On Beginnings
opening lines and origin stories
Opening lines often come to me and remain intact.
Of course, now that I’ve said it, I’ve probably cursed myself for all future projects, but the opening lines of NOW THAT WE DON’T TALK and the two subsequent manuscripts I’ve written have survived many rounds of critique partner and beta reader eyes.
(Apologies if you’ve had to revise your opening a zillion-and-seventeen times, and this is triggering for you. At least I got my standard-issue apology note out of the way early this time?)
The entire opening scene of NTWDT is virtually identical to my first draft of the book. I maybe learned the difference between lay and lie (and then immediately forgot—but also TBD because I’m still waiting on my copyedits to tell me definitively), but that’s about all that changed. One thing about coming from a screenwriting background is that there’s a constant loop in my head chanting “get into the scene late, and get out early.” It’s actually criticism I got from agents while querying NTWDT—because it doesn’t always apply to novels, especially when the interiority of the character is so vital. It’s a thing I’ve had to unlearn as I transitioned from screenwriter to author. But I do think that an eye for screenplay structure has often helped me figure out how to start in the right place, and that certainly gives a leg up.
If you’ve been following me for a bit, you may know that NTWDT started out as a feature screenplay. I’d outlined it as such—a Hanukkah rom-com. I wrote a handful of pages (in my head it was three, but I found the Final Draft file and it was more like four and a quarter), and then realized that this story was telling me it wasn’t being told in the correct format. I was trying to get into Norah, my FMC’s, POV via her best friend, Frankie, but something wasn’t working. Even though there are lines from those few pages of script that have made it into the book, it wasn’t right. I wasn’t getting her voice across the way I could if I was truly in her head.
I went back to my screenplay outline, and re-broke the entire story as a book instead. I’d read enough to know that the structure I’d outlined was all wrong for a romance novel. In rom-com movies, the culminating grand gesture can lead to a first kiss, and then we call it a happily ever after as credits roll. In romance novels, it feels different to me somehow. I like to see them together for a minute so that the third act breakup (hi! third act breakup apologist here!) hurts more and then the resolution is that much sweeter.1
Where my story ended as a film is now around the 60% mark of the book itself. Because Norah has a lot more trauma to work through. And she didn’t have as much of that when it was a cuter little rom-com feature either! I honestly can’t remember how the original outline went, but I feel fairly certain that while Norah’s dad was still dead (because the premise was always that Norah and Henry’s moms were dating), the grief component was much smaller, if it was even a factor at all. Because again, I was trying to write a cute lil rom-com!
As I started thinking about all of this, I was reminded of the time I actually *did* write a cute lil rom-com feature. My sophomore year of college, I talked my way into a screenwriting class called Writing the Romantic Comedy. It was meant for upperclassmen and grad students, but I knew that as someone who only ever wanted to write about relationships,2 I needed to take that class, and it was only going to be offered this one time, not in a year or two when I actually qualified. After a lot of pleading with the professor, I managed to get in. In that class, I wrote a second chance wintery rom-com about two former high school sweethearts who were forced back together to pull off a wedding in a week for their siblings who were secretly pregnant. I completely forgot about this script because it’s been fifteen years, but the similarities between that concept and NTWDT are definitely there. Granted, this screenplay had a lot more silly hijinks—much more classic 90s rom-com than NTWDT could have ever been—but it was kind of hilarious to revisit this thing I absolutely did not remember when I was drafting my book that was somehow still ingrained in the back of my mind. Both projects feature a return to their hometown, childhood… somethings with *baggage* forced back together because of their family members’ relationship, business boys living in New York who are much more together than their female counterparts, and a scene of the FMC desperately trying to prove she’s not a bad driver (which maybe says more about me, Rachel, than anything else). I was talking with a writer friend about this, and she completely called it—“We like what we like.” And boy do I love second chance (or second chance adjacent, in Henry and Norah’s case).
FWIW I *do* think that NOW THAT WE DON’T TALK would be great for adaptation as a Netflix or Amazon etc movie! Or my universe of interconnected standalone books into a show (my actual dream, coming from a TV background). But this is just that for now—a dream.
I don’t know when this post will actually go live, but the day I’m writing it is also the three year anniversary of me finishing the first draft of NTWDT. I know that sounds more like an ending than a beginning, but I’d argue the opposite. Finishing a first draft is really only the beginning of the process. But it was also the beginning of this new chapter of my life because hey! I could write a whole ass novel! I did it! After writing scripts for so long, I wasn’t sure if it was something I *could* do. In screenplays, blank space on the page is King. Do you KNOW how many words a novel is??3 Especially in comparison to how FEW words are in a screenplay??
I had written three YA “novels” in high school, before my focus shifted to television in college. I use the word novel loosely here because what did I know at age 14, with a book that would have died two years later when Hannah Montana came out because it was a similar premise? Or my own epistolary-adjacent journal book (obviously inspired by the format of THE PRINCESS DIARIES) at 16, that was pretty much just wish fulfillment about my first high school boyfriend and breakup, giving way to a HEA with the guy I had a much bigger crush on. Or the 78k word book I wrote about unknown actors working on a teen soap that’s pretty much just Dawson’s Creek fanfic about young Katie Holmes and Joshua Jackson (who dated and broke up before their characters even got together).4 I did reread some of that one when I decided to pivot NTWDT into a novel, even though I wrote it a decade and a half prior, just to see if I could even *do* prose.
Turns out those opening lines aren’t terrible either.
But perhaps my crowning achievement of first lines happened earlier than all of this, when second grade Rachel took the snack food she was supposed to use as inspiration for a Language Arts assignment, and wrote a first-person narrative about a piece of dough named Dolly who was being baked into a pretzel by a baker known as “The Painmaker.”
My child woke up from her nap and I lost my train of thought, so maybe this is the right place to admit—beginnings? Easy for me. Endings? Absolutely excruciating. With all three books I’ve written, I’ve had to pause and re-break the last acts every single time. Books two and three are still probably a mess, but I love where Norah and Henry ended up. I think they really work hard to earn their HEA. I hope you’ll think so too.
xo R
Plus, as a romance novel, it could have more sex.
It was really there right in front of me the whole time that I was meant to write romance novels, huh?
My first draft was 81k. The current draft of NTWDT is about 92k.
OK… actually that one might have legs. I’m thinking dual timeline, lots of angst, should I be talking about this with my agent and not the internet… ?