Hello! Happy New Year! Welcome to another Fabulous First Page post.
In my last Fabulous First Page post, I talked about why the first page is perhaps the most important page in your entire book. I also listed what a good first page should do.
A first page should:
Hook the reader right away and invite them into the story.
Set the scene and overall tone of the novel.
Introduce a main character (and/or introduce a main setting or theme).
Hint at a conflict, situation, mystery/secret, or question.
At the end of the day, it can be hard to do all of these things in the first page, so your top priority is hooking the readers. If you don’t hook the readers right away, they won’t flip to page 2.
This time we’re discussing a recent literary fiction novel. “Literary fiction” can be hard to define (sort of an “I know it when I read it” situation). Some people say that, unlike genre fiction, which tends to be plot-driven and follow familiar tropes, literary fiction tends to be character-driven and might play around with or simply ignore popular tropes. And that’s often true. But to me, what usually makes a novel literary is close attention to how the story is written — style, language, storytelling techniques — as well as a tendency to be more introspective, observational, and/or experimental.
Therefore, on page 1, a literary novel should (in my opinion) have style, whether it comes from beautiful or interesting language, an original storytelling technique, or something else involving how the story is being told.
So, without further ado, here is a fabulous first page from a literary adult novel published in 2023:
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