New Beginnings... Chapter One

 

Our theme for April is New Beginnings—appropriate enough for spring if it ever arrives in my neck of the woods. Our peach tree is beginning to bloom, however, the weather forecast calls for below-freezing temperatures. Freezing temps mean that the blossoms won’t last and we won’t get peaches again this year. Hold a good thought for that sweet tree, won’t you? New beginnings also mean it’s time to open up the lake cottage, but we’re having some work done on our city house in the next couple of weeks, so that puts the lake on hold for a bit. I did go into my hairdresser and have her take a few inches off my long hair…that felt a little like a new beginning for summer and the hairstyle feels fresh and fun and different.

All that said, today New Beginnings, for me at least, is all about starting a new story. So many writers struggle with beginnings and I am among them. My new WIP—Joanna Weaver’s story—is no exception. I think perhaps I’m a little “beginning-shy” with this book because my editor and I took apart the last one (Jo’s sister, Jasmine’s story), and I redid a rather meh opening scene to put the reader right in the middle of the action. It's so much better now, and I'm very glad we reworked it, but I confess, I clutched. 

Always start in the action! Words to live by if you write fiction, romantic or otherwise. But, particularly in romance, it’s important that your main characters meet up in those crucial first two chapters. Readers learn immediately who the hero and heroine are and what they are to one another—whether they are strangers like Jo Weaver and Alex Briggs or old sweethearts like Jazz and Eli Walker in Book 1 of the Weaver Sister trilogy.

Beginnings in a novel are Act 1—that inciting incident that brings the hero and the heroine together for the first time. In Jo’s book, Alex literally crashes her elegant high school reunion party. He needs her help, and she must decide—do I help him or do I tell him to get lost? She doesn’t know at the time that this upstart river rat is the key to her future. She only knows he’s interrupting what was promising to be a very nice evening with a handsome older man. But, the reader figures out almost immediately that Alex is her new beginning.

Beginnings are even more important in a series because you are establishing a world that you’re going to be in for a while. Building the little town of River’s Edge has been the joy of my writing life and creating the place and the secondary characters in that first River’s Edge book—A Small Town Christmas—was such important work for the books that came along after that first story. Now, I can simply build on what I created in that first new beginning.

Tell me about your new beginning this month, Wranglers. What’s happening? What’s new? Let’s talk.

Stay well, stay safe,