It is all well and good that experienced people share their advice with neophytes, with those who are less practised, less confident, or simply eager to imitate. There is nothing inherently wrong with offering footholds. This particular video, for instance, sets out ten strategies for the opening paragraph, each supposedly designed to stop readers from bolting at the first hurdle. For the green and anxious, a checklist can feel like a lifeline.
But here is the rub. The first rule of writing, which is also the first rule of art, is that there are no rules. There are, admittedly, a near-infinite number of bad ideas – every creative writing workshop is proof of that – but this abundance of failure does not magically distil into a shortlist of approved techniques. “Best practice” is a managerial fiction dressed up as gospel.
NB: I am not disparaging John Fox, Bookfox, or this video. I am commenting on the notion of writing formulae. I found the tips informative and on-point, but in the end, you are the artist.
Yes, if you are working in a commercial genre, there are conventions and tropes that must be acknowledged. A murder mystery without a corpse is merely awkward, and a romance without union or rupture is simply wishful thinking. But let us be clear: these are expectations, not commandments. They are signposts, not shackles.
The danger of this kind of advice is not that it is wrong, but that it is received as dogma. If every first paragraph dutifully obeyed these ten tricks, the outcome would not be ten compelling openings but ten perfectly interchangeable ones. Predictability, not incompetence, is the real enemy of writing. To follow rules too tightly is to aim directly at cliché.
And yet the defence is equally obvious. A novice often requires boundaries, if only to resist paralysis. “Begin here, avoid this, try that.” Advice of this sort can be useful scaffolding, and scaffolding, while inelegant, keeps the building upright until the architect has a design. The problem arises when people mistake the scaffolding for the cathedral.
So the honest conclusion is double-edged. Watch the video if you like. Steal what steadies you, ignore what doesn’t. But do not imagine that art is born from lists. At best, such advice can prevent you from falling flat on your face; at worst, it convinces you that walking in circles is the same thing as running.
Ridley Park 