Your First Ten Pages

And Why They Can Make or Break Your Next Book

Next week, I’m teaching at a writing retreat with my friend Joe Bunting. We’re doing it in Oxford, England, which seemed appropriate. The assignment to all attendees is to bring their first ten pages of a work-in-progress. One writer asked why.

What’s so special about ten pages?

Nothing, really. Except that it’s the right amount to get a sense of what this thing is or could be. This is what a publisher wants to see before they green light production of a book. It’s what an editor wants to get a handle on your progress. And it’s what an agent hopes to see in a proposal to see what chops you have.

Ten pages, depending on font sizes and spacing, is about a few thousand words, which is something like an Introduction to a nonfiction book or a relatively short chapter in a novel. It’s a good sample of the rest of the book will, or could, be.

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Recently, I was working with a client on a book proposal. It took three months, and when we were done we sent the full document to his agent. After we didn’t hear from him for a couple of weeks, the agent called and said this wasn’t it. We had not nailed the idea or the voice, and as a result he didn’t think the book was sellable.

He told me he had talked to the author already and that the author (my client) had a powerful story—but it wasn’t coming through in the writing. We needed to rewrite the whole thing. I was discouraged but determined to get it right. Nonetheless, no writer wants to go back to the drawing board.

“Before you do that, though,” he said on the phone, “gimme ten good pages, and let’s see if there’s something there.”

So I called up the author, and we spent a couple hours on the phone. I recorded every word he said. And as he told me the story of driving down a highway in Denver at midnight, driving over 120 miles an hour, how he wanted to die, and the four questions that came to mind that caused him to slow down the vehicle—four questions that incidentally changed his life—I knew we had it. That story, that revelation, and everything that followed was the hook we were looking for.

The next day, I told my wife I needed to disappear for a couple of hours and went to a nearby Mexican restaurant. I ordered a $4 “Happy Hour” beer and a basket of unlimited chips and salsa. And for the next two hours, I typed like that Kermit-the-frog gif you see: arms flying in all directions, fingers maniacally slamming down on the keys.

At the end of the evening, I had my ten pages. They still needed to work, still needed to be edited and fact-checked, but I could feel that something special had happened. I’d been afraid to do this, but the fear was greater than the actual doing.

The next day, I did some quick revising then shared the piece with my client. After making a few final edits based on his feedback, I sent the excerpt to the agent. He got back to us both immediately:

“This is exactly what I was looking for.”

There’s a story about J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis going to lunch one afternoon at their preferred pub The Eagle and the Child (which they affectionately called “The Bird and the Baby.””

Tolkien is trying to figure out how to get over his recent bout of writer’s block, and he’s turned to an old friend for help. Both he and Lewis met while teaching at Oxford, sharing pieces of poetry they’d written.

At this point, Tolkien has already published The Hobbit to considerable acclaim. He’s working on a new book now, but he’s stuck. It’s been months since he’s written anything new, he’s past deadline, and now he is considering giving up. When the two authors meet, Lewis cuts straight to the quick and tells his friend what he thinks of the story.

“Tollers,” he says, “don’t you know that hobbits are only interesting when you place them in unhobbit-like circumstances?”

It’s everything Tolkien needed to hear in a simple question. He had to get Frodo and his buddies out of the Shire if they were going to have an epic adventure. The story needed to move, and so did the author.

Tolkien reworked the beginning of his book, moving the hobbits out of the Shire, thus beginning The Lord of the Rings as we know it today—and the rest was history. Sometimes, the difference between a masterpiece and yet another addition to the slush pile is getting those first ten pages right.¹

A poet once said the truth depends on a walk around a lake, and I think the same can be said of any brilliant idea. Brilliance is contingent on a person’s ability to reframe their perspective: to revisit an old idea, discard what doesn’t work, and double down on what does.²

Most writers want to focus on the macro, on the larger scope of any project, and there is merit to doing so. But what often matters most is the micro, the small but significant choices that build over the course of an entire book.

Readers don’t read books, after all. They read sentences, paragraphs, and pages. And as those pieces build, you either do or don’t have an actual book. As the author, you have to be able to captivate them for minutes before you expect them to give you hours. That is always the job, the hardest part of building worlds and spreading ideas. We writers are in the attention business, whether we like it or not.

We writers are in the attention business, whether we like it or not.

If you can’t get someone into your story within the first ten pages of beginning it, then you don’t have a book. You may have five hundred pages of an epic work of staggering genius, but it’s not anything people will read. If your big idea can’t be fleshed out in the first few thousand words, it doesn’t matter how big it is. Expecting a reader to hold out for page 11 or 23 or 55 before you deliver just won’t work.

Which is why we asked our attendees to bring their first ten pages to Oxford and be ready to share and rework them. Sometimes, all it takes to turn a piece of writing around is getting those ten pages right and sharing them with someone who cares.

It’s reductive to say this is the difference between success and failure, but that wouldn’t be entirely wrong. A willingness to revisit and reconsider is most of what writing is about.

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I originally shared this story in my book Real Artists Don’t Starve, which I (even more originally) heard from Inklings scholar Diana Glyer. She writes about it in her book Bandersnatch.

This quote comes from a Wallace Stevens’ poem called “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.” I first heard the reference from David Whyte.

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© 2024 Jeff Goins
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