How Rowling Kept Her Manuscript Out of the Rejection Pile (And You Can Too)

Every week agents sift through overwhelming amounts of unsolicited manuscripts. Give them just one excuse to dump yours into the rejection pile and they'll take it. You have one sentence . . . perhaps one paragraph . . . maybe, just maybe - if the planets are aligned - the entire first page (but don't count on it).

So how did Rowling keep her manuscript out of the rejection pile?

Look at her first sentence in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone:

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley's insistence on being normal foreshadows to the reader that something abnormal is most certainly going to happen. This also conveys to the reader that the story will have action - and soon. (It's like a promise between the writer and reader: Keep reading and I promise something exciting will happen.)

Other small things that help the first sentence work:

1. Rowling introduces two main characters right away. (Specifics draw in the reader.)

2. She includes a specific location.

3. She gives the sentence a sort of "humanness" with the phrase "thank you very much" - as if the reader was being talked to directly.

The first sentence is a success - the agent is hooked . . . for now. Rowling moves on to the next level; she now has a whole paragraph to prove herself. What does she do with it? She writes:

They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense.

Here Rowling deepens the foreshadowing. Whatever abnormal thing that's going to happen to the Dursleys isn't going to be something banal (like buying lutefisk instead of tuna at the grocery store); it's going to be something "strange" and "mysterious" (she's upping her promise). This makes the reader begin to wonder - to hypothesize in their mind what it could possibly be.

(Notice again that this sentence has some "humanness" with the phrase "they just didn't hold with such nonsense," as if the Dursleys were wagging their fingers at the reader.)

The agent decides to give the manuscript an entire page's worth of her attention.

Rowling spends a good chunk of that on the Dursley's background, illustrating to the reader just how normal (and boring) they are. It might seem like a precious waste of space writing about mustaches and garden fences, especially since she now only has one more paragraph until the agent either decides to turn the page or toss it, but that is the art of suspense.

Suspense is like a rubber band. If you keep it pulled taut the whole time, eventually it will just snap in half. Rowling takes a break to bring her characters to life. But she doesn't make the reader wait long - not so early in the story.

The very next paragraph, the last one of the first page, she writes:

The Dursleys had everything they wanted, but they also had a secret, and their greatest fear was that somebody would discover it.

Now if you were the agent, would you toss the manuscript or would you give it just one more chance and turn the page?

Some writers are afraid of starting their story out with a bang. They worry that if they start big, they'll have nowhere else to go. But if a story has to hobble out of the gate, trust me, it's not a good story. You have to go big or go home - and Rowling went big.

Now look at your first page. Step back and be critical. Look at it through a reader's eyes. Ask yourself these questions:

Does it draw you into the story with specifics?

Does it make you ask questions (and make you want to find out the answers)?

Does it have some form of suspense?

Does it promise you that something will happen - something big?

There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

~ Walter Wellesley Smith