How not to start your novel

If you're trying to get published, the odds are you are going to have to make your way through a few gatekeepers before someone, somewhere decides to give you a shot.

Literary agents, commissioning editors and publishers - and even their assistants - go through hundreds upon hundreds of manuscripts before choosing the one that they'll take a chance on. Getting them to even read past the first paragraph can be terribly tricky. Yes, it can be a matter of taste, or mood, or any amount of environmental factors, but there are a few recurring no-nos that have been collected from agents and publishers across the world.

Here we list the top 5.

1. Too much description
Whether you're expounding on the weather, setting an idyllic village scene (and still doing it three pages later) or having your protagonist muse long-windedly about whatever it is he/she likes to muse about, you're probably going to bore your reader. And fast. Get to the action. You're not Tolkein.

2. False beginnings
"Write left, dodge right. Muahaha! You weren't expecting that, Reader. I've got you now." Right? Wrong!
Leading your reader off in one direction, only to change it straight away is incredibly annoying. That means starting the story in a dream, killing off who the reader thought was the protagonist early, getting too into a minor character, anything that makes the reader feel like they just wasted a couple hours of their life, really.

3. Avoid the prologue
"What?!" you gasp. But seriously. A prologue is a fairly lazy way to add exposition or back story when you're not sure how to include it in the main text, and half the time it takes the reader ages to figure out what the point of it was. It's a fairly common device in fantasy, but avoid it all the same.

4. Obvious beginnings
An alarm clock, the first day of school, a birth. Even getting fired, although it is the end of something, is an obvious start of something new. Anything that is obviously the beginning of a new path should be avoided at all costs. Start in the middle of the action.

5. Starting with dialogue
The reader has no context for the speakers, so there's no reason for him or her to care about what is being said. This goes for anything that requires context - a battle, a bar fight, a game of soccer. Who do we root for?