Making the first page sing

Having spent the week reading the openings of other people's stories, I then had to return to my own and figure out what was wrong with them.

I've always thought I was starting in the middle of the action, that my characters were doing things as the story opened, but I've detected a tendency to write myself into the story. My first line might start with a bang, but then I'll switch to a description of the place that slows things down.  

I was doing that with the novella I've submitted this week, The Goldeagle Courier Service.  I had my character striding across the courtyard to an urgent meeting, then instead of getting on with the meeting I described the gouges in the stones caused by Goldeagles' talons as they took off and landed.  It's a detail I like, and I've retained it, but not on page one.  

Taking a good, hard look at my first pages has shown me that I'm starting too slowly in a lot of them.  I'm establishing the viewpoint character, and usually the problem, just fine, but I'm slowing the story down scene-setting.  This is a particular challenge for a science fiction writer, as the world can't be left to the reader's imagination.  It isn't the same as present-day Earth, and its differences must be described, but the challenge is where to do it.

I re-worked the first chapter of my novel Genehunter for this reason too.  My original page one had a two-paragraph description of mountains and savannah, and the creatures that grazed on it.  And the reader needs to know that the grass is red there, but not all on the first page.

The real difference about this world is the intelligent, pony-sized, big cats with arms and hands, and I hadn't introduced them until the end of the chapter in the original version.  Now I've had them being the first thing my heroine Aris sees as she steps off the shuttle.  They're on a nearby ridge, watching the humans construct their camp, and they freak Aris out.  Immediately I have a potential sense of danger in my story, and a hint that these cats will play a part in it.  I still haven't got the order of the information right in that chapter, but I'm much closer to it.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com