Beyond that momentous first line

I wrote the first line. Of my new Middle-Grade novel. I wrote the line I find most difficult, challenging and frightening to write. The first one.


I don't love it. The line that I came up with. But I wrote it.


And then I wrote the second line. The third line. Full paragraphs even. Almost the entire first page to the book.


I am very excited.


But I am also now facing all of the other challenges a writer faces when she/he begins a new project, like making decisions as to tone, language, diction, character, and physical descriptions.


I am fortunate in that I have chosen a real location as the central setting for the book so the major decisions regarding that aspect of the novel have been made for me.


My concern now, however, is to make sure that I get the right "flavour" to my writing. That my narrative voice captures an appropriate tone, that its choice of words is both appropriate and compelling, that it creates initial descriptions for my principal characters and my key settings that are memorable and evocative.


I read over that triumphant first page last night and started to second guess myself.  About everything.


Are my sentences too long? or maybe too short? Should I be injecting humour into what is intended to be a suspenseful opening scene or should I leave that until later?


I even questioned details as small as my choice of diction in a given sentence: should I use the word "calculated" or the word "counted"?


How should I describe my main character? When should I describe her?


And that plays into much bigger questions like: do I want my narrator to be third-person limited (written as if sitting on my main character's shoulder, seeing only what she sees, knowing only what she knows)? or do I want to use the third-person omniscient approach, where my narrator knows all (though she might not choose to share it with the reader)?


If I'm using the TP Limited, then I can only really insert a description of my character when she herself would be thinking about her appearance: "She passed a mirror and saw that the wind had made a mess of her long blonde hair".


On the other hand, if I'm using the TP Omniscient, then I can just insert a paragraph of description wherever I chose to: "She was a tall, slim girl with messy blonde hair, piercing brown eyes and the slim facial features of an Italian sculpture."


You will notice that I have already eliminated any thought of using the first person narrative voice for this book: that decision was made without any conscious deliberation on my part. FP doesn't seem right for a book of this nature.


That's one of the wonders (and burdens) of writing fiction: you create the entire world and every choice you make in creating that world will have an impact on the success of your writing. Not only do you choose the whos, wheres and whats, you also choose the what colours, how talls, how manys and how oftens.


You are responsible for every word in the book. You are responsible for every detail in the book. And, as if that's not enough responsibility to place on a single person, you are also responsible for every detail that is not in the book.


Crazy as it sounds, the decision as to what NOT to include in your book is often as important as the decision as to what to include and how.


Yeah, I can really tie myself up in knots, can't I?


Ah, Stephen King, you've got it right. Just write. And write and write and write. Don't edit until you're done writing. Then use the revision process as a sculptor works with a block of marble: carve away the excess so that the story emerges, clear, crisp and gorgeously detailed.