Welcome to my writing pages! The main focus of this website is to offer writing tips, prompts, and inspiration to writers, no matter what their genre or skill level. You’ll also find information on my published works and the ones in progress. My schedule for posting is:

Monday Sparks: Writing prompts to fan your creative flame.

Thursdays – Writing tips based on a monthly theme

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3 Steps to Mastering Your Novel’s Beginning

How to the write the beginning of your novel

Last week, I discussed 2 secrets for creating a hook for your novel–those attention-grabbing first few lines in chapter 1. Today, I’m offering 3 steps to mastering your novel’s beginning. But before I get to those steps, I need to explain what the beginning of your novel does.

What is the purpose of the beginning of your novel?

The beginning of a novel has 2 jobs: introducing and establishing the characters, plots, and settings. It doesn’t matter which genre you’re writing. All beginnings must do this. The beginning should orient readers in the world of the novel and answer questions of who, what, when, and where. Readers should find out quickly who the protagonist is, basic facts about this character’s personality and motives, where the novel is taking place, the timeframe for it, and what problem the protagonist faces. The how and the why of the novel should unfold over the course of the book.

Now that we know the purpose of the beginning of a novel, how do we write accomplish the jobs of introducing and establishing while still maintaining tension? As I’ve stated in previous posts, tension is the engine that keeps readers turning the pages of your novel. Although readers have just opened a novel, there should still be tension on the first page. But beginnings are the best place to kill tension because we have to work at introducing and establishing readers in the world of our novel. A compelling beginning balances tension with getting readers settled in the story world.

Space how many characters you introduce in a chapter.

The novels in my Rae Riley Mysteries have a lot of characters, so I’m very conscious of not introducing too many characters in a chapter or scene at the beginning. I only bring in the characters that are absolutely necessary to carry the action or dialogue. Introducing numerous characters in a few pages will kill tension. Too much space is taken up with adequately explaining all these characters are.

Use only the settings you need.

If your beginning comes to eight chapters, and each chapter has a new setting, describing each of those settings will weigh down the tension. See if some of the settings can be used again.

Especially in the first chapters and scenes, we should bring readers into major settings. In my Halloween mystery, A Riddle in the Lonesome October, the first chapter is set at an outdoor Halloween experience–customers walk through the woods where scenes created from Edgar Allan Poe stories are enacted. This location is the major setting for the novel. Most of the action and plot points happen here. So I introduced and established it as soon as possible in the first chapter.

Introduce a problem in the first chapter.

It doesn’t have to be the main problem that the protagonist will tackle throughout the story, but the problem must be important and tied to the main one. In Riddle, my amateur sleuth Rae Riley is riding home from work with her dad, Sheriff Malinowski. Her Aunt Carrie, who is head of security at the Halloween event, calls them, saying a trespasser has been caught the day before it opens, and the man wants to talk to the sheriff. So Rae and her dad drive to the event. Trespassing becomes a major plot point in the mystery, and I establish it early. The trespasser also gives me the chance to introduce the main mystery in the first chapter: a weird will with a lost inheritance.

What’s the best beginning you’ve read?

May 14, 2026 0

Write an Hook for this Scene

To fit my theme of beginnings this month on JPC Allen Writes, write a hook for this scene. This picture holds so much potential for inspiration. Here’s my hook:

The call from across the lake was like nothing I’d ever heard before and I’d lived along its shores my whole life.

If you’d like guidance on writing hooks, read my post about the 2 secrets for creating them.Drop your hook in the comments.

May 11, 2026 2

2 Secrets for Creating a Compelling Hook for Your Novel

Before I dive into the 2 secrets for creating a compelling hook for your novel, I wanted to remind you that the theme for JPC Allen Writes during 2026 is how to write a novel. With four months behind us, we’ve covered:

This month will be about how to write the beginning of your novel. The hook is the opening line or lines that snag the attention of readers so thoroughly that they can’t put your book down. That sounds like a tall order and it is, but keep reading.

No hook? No problem.

If you can’t get past page 1 of your novel because you can’t come up with a creative hook, write a lousy one. It’s not permanent. Consider it an interim hook until the permanent hook arrives. Write your opening lines and then keep going.

Now write the whole novel.

What? What about the hook? Often, especially for first-time novelists, you have to slog through a first draft before you understand your characters and their journey through the story. Only when you’ve reached the final page are you in a position to understand how to create a hook for your particular story. Go back to your interim hook and throw it out or refine it to fit the rest of your book.

