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 d ot he 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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