Delete Your First Chapters
...or maybe just consider it
When one of the beta readers for my first novel came back to me suggesting I might consider deleting the first three chapters and starting at chapter 4, I was shocked. But, I was shocked in that way where deep down I knew he was right. I tried it and it turned out there was so much from the first few chapters that I didn’t need. Starting from chapter 4 made things come alive.
When I came back to my most recent book after a year, I did something similar. In this case it was a rearrangement of the first chapters. A deleted chapter from further into the novel re-emerged to become the opening chapter, chapter 6 became chapter 2, and the first two chapters were highly edited to become chapter 3. Are you still with me? It definitely took some brainpower.
In both cases, it became clear to me that in those first chapters I was writing myself into the novel. The chapters were important for me, but not needed by the reader. They had some sort of sentimental value but they weren’t doing my work justice.
And I am not alone. It is very often the case, that a good few chapters from the beginning of novels can eventually be discarded.
Annie Dillard has a no nonsense discussion of this in her book, The Writing Life.
“It is the beginning of the work that a writer throws away. A painting covers its tracks. Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.”
Contrasting writing and painting in this way is really useful. It shows how the first draft is almost like the sketch, the part that is painted over or sometimes rubbed out where no longer necessary. Perhaps like training wheels on a bike, they keep us secure until no longer needed.
Discarding our first chapters can be so hard to do, though and here are a few reasons why:
1) We are sure those chapters are needed to guide the reader in the same way those chapters guided us. It won’t make sense without them.
2) We are deeply attached to them because they are the first words we wrote on this beloved project
3) It feels far too complicated to work out how to take them out and then feed in the information from them that is vital to the story
Dillard says, “several delusions weaken the writers resolve to throw away work. If he has read his pages too often, those pages will have a necessary quality, the ring of the inevitable, like poetry known by the heart.” This kind of poetry can be very hard to discard, can’t it?
She also suggests that “sometimes the writer leaves his early chapters in place from gratitude,” since they are the first words that moved us from the blank page into the story.
If you have an inkling that your first chapters might not be doing the rest of the book justice, maybe have a look again at them, with Annie Dillard’s firm words in your mind.
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I do often delete the first paragraph of a short story so I guess that’s the equivalent! Does you good!!!