2 Secrets for Creating a Hook

The two secrets are that your hook should be meaningful and project tension. By meaningful, I mean the hook should reflect what readers should expect in your novel. The exciting opening sequence that turns out to be a dream, a flashback, or a scene on a movie set is not meaningful. Readers will feel cheated.

The best hooks also project tension, either hinting at the problem facing your protagonist that will soon become clear in the first chapters or plunking the problem in front of readers with the first line.

Here are the first line of my three novels:

A Shadow on the Snow. “I’M NOT FOOLED, RAE. YOU’RE JUST LIKE YOUR MOTHER.”

19-year-old Rae Riley receives anonymous notes that grow more threatening. That’s the mystery she has to solve, and I begin the novel with the message from the first anonymous note. I put the problem front and center in the first line.

A Storm of Doubts. “‘Just stop it!’ The shout made me jerk and get poked by a dead branch of a honeysuckle bush. Wasn’t that a woman’s voice? Not a girl’s, not my cousin Coral’s.”

Since this is a mystery, someone shouting like she’s in trouble creates immediate tension.

A Riddle in the Lonesome October. “‘We’ve got a bit of a situation here at the children’s home, Mal.’ Aunt Carrie’s voice came over the phone.”

The line of dialogue carries tension. What’s the situation? What could be happening at a children’s home? This first line hints at the tension involved in a hunt for a missing inheritance which is explained in the first chapter.

So let me know which opening lines did a great job of pulling you into a novel.

May 7, 2026 2

Best Openings Lines from Your Favorite Novels

On JPC Allen Writes this month, we’re all about how to write the beginning to your novel. So my bookish question for Monday Sparks is what are the best opening lines from your favorite novels?

When I look at the first page of my favorite novels, it’s a bit of shock to realize that most of them don’t have memorable first lines. Most of my favorite novels are older, so there wasn’t the push that there is now to grab readers’ attention with the first sentence. Authors could take a couple of chapters to slowly reel in readers.

First line of the The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton is the one memorable line among my favorite novels:

“When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.”

But here some other opening lines from my favorite novels:

“It was an old plane, a four-engine plasma jet that had been retired from active service, and it came in along a route that was neither economical nor particularly safe.” fromFantastic Voyageby Issac Asimov

“The primroses were over.” from Watership Down by Richard Adams

“Grant lay on his white cot and stared at the ceiling.” from The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

“Don’t talk droopy talk,” Archie Carstairs said. “Mother can’t have lost a twelve-pound turkey.” from Home Sweet Homicide by Craig Rice.

These are all great novel, but they don’t have the hooks contemporary novels expect. So let me hear from you. What are the best opening lines from your favorite novels? And if your favorites don’t have a great opening line, tell me why you like the novel despite a less than stellar hook.

Here are more bookish questions for avid readers.

May 4, 2026 0

How to Make a Novel Great with Subplots

I’ve written a lot this month about plots but haven’t addressed subplots. Subplots are unique to novels because short stories aren’t long enough to handle them. How do you make a novel great with subplots? Below are three ways subplots improve a novel.

Reflect the theme

In my Halloween mystery,A Riddle in the Lonesome October, Rae deals with fear and how to handle it as a Christian. Her cousin and uncle also struggle with fear after a terrible riding accident. Her cousin and uncle’s battles allow me to explore the theme with different characters, who have different responses to it, making the story richer for readers.

Complicate the main plot

Subplots in mysteries can help obscure the solution. Many times in the novels by Agatha Christie, a lesser crime is woven into the murder, which complicates discovering the identity of the killer. Subplots can add layers of complexities to the main plot, but they must support the main plot. For example, let’s say I’m writing a mystery about the owner an old local theater getting killed in it. So a lot of the mystery has to be set in the theater. My amateur sleuth is a retired teacher who volunteers at a community garden. If I have several scenes where my sleuth talks to friends and strangers at the garden and the only things readers learn is gardening techniques, then my subplot of working at the community garden isn’t supporting the overall plot of the murder mystery.

Inject fun

Subplots can add humor, if that’s appropriate for your novel. In each of my cozy mysteries, my protagonist’s younger brothers, who’s ten, is always working on an invention. It malfunctions somehow, attacking their father, and somehow, I always make the invention a component in solving the mystery. Since I’m writing about a close family, and my teen protagonist has a sense of humor, this subplot works.

Here’s all my posts on plot this month. If you have a question about writing plots, drop it in the comments.

April 30, 2026 0

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