How to Make Your Novel's First 50 Pages Stand Out
Jeff Gerke gives tips to aspiring novelists on how to improve their first fifty pages.
This is a post by guest blogger, Joe Perry, intern at FinePrint Literary Management.
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Jeff Gerke, author of The First 50 Pages: Engage Agents, Editors and Readers, and Set Your Novel Up for Success, gave tips to aspiring novelists about how to improve their first fifty pages. Below is a quick list of some tips that the first fifty pages should include:
- Engage the reader
- Introduce your hero
- Establish the context of your story
- Start your hero's inner journey
- Circularity (refer back to the beginning at the end of the novel)
- Establish the protagonist's "normal" (what the protagonist's normal life is like)
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