You know what the most awful part of writing anything is, don’t you, Amadeus? It’s always the first page. Be it your own attempt at penning the Great American Novel, a tome of your beliefs, a short story, your latest school essay or merely an entry within your journal (Women have “diaries”!), the first page always proves itself the most irritating of barriers separating yourself from Accomplishment.

Listen, here’s why the first page is Hell: No matter what you are writing, the opening page of your work establishes a baseline for all that follows, like questions the policeman will ask prior to his or her earnest interrogation of your honesty in a polygraph test. The problem with this arises from our general understanding, as humans who for the most part are entrenched in lifestyles devoid of day-to-day adventure, that the baseline is boring. Really boring, in fact.

Boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring.

Now at least with Nonfiction, that class of the written word with which this website is concerned (debatable, yes), the baseline serves a clear purpose. You can’t write a book about Lyndon B. Johnson’s sex life if you don’t mention that he was married to Lady Bird (I used to think her parents should’ve been brought up on charges, but after recent information provided by newsstand magazines that Gwyneth Paltrow has named her daughter “Apple”, I believe there are bigger fish to fry. Besides, Lady Bird’s parents are dead.). Plus, as in the case of Lyndon B. Johnson’s sex life, a potential reader can use the opportunity afforded to him/her by an introduction and put the book down, back away slowly.

Fiction First Pages are entirely different sorts of Hell. Again, the baselines are uninteresting, but without prior knowledge of the characters, new events lack meaning. Plenty of tonics for the malady of such necessary set-up have been applied: Filling the Setup With Amusing Humor, Filling the Setup With Action (any James Bond movie being a good example), Teasing the Audience Prior to the Setup (the problem with these being obvious; the set-up has been displaced, not replaced), Writing First Pages About First Pages, Having the Superhero Foil the 50th Bank Robbery In As Many Issues (in Pre-Giulani New York, maybe I could see this, but now?), Cheating By Using Well-Known Characters In Lieu of Originals So Background Information Isn’t Necessary. Occasionally these remedies work. Other times, they don’t. The only surefire method of defeating the Fiction First Page is, I believe, cutting out the set-up in its entirety, and leaving it out without apology. You’d be amazed how many stories you could improve if you simply deleted the first act.

(An excellent example: My grandmother and I attended a cinema to catch a showing of the Ben Affleck historical drama “Pearl Harbor”, but we accidentally walked into the wrong theater. The showing of “Pearl Harbor” we sat down to watch was half-finished when we arrived . The kicker: Neither of us noticed. We sat through HALF of “Pearl Harbor” and left the movie fully believing we had seen all of it. There is a very good lesson in our experience for every person interested in writing fiction.)

I digress and summarize:

First Pages. Yugh. I hate ‘em, A. I hate ‘em a lot. Almost as much as I hate writing a last page.

And if you think I’m getting into that, you’re crazy.

Your brother Theocrat,

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