The Making of Step Sisters: Chapter One

When I write a book opening chapter, and I'm serious here, I'm aiming for something with the conciseness and impact of the first chapter of The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot. I'm perfectly serious. Those books are acclaimed for a reason. You have the main character's motivation, their age, the tragedy in their life, all in little more than a page and a half; you don't feel ripped off. You're buckled in and ready for the book ahead. As someone whose first book's first chapter totalled twenty pages, you can see why I would be jealous of Meg Cabot.

That's why my first chapter of Step Sisters is as close a homage to that chapter as you might ever get, right down to the rather tasteless final line, "thanks, Hitler. Thanks a lot", which is a direct homage to The Princess Diaries.

Two other influences were Wise Children by Angela Carter and Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. Both those books begin with the giddy, fluttering excitement of finding out they're novels; they exist! That first page writing, where you have to really SELL, both those books capture it with pure joy.

I love Rushdie, and respect him so much for the sacrifices he made, but AC is one of my biggest influences, and this book, Step Sisters, was my go-for-broke attempt at capturing her style. I fucked up pretty bad, huh? Still, it was a joy to comb my hair in the mirror like a real writer, even if my full-stops and punctuation points were never quite going to match up. Look, I'm going to break it to you -- there's an element of falseness in all of my writing and even when I'm paying homage, it's no different.

I really struggled with coming up with a first line for this, settling on "It began with a bang", not exactly hotcakes but it would do. That captured both the theme of the book (ATOMIC BOMBS) and the energy with which I planned to capture it.