The First Thirty Pages: A (Partial) Novel Workshop [Michael Shilling]

Intermediate. Finishing the draft of a novel is quite an achievement, but if the opening section doesn’t grab the reader’s attention and keep it, that achievement will all be in vain. In this class, we’ll workshop the first thirty-or-so pages of each other’s drafts, looking at strategies to build a propulsive narrative force through voice, character, tension, and plot, and also examine the openings of a few really brilliant, stylistically divergent novels that are simply amazing from the first sentence.