One of the pleasures of reading a novel is anticipation. Would a playwright not bother to anticipate what the audience is anticipating? The reader of a novel also enjoys the feeling that he can anticipate where the story is going; however, if the reader actually does anticipate the story, he is bored. The reader must be able to anticipate, but the reader must also guess wrong. How can an author make a reader anticipate—not to mention make a reader guess wrong—if the author himself doesn't know where the story is going? A good beginning will suggest knowledge of the whole story; it will give a strong hint regarding where the whole story is headed; yet a good beginning must be misleading, too.
Therefore, where to begin? Begin where the reader will be invited to do the most anticipating of the story, but where the reader will be the most compelled to guess wrong. If anticipation is a pleasure, so is surprise.
-- from his essay "Getting Started" in the compilation Writers On Writing (Middlebury College Press, 1991)
The bad news is, I'm now feeling like I need to reconsider the opening of my novel.
The good news is, I think I know what it needs. Such revisions are never scary when I have at least an inkling of an idea of where I might go. "Scary" is when I have no idea what needs to be fixed.
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