English; and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago. She lives in Chicago and Vermont.
