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read this magnificent piece of work. Tears, shrieks, gasps, cries—it’s a masterpiece and unbelievable that anyone could write such stuff. And of course, it then is priceless and highly coveted. Which leads Optimus into all kinds of danger.
    My dream is to someday spend a good amount of time (perhaps a year) trying to write the most powerful, beautiful, moving first scene (ten pages) that will evoke this kind of intense emotional response. I hope one day to host a workshop each year called “the Ten-Page Challenge,” where a group of writers spend a few days seeing if they can create such a powerful scene. What if you could make your reader cry, become breathless, gasp, experience an elevated heart rate—all this in your first scene. Is it possible? I believe it is.
     
    First Paragraph, First Thoughts
     
    Since we’re discussing the heart of your story and all the major elements you need to set up in your first few pages, I want to stop for a moment and talk about the whole experience of diving in to begin establishing all these essential first elements needed in your novel. As I mentioned earlier, that first scene has a tremendous burden, and you may have to go back once your novel is done and rewrite that scene to tie in neatly with the themes you’ve developed throughout your novel, as well as homogenize your voice. 
    There’s nothing wrong with this, and if you keep in mind you are just trying to line up all your ducks without too much precision at first, you won’t freeze up from the enormous weight of the task. The ducks are going to bump into each other and quack a bit in irritation, but later on you can calm them down and impose order on them so they swim in a nice tidy line. (Okay, just felt like I had to run—paddle?—with that analogy.)
     
    Who’s Your Audience?
     
    I find that I often start each novel a bit rough in terms of voice and style. I don’t write each book in the same style; in fact, many of my books showcase such diverse styles that readers have commented that they never would have known I was the author of these very different novels. In a series, for example, you would want to keep the same identifiable voice and style, and that’s what I do in my seven-book fantasy series, which I’ve set up to be able to go deep and evocative with language and imagery. But in my “noir” suspense dramas, I use an entirely different style—more of a tight, terse voice that fits the genre.
    And that’s what you want to always be thinking about as you begin to write your novel and start setting the tone as you write the first scene. You need to know who your audience is and what style they’re expecting when they read that genre. If you’re writing strict genre (tailoring your novel to fit in a very specific slot), you need to do your homework and study the style and voice of writers who write those kinds of books. No doubt you are probably already a fan and reader of that genre (that’s why you love writing it), and so you should have a feel for this already as you begin your book.
     
    Where to Start?
     
    In addition to making sure your first scene has all the aforementioned elements, you also want to think about what situation would best set up your premise (what your story is basically about), plot arc, character arc, theme, and mood for your novel. You may have to write a bunch of different first chapters, as I sometimes do. Sometimes it’s not until you near the end of writing your book that you get the right idea for the opening scene. You might be like John Irving, who starts every novel with the last line of his book and works backward (yes, he does!). But he’s onto something there—do you see? He knows exactly where he wants his readers to end up—plot-wise and theme-wise. He already knows the end of the story and the take-home feeling or thought he wants to evoke, so he sets about figuring how to lead that back to the start. Maybe that technique will work for you.
    Think