Your First Page: First Pages and What They Tell Us about the Pages that Follow Them: Revised Workshop and Classroom Edition

by Peter Selgin

Your First Page is unlike any other craft book on writing. It is based on the premise that practically everything that can go right or wrong in a work of fiction or memoir goes wrong or right on the first page. Those first 300 or so words function like canaries in coal mines, forecasting success or predicting trouble. They establish the crucial bond between writer and reader, setting them off together on a path toward the heart or climax of a story―or they fail to do so. From first pages we stand to learn most of what we need to know to succeed as authors. This new workshop and classroom edition of Your First Page has been revised to better fit the needs of creative writing classrooms and workshops.

360 pages, Paperback

Published July 30, 2019

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

[Vic Cavalli · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent, unique book. I'm going to order this book for my English 307: Writing the Literary Novel course next term. What's unique about it is its rich collection of good quality brief samples of work in progress. The strengths and weaknesses of these texts are clearly analyzed by Peter Selgin with an intelligent eye, and students can see how to improve their own work. Reading the contemporary masters of fiction is valuable, but inevitably a chasm is created. This book helps to realistically bridge that chasm and get students on the road to increasingly more efficient results in their own writing.