The 13 Most Common Errors on a Novel's First Page 

• Over-explanation. This includes prologues. “Prologues are never needed. You can usually throw them in the garbage. They’re usually put on as a patch.”
• Too much data. “You’re trying to seduce your reader, not burden them,” Friedman said.
• Over-writing, or “trying too hard.” “We think the more description we add, the more vivid it will be; but we don’t want to be distracted from the story” we open the book for.
• Beginning the novel with an interior monologue or reflection. Usually this is written as the thoughts of a character who is sitting alone, musing and thinking back on a story. Just start with the story.
• Beginning the novel with a flashback. Friedman isn’t entirely anti-flashback, but the novel’s opening page is the wrong place for one.
• Beginning a novel with the “waking up sequence” of a character waking, getting out of bed, putting on slippers, heading for the kitchen and coffee…a cliche
• Related cliche: beginning the novel with an alarm clock or a ringing phone
• Starting out with an “ordinary day’s routine” for the main character
• Beginning with “crisis moments” that aren’t unique: “When the doctor said ‘malignant,’ my life changed forever…” or “The day my father left us I was seven years old…”
• Don’t start with a dialogue that doesn’t have any context. Building characterization through dialogue is okay anywhere else but there.
• Starting with backstory, or “going back, then going forward.”
• Info dump. More formally called “exposition.”
• Character dump, which is four or more characters on the first page.

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