C is for Chapter One: The Notebook

In my previous Chapter One post I had a look at the opening of A Kiss Before Dying, a tautly written thriller. This time I’m looking at The Notebook, a romantic novel. I had intended to take apart the first chapter in a similar way to last time, but it turned out to be quite a different kind of book and quite an eye-opening experience. The conclusions I came to after spending some time with it were unexpected to say the least and I hope you find them as interesting as I did.

The Notebook is a very slim 50,000 word romance that was Nichloas Sparks’ first published novel in 1996. It was picked out of a slush pile by an agent and sold for a $1 million advance to a major publishing house, and instantly became a bestseller. This should make it clear that everyone along the way, agent, publisher, public, took to it immediately. People knew it was something special. The strange thing is, I thought the opening chapter was terrible.

It not only doesn’t obey any of the basic guidelines of opening chapters, it almost completely goes against all of them. It’s slow to the point of being static. It’s unclear who the characters are or where we are. The voice of the narrator (first person present tense) is strong, but quite tedious and self-involved. The story is rambling and unclear. But someone picked up this book and said yep, that’s a blockbuster. How did that happen? I certainly wanted to do my best to find out.

I want to make it clear I am not going to spend this post bashing the book. It’s a multi-million seller. It works just fine (better than fine). But I want to take you from where I was at the start to where I ended up.  I should also point out that I have no idea if the opening chapter in published form is the same as the opening chapter of the manuscript in that slush pile, but for the sake of this post let’s assume so.

If you would like to read the first chapter for yourself (four pages) you can do so on Amazon here.

So, enough preamble, the first line of the book:

Who am I? And how, I wonder, will the story end?

Vague enough for you? My initial reaction was: Who cares? This kind of ‘Come with me and I shall tell you a tale to end all tales’ kind of a start from a fledgling novelist always makes me wary, because by and large the promise is not kept. The story isn’t up to it. And this wasn’t (at that time anyway) an established voice.

What follows is a lot of description of an 80 year old man’s room and clothing as he gets dressed, and along the way him going on about stuff in this way:

The romantics would call this a love story, the cynics a tragedy.

Whenever I read this sort of proclamation my feeling is why don’t you just tell me the story and let me decide for myself? He also does a lot of:

I am a common man, with common thoughts, and I’ve led a common life.

This is one of those things agents often tell you not to do in their list of ‘Ten things that make me want to kill writers’. If he’s so ordinary why would I want to listen to his story?

There’s also plenty of clichés:

I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

And convoluted metaphors:

Time, unfortunately, doesn’t make it easy to stay on course. The path is straight as ever, but now it is strewn with the rocks and gravel that accumulate over a lifetime.

The old man moves slowly through the halls, past nurses so we know the kind of place we’re in, people say hello, he feels they pity him, don’t understand him, but he doesn’t care. He eventually sits down next to someone unnamed (she doesn’t know who I am) and opens the notebook he’s carrying and starts to read.

The next chapter takes us back in time to the 40s when these two met etc. but I want to point out that rather oddly it isn’t presented as what’s in the notebook, it’s told from a completely different perspective, and the story that unfolds is fairly standard love-triangle, true love, get caught in the rain, making love in front of a roaring fire type melodramatic romance. Publisher’s weekly referred to it as ‘cliche-ridden prose’ and that’s very fair. So why does it work so well for so many people. My first clue came in the same Publisher’s weekly review.

‘What renders Sparks's sentimental story somewhat distinctive are two chapters, which take place in a nursing home in the '90s, that frame the central story.’

The scenes in the old age home is him reading her own notebook to her about how they met and fell in love. She has Alzheimer’s and doesn’t remember him and they say she never will, but he reads to her regardless, he believes in miracles beyond the ken of science (and guess what?). I’m sure you can see the attraction of such an idea, some of you may have already become charmed by the idea. But there’s a big difference between knowing a book is a proven commodity that’s already satisfied millions, and picking it out of a slush pile in the agency post room.

This made me wonder what had attracted the agent to this story, and rather fortuitously Nichols Sparks has made his query letter for The Notebook available on his website. You can read it here: Query. I suggest you have a look now (you’ve read this far, for some unknown reason, might as well go the whole hog).

What struck me is how clear he was about the old age angle, about the idea of love everlasting. In short, he’s selling the angle and selling it hard. I can see why the agent might have become interested, and I can also see something else.

Nobody reads a first chapter in isolation. The public have the book cover, the blurb, the reviews, the reputation, they have a strong idea of what to expect. Agents have the query letter and the synopsis. They know where the story is going, they can decide if the hyperbole and claims of a wonderful story at the start are justified by flicking through the major plot points (conveniently reduced to a single page).  Which made me think that all the stuff about making sure your first chapter kicks off with vim and vigour, that the inciting incident is right up there and you hook the reader within the first five page is all a bunch of bullshit.

Okay, that's a little over the top, but certainly out of the idea, the story and the opening, the opening is the least important.

Of course you want the start to be impactful, and certain genres have certain expectations, but people don’t blindly pick up a book, open to the first page without looking at anything else and read the first line and start judging based solely on that. In fact the only place people do that is on online writing sites (and I'm a member of most of them) where people can’t be bothered to read any more than the chapter in front of them.

What’s equally important, I think, is selling the person on the idea of the book. The hook doesn’t need to be on the first page or the fifth page, it needs to be before you start reading. Whether it’s a great premise or a moving one, whether it’s just that the author is famous (maybe even for writing!) or that people are raving about it in all the right circles, the reader has to think ‘Hmm, that sounds interesting’ before they start reading.

The difficulty is that a lot of writers don’t know how to encapsulate that idea into something easy to get. Often because they don’t really know what the idea is themselves. And I don’t mean in a Hollywood pitch kind of way (It’s Harry Potter in a submarine!). Sparks’ query letter is not high-concept, old people remaining in love, but he makes it very clear what he’s going for. He has a specific purpose and he explains it clearly. His opening chapter may be vague but his query letter certainly is not. And once you know what his purpose is, it completely changes the way you approach the opening. Well, maybe not completely, but you understand what he’s doing and that there’s a reason behind it.

The question is, does your book have a solid concept behind it? Shouldn’t it have?

This was quite an enlightening process for me. I started to realise I very much rely on the text doing the talking for me and I need to work out what my story is really about. And why anyone would care about that.  More work for me. I guess the path is straight as ever, but now it is strewn with the rocks and gravel that accumulate over a lifetime. Hey I totally get that now. Oh, wait, no, still gibberish.

I think I might try this Chapter One thing again with another genre (although not for a while, it’s quite intense). Let me know if you have any suggestions for genres or books.