on Live Write Thrive:

Noah Lukeman, in his book The First Five Pages (published in 2000), says “Over the years I’ve read thousands of manuscripts, all, unbelievably, with the exact same type of mistakes. … Writers are doing the exact same things wrong.” I’ve found this to be spot-on in the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of manuscripts I’ve edited and critiqued too. He goes on to explain that the opening pages are indicative of the rest of a manuscript. Meaning, the weak writing or glaring errors or “bad” writing habits noticed on the first few pages almost always implies the rest of the manuscript will be more of the same.

For that reason, it doesn’t help to have a writer say something like “Wait till you get further in, when the story gets rolling. Then you’ll see how good it is.” No, we’ll probably know “how good it is” by seeing how good that first page is.

I spent months examineing what makes these first pages grab readers and pull them into the novel.