The First 100 Pages

When I told people to say less than they want, I warned them that saying too much will put a heavy drag on the story. The worst offender of this is the novel, where I have often heard comments like, "after the first hundred pages, it starts getting interesting."

Why should a book take a hundred pages (sometimes as high as 300) to be interesting? I know I've heard a lot of reasons, but I've never heard an excuse. People will say that it takes time for plot to develop, characters to grow, and stories to blossom or intertwine. I say that's all a cop out.

Plot should be interesting from the beginning. Plot is interesting when something is happening. People need loose ends that characters are driven to tie up. If you think it takes 100 pages to start from nothing and build the story into an intricate lattice, then maybe you're saying too much. Try skipping the boring parts and starting in medias res.

Characters should be interesting from the beginning. What make characters interesting are their thoughts and actions. The interesting characters are surprising. They may do things that make no sense to you (thus making you want to find out why) or they do the things you always wish you could do (thus making you want to live vicariously through them). If you meet a character who is too normal or too fake, we don't care. If we are introduced to a character before they have grown into an interesting person, then don't make us wait to see the change.

If your first chapter isn't interesting enough to make me want to read the second, you have failed. Now, I will admit that at a first glance, this seems to conflict with a previous article where I talk about the first 100 strips of a comic. There is a major difference, though. In that post, I am talking about individual works.

The idea of the first 100 strips is that we need experience in our craft. Every single thing we write should be better than the last thing we wrote. Every comic strip should get better, just like every book we write should get better. However, we don't expect every panel in a comic to be better than the one before it, much like we don't expect every chapter to be noticeably better within a book.

And I have the same 100 pages rule about comics, too. A comic should not be a little funny. I don't want to read 100 boring pages in a book before it's good and I don't want to read 3 boring panels just to laugh at the fourth. Always be interesting, right from page/line/panel 1.