Your First Ten Pages
And Why They Can Make or Break Your Next Book
Next week, I’m teaching at a writing retreat with my friend Joe Bunting. We’re doing it in Oxford, England, which seemed appropriate. The assignment to all attendees is to bring their first ten pages of a work-in-progress. One writer asked why.
What’s so special about ten pages?
Nothing, really. Except that it’s the right amount to get a sense of what this thing is or could be. This is what a publisher wants to see before they green light production of a book. It’s what an editor wants to get a handle on your progress. And it’s what an agent hopes to see in a proposal to see what chops you have.
Ten pages, depending on font sizes and spacing, is about a few thousand words, which is something like an Introduction to a nonfiction book or a relatively short chapter in a novel. It’s a good sample of the rest of the book will, or could, be.
Recently, I was working with a client on a book proposal. It took three months, and when we were done we sent the full document to his agent. After we didn’t hear from him for a couple of weeks, the agent called and said this wasn’t it. We had not nailed the idea or the voice, and as a result he didn’t think the book was sellable.
He told me he had talked to the author already and that the author (my client) had a powerful story—but it wasn’t coming through in the writing. We needed to rewrite the whole thing. I was discouraged but determined to get it right. Nonetheless, no writer wants to go back to the drawing board.
“Before you do that, though,” he said on the phone, “gimme ten good pages, and let’s see if there’s something there.”
So I called up the author, and we spent a couple hours on the phone. I recorded every word he said. And as he told me the story of driving down a highway in Denver at midnight, driving over 120 miles an hour, how he wanted to die, and the four questions that came to mind that caused him to slow down the vehicle—four questions that incidentally changed his life—I knew we had it. That story, that revelation, and everything that followed was the hook we were looking for.
The next day, I told my wife I needed to disappear for a couple of hours and went to a nearby Mexican restaurant. I ordered a $4 “Happy Hour” beer and a basket of unlimited chips and salsa. And for the next two hours, I typed like that Kermit-the-frog gif you see: arms flying in all directions, fingers maniacally slamming down on the keys. And at the end of the evening, I had my ten pages.
They still needed work, still needed to be edited and fact-checked, but I could feel that something special had happened. I’d been afraid to do this, but the fear was greater than the doing. After that I did a quick round of revisions then shared the piece with the client. He was thrilled. After a few final edits based on his feedback, I sent the excerpt to the agent.
He got back to us both immediately:
“This is exactly what I was looking for.”
We were back on track.
There’s a story about J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis going to lunch one afternoon at their preferred pub The Eagle and the Child (which they affectionately called “The Bird and the Baby.”) Tolkien is trying to figure out how to get over his recent bout of writer’s block, and he’s turned to an old friend for help. Both he and Lewis met while teaching at Oxford, sharing pieces of poetry they’d written that no one else had read.
At this point, Tolkien is a known commodity, having already published The Hobbit to considerable acclaim. He’s working on a new book now, but he’s stuck. It’s been months since he’s written anything, he’s past deadline, and he’s considering giving up.
When the two authors meet, Lewis cuts straight to the quick and tells his friend what he thinks of the story: “Tollers,” he says, “don’t you know that hobbits are only interesting when you place them in unhobbit-like circumstances?”
It’s everything Tolkien needs to hear in a simple question. He has to get Frodo and his buddies out of the Shire if they are going to have an epic adventure. The story needs to move, and so does the author.
Tolkien reworks the beginning the book, moving the hobbits out of the Shire and beginning The Lord of the Rings as we know it today. And the rest is history.1
A poet once said the truth depends on a walk around a lake, and I think the same can be said of brilliant ideas. Brilliance is contingent on a person’s ability to reframe their perspective: to revisit an old idea, discard what doesn’t work, and double down on what does. Sometimes, the difference between a masterpiece and yet another addition to the slush pile is getting the small stuff right.2
Most writers want to focus on the macro, on the larger scope of a project, and there is merit to doing so. But what often matters most is the micro, the small but significant choices that build over the course of a book.
Readers don’t read books. They read sentences, paragraphs, and pages. And as those pieces build, you either have or don’t have a book. As the author, you are responsible for captivating the reader for the minutes that you have them before the leave you forever. You want those minutes to matter.
That is always the job, the hardest part of building worlds and spreading ideas and sharing you story with the world. We writers are in the attention business, whether we like it or not.
We writers are in the attention business, whether we like it or not.
If you can’t get someone into a story within the first ten pages of starting it, then you don’t have a book. You may have five hundred pages of an epic work of staggering genius, but it’s not something people will read. If your big idea can’t be fleshed out in a few thousand words, it doesn’t matter how big it is. Expecting a reader to hold out for page 11 or 23 or 55 before you deliver is just plain selfish. And it won’t work.
Which is why we asked our workshop attendees to bring their first ten pages to Oxford and be ready to share them and rework them. Sometimes, all it takes to turn a piece of writing around is getting those first ten pages right. It’s reductive to say this is the difference between success and failure for an author, but that wouldn’t be entirely wrong. A willingness to revisit and reconsider is a lot of what writing is about.
I originally shared this story in my book Real Artists Don’t Starve, which I (even more originally) heard from Inklings scholar Diana Glyer. She writes about it in her book Bandersnatch.
This quote comes from a Wallace Stevens’ poem called “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.” I first heard the reference from
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I'm going to be thinking about that idea of moving your hobbits out of the shire for a long time.
Tolkien and Lewis were lucky to be able to confide in each other- their respective fictional universes show what influence each man had on the other.