Your First Page: First Pages and What They Tell Us about the Pages that Follow Them

by Peter Selgin

Your First Page is unlike any other craft book on writing. It is based on the premise that almost everything that can go right or wrong in a work of fiction or memoir goes wrong or right on the first page. The book grew out of an experiment for which writers submitted nearly one hundred anonymous first pages of works-in-progress for analysis. The experiment proved two things: that first pages function like canaries in coalmines, forecasting success or predicting trouble. They establish the crucial bond between writer and reader, setting us off on a path toward the heart or climax of a story, or they fail to do so. The experiment also demonstrated that from first pages we stand to learn most of what we need to know to succeed as authors.

Genres: Writing

370 pages, Paperback

Published November 27, 2017

About the author

Peter Selgin is the author of Drowning Lessons, winner of the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award for Fiction, Life Goes to the Movies, a novel, two books on the craft of fiction, and two children’s books. His stories and essays have appeared in dozens of magazines and anthologies, including Glimmer Train Stories, Poets & Writers, The Sun, Slate, Colorado Review, Writers and Their Notebooks, Writing Fiction, and Best American Essays 2009. Confessions of a Left-Handed Man: An Artist’s Memoir, was recently published by the University of Iowa Press and was short-listed for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. His latest novel, The Water Master, won this years’ Pirate’s Alley / Faulkner Society Prize, and his essay, The Kuhreihen Melody, won the Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. Selgin’s visual art has graced the pages of the The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Outside, Gourmet, and other publications. Selgin has had several plays published and produced, including Night Blooming Serious, which won the Mill Mountain Theater Competition. His full-length play, A God in the House, based on Dr. Kevorkian and his suicide device, was a National Playwright’s Conference Winner and later optioned for Off-Broadway. He teaches at Antioch University’s MFA writing program and is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Georgia College.

Reviews

[Anne Green · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best advice to writers books I've read. Focusing on the crucial beginning of a piece of writing (novel, story, memoir) and including both literary and genre fiction, the author has provided writers (novice or experienced) with a virtual "bible" of how to do it and how not to do it.

I think many people learn best by being given examples, or at least I do, and when it comes to writing a great deal of theory has been spouted which may or may not be valuable, but without concrete examples is often ambiguous. Here, by the use of carefully chosen examples, the author illustrates exactly what he's talking about. The only real criterion for judging a piece of writing, of any kind, is how it's received by the reader - which can't help but be a entirely subjective assessment (all readers being far from equal). But there are some general, overarching pitfalls that can influence that experience negatively, e.g. "false suspense", "information versus experience", "imitation story" and so on. These are explained in detail and then referred to again in a series of critiques of actual first pages.

This is a book I'll go back to again and again.

[Reyna Favis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Real writers submit their first page and Mr. Selgin surgically dissects the good, the bad, and the ugly. I can't stand it when people say they like / don't like something but cannot articulate why it's good / bad. You can tell a hack when they say something like, "If you have to ask..." Experts can break it down in a language even lay people can understand--the art of making something complex into something simple. But as Einstein said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." Mr. Selgin is a true expert and I learn something with every example in this book.

[Rush Dar · Rating 5 out of 5]

In writing the first sentence or even page sets up the flow of the story. It opens your reader to the world that you created and welcomes them in. Your First Page by Peter Selgin explores seven ways of holding that door open. The first section of his book explores the various methods of accomplishing the task, and the following sections are step by step examples showing these in action.

This is a book not to read once and place on the shelf. Read it, bookmark it with stacks of sticky notes. Use it as a reference for your writing.

[Hannah Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't actually read this cover to cover, I used it for a class for the exercises. I am very picky with most writing books that purport to be manuals to assist with storytelling, but this one was not too bad.