Let’s talk about ‘First Page Fear’

When I teach writing, students often worry about how to begin.

When I teach reading, the feeling is different. Not fear, perhaps, but bewilderment.

God, people have been talking about this text for years.

How can I say anything different or interesting about it … ?

Imagine being an inch tall

… when you land on the first page of a new book.

Think of it as a map of a new world. So many questions.

Where am I?

When am I?

Who‘s here with me?

What‘s going on?

Why are we here?

Before we’ve even turned that first page, we’ve already begun to find our balance; to navigate this new world. Not simply to find answers, but to work out which are the most important questions. We might even begin to make predictions.

What if we stopped and took a breath after just 100 words?

After exactly 100 words.

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Not a sentence. Not a page. Not a chapter.

Just enough to begin to hear the writer’s voice, to sense what might be on their mind, and to start asking questions which don’t sound as though we’ve just woken up in a hospital bed.

That pause can transform our experience of a book.

The aim isn’t to finish reading as quickly as possible. It’s to begin reading well.

Not entirely coincidentally, that’s exactly what the strongest A-Level English Literature essays do. They don’t race through texts; they pay close attention to how writers create meaning.

Why 100 Words?

Actually it’s pretty arbitraty. Not because 100 words tell us everything we need to know. Quite the opposite. If they did, we could stop reading at that point.

First impressions matter. Writers know that. They work astonishingly hard on their openings because they understand that those first moments shape everything which follows. Let’s go back to First Page Fear. It applies as much to published authors as it does to students.

The Rules of the Game

1 – I’ll be strict about the 100-word limit, even if we’re left in the middle of an important sentence. But I also promise never to treat that cut-off as a cliffhanger the author never intended.

2 – No spoilers.

I’ll always write as if approaching the text for the first time. That also means no hindsight, and no context until the author prompts it. No discussion of biography simply because I happen to know it.

Just careful reading, and careful thinking. If you’re a student, you’ll understand when I say this is going to be pure AO1/AO2, with the emphasis on the latter.

3 – a 750-word limit for the body of each post. There’s a line between close-reading and navel-gazing. If I cross it, let me know! (there might be exceptions – spoiler: number one is one of those)

What Can I Take Away From Reading These?

You won’t understand an entire novel from these posts. Or, actually, will you … ?

‘Save My Grade’ isn’t my style, as you possibly know by now. I can and sometimes do help with this, but this series is about skills, not tricks or hacks.

I hope you’ll become a more confident reader – especially as a reader confronted with books you may have been told to read rather than chosen for yourself.

More than anything, I hope you’ll learn to begin well: asking better questions of every text you encounter, whether it’s an unseen extract or a novel you’ve been studying for months.

The skills of close reading don’t belong to one book. They travel with you.

Look at enough of these, early enough, and I think you’ll end up equipped to handle the beginning of any text, maybe even an ‘unseen‘ extract in an exam …

Which Texts Will You Be Covering?

I’ll mostly be exploring the wide range of prose texts studied for A-Level English Literature in England and Wales.

Some are familiar friends. Others will be new discoveries. As the series develops, if you think you know which is which, let me know!

If there’s a text you’re studying and you’d like to see it move towards the front of the queue, get in touch.

That’s part of the pleasure. Every reader begins somewhere, and every novel deserves the chance to speak before someone else explains it.

So … shall we begin?

One hundred words.

One careful reading.

Every Friday evening. We begin tomorrow.

I’d be delighted if you joined us.