First Five Pages Syndrome

Hello FF Readers!I'm currently neck deep in rewrites, so pardon the short post.We’ve come to that time of year (which has become more and more nebulous) when TV shows make a last bid for our attention. Quite a few of those shows are in their freshman run and are competing with a huge field to get noticed. By consequence too many of these shows suffer from what I call First Five Pages Syndrome.Writers know that this is the mythical time it takes a reader to pick up a book and decide whether or not they intend to finish it. So, writers try with near maniacal precision to craft the perfect opening—five pages worth—to entice a reader to keep reading. As a writer I find this beyond stressful. As a reader, I feel like the first five pages are condescending. I give a book considerably more than five pages before I abandon it.TV shows do the same thing. They try to accomplish in one episode what used to take a whole season. It makes it feel hurried and overstuffed, like a badly made sausage. It’s something I keep in mind while I wade through another round of edits. Good stories are good stories and writers have to trust they’ll find the right readers.

The Elusive Ooh

Writers are some of the best readers. Many of the same traits that make a good writer are cultivated by good readers. Attention to detail. Love of a good story. Ability to suspend disbelief. But there's a fourth thing that I've only ever experienced as a writer.I've been working on my second novel and the moments that give me the most agita are when I know where something starts and where I need to go, but not how to get there. A plot point will irked me for days, even weeks because I can't figure out how it fits into the larger whole.And then it happens. I poke and prod and reshape and then I find my way from A to C. I find B. I call it the elusive ooh. I call it that because it's usually what I say when I finally crack the code. Kind of like that moment in a fairy tale when it all turns around for the protagonist.It happened when I was thinking about what to post today. I mentally searched my catalog of fairy tales and folk stories, thinking of ways to connect it to my editing woes and then... Ooh, I could just write about my editing woes. Or better yet, how I overcome them.