Ed McDonald has spent many years dancing between different professions, cities and countries, but the only thing any of them share in common is that they have allowed him enough free time to write. He currently lives with his wife in London, a city that provides him with constant inspiration, where he works as a university lecturer. When he’s not grading essays or wrangling with misbehaving plot lines he can usually be found fencing with longswords, rapiers and poleaxes. His gritty epic fantasy, Blackwing, was published on July 27 and here he gives a helpful pointer to potential new authors…

When you’re a debut author with publishers like Gollancz and Ace, you enter a strange build-up phase where people start to assume that you must know a bit about what you’re doing, but where you’re not yet in print. So people hear of you, know your name, but haven’t read your book. Your main audience at that point become aspiring authors, writers who want to know what you did, what tricks and tips did you do to get published? I was totally fine with that, given that up until October last year, I was one of them. So, here’s my big tip:

Your first fifty pages are worth more than the rest of the book put together, and you should spend a hugely disproportionate amount of time on them.

These are your gateway pages; they are what will get agents to read the rest of what you’ve written. They introduce your own unique style. They are where we first meet your characters. They are so important that when you’ve finished and you get someone to read it, if they don’t come back saying “OMG! Amazing!” then you need to go back to the drawing board. Because if your friends aren’t saying that, then it’s not going to blow an agent’s socks off.

It often can feel like published authors get aloof once published, that their advice isn’t that helpful to unpublished writers. But I was an unpublished writer for nearly twenty years, and I’ve been an author for less than one, so I like to think I’m still fairly grounded.

The most common mistake made by aspirant authors is not critiquing other people’s work. I cannot recommend this activity highly enough as a way to improve your own writing. Some people will say “Read, and write a lot.” It’s good advice, but reading someone else’s non-published, non-edited work and viewing it through a critical lens will actually do more to improve your own work than either reading published fiction or writing your own, and certainly when combined with reading and writing a lot, you become a power house.

When you’ve read 50 other writers’ ‘Chapter One,’ you discover that most people don’t understand how to write a first chapter. Or a book. And you learn a set of rules. You don’t intend to, you just find yourself repeating the same things over, and over, until they become a copy and paste set of mantras. So, here are some things to consider about your own first chapter:

Is this absolutely the most interesting point that it’s feasible to drop the reader off in? You only get one shot to keep them reading. Was this the finest, most interesting, tense, exciting, glamorous, explosive, chilling scene that you could have written? If not, then it’s not first chapter material.

Is something happening? And by something, I mean, something really, really interesting. Something that’s going to get my mind bubbling for what comes next in the story. Does it make me thirst to reach the end of the book so that I know how it all works out?

Is the protagonist an interesting character to follow? Why should I be interested in this character over others? As a general rule, a child in peril is always interesting to a reader. A lone woman on a dark road is always interesting. A wounded soldier behind enemy lines is always interesting.

Does the protagonist perform actively, e.g. do they want something? They need to want something, even if it’s just a ham sandwich. The inability to have what they want is what spurs their actions through the chapter. What does the protagonist want? Is it interesting?

Does the chapter get us into the heart of the plot right away? There’s a tendency for writers to want to start with a ‘slice of life’ that they’ll then disrupt later on, but that’s generally a bad way to go. I want to be into the guts of the story from the very beginning. Don’t waste any time.

As this is a first chapter, it needs to drive me to turn the last page. “It’s interesting…” isn’t enough to make me read Chapter 2. I need to be driven to do so.

When I started Blackwing, I wrote the first chapter. Then I heavily edited it. Then I rewrote it again from scratch. And then I did that again. And again. I’ve lost track of the number of edits that version four must have gone through – twenty? Thirty? I don’t know.

Not everyone edits like this. But I give it here as advice because it’s something practical that I can suggest to writers to do. You can’t control whether an audience will enjoy your work. You can’t influence genre trends, and you can’t know whether your style will be great or not. But you can spend the time to ensure that it’s perfect.

Fifty pages. That’s what it takes to get an agent, and from there, well. Let’s just say, it’s a good ride to be on.

Blackwing is out now from Gollancz