Opening Pages Intensive - Week 3 - The one thing you shouldn't start a manuscript without

I hate the word hack, but do I ever have a writing hack for you this week!

I hate the word “hack.” When did we start using it? “Trick,” “short-cut,” these all sound like cons. Because I don’t like any of these words, I’m going to refer to what I’m sharing as a “checkpoint.” It’s the number one thing I check all my work against, fiction and nonfiction. It’s the magnet that pulls agents and editors deeper into your books. It’s not a hook so much as the thing that gets a reader hooked, the sticky-glue pull that makes you have to turn the page.

I call it the “occupation/preoccupation” checkpoint. By page one of whatever you are writing (a short story, an essay, a novel, a memoir…) the reader should have a sense of what the narrator’s occupation is, and what they are preoccupied by. I don’t mean this in a literal, narrow sense (like, the narrator is a farmer and he needs de-worming medicine for his ranch horse, though that example certainly works.) By occupation, I mean what is this person’s general status in life? Are they young, close to dying, in rags but they want riches, in riches, but they’re yearning for something beyond wealth? Do they have a job? If they don’t have a job, do they want one? Where do they live? How do they occupy themselves? Who do they love?

For preoccupation, questions I consider are: what keeps this person up at night? When they can’t concentrate on a conversation with someone, what is the issue distracting their mind? What is most of their energy and resources and free time moving toward at the point at which we’re meeting them in the narrative?

The occupation/preoccupation checkpoint is something that I teach to students, so allow me to share some of the slides I’ve developed here to illustrate it further.

Can you really and truly establish all of the above in your opening paragraphs? I promise you, it’s possible. To prove it, let’s take a look at one of my favorite opening pages from the first short story in the eponymous collection F*CKFACE: And other stories by Leah Hampton.