Page One

Nobody gets past your first page, and nobody can tell you why.

Not because they were being kind. A reader who stops does not know why she stopped. Press her and she will invent a reason - it didn't grab me - which describes the outcome and diagnoses nothing.

So you were given the only advice available. Sharpen the hook. Start later, start louder, start with the body already on the floor.

The hook was almost never the broken part.

Sit in the room where openings are actually judged - a slush pile, an agent's screen, a panel of readers who stop the moment three hands go up - and the pages that fail are frequently not dull. Several of them are thrilling. They get stopped anyway, and the reasons cluster: I didn't know where I was. I couldn't tell who I was following. I had to go back to the top.

Not bored. Lost. And being lost inside a book does not feel like boredom. It feels like being somewhere nobody has shown you around, and a reader who feels that puts the book down and blames her own tiredness.

• Where am I? - grounding, which is not description, and costs about a clause.
• Who am I with? - not a face in a mirror. A person with an opinion about what she is looking at.
• What kind of book is this? - the shape of the ride, and the counterintuitive duty to let the wrong reader leave.
• Why should I keep going? - one small promise, made and kept fast, before you open the one you intend to keep.

Answer all four and a reader relaxes. Answer one of them brilliantly and leave the others blank - which is exactly what a spectacular action opening does - and she stops on line six while telling herself she will come back to it.

Every chapter ends with a test you carry out on exactly thirteen lines - your first thirteen, and no more. Always a test, never a rewrite, because you are the one person in the world structurally unable to read your own first page. They collect into a two-page audit at the back that you can run against any opening in an hour.

And running through the whole book is one real manuscript: thirteen lines of a fantasy novel whose author has rewritten chapter one nineteen times. You will see them five times. They get better, then better again, and then - for reasons that have nothing to do with the writing - worse.

• Why adding description to a confusing opening reliably makes it more confusing
• The six openings that put you on hard mode, what each one costs, and what buys the exception
• Why an unexplained proper noun is a debt, and how to settle one inside the clause
• FAST - the four places a reaction shows up, and why a checklist ruins it
• The stop condition: how to know the page is finished when it will never be perfect

Page One is the fourth book in a line that follows the work in the order it actually happens - You Are Not Lazy for the writer who is not writing, The Four-Day Novel for the one who cannot finish a draft, The Rewrite for the one who cannot fix it. Start wherever you are stuck.

You almost certainly cannot write this page yet. That is not a failure of preparation - it is the order of the work, and this book is about what to do in the meantime.