In 1987, I was studying art history at the École du Louvre when I met an older German man named Peter.

Peter was stern, didactic, exacting, prickly and super intellectual. He relished arguing loudly at dinner for the fun of it. Something a young twenty-three-year-old Southern woman wasn’t used to.

He was also a perfect gentleman, and I had zero attraction to him. Thus, the friendship rolled along seamlessly. Even though I don’t remember exactly how we met, I do remember everything we did.

Peter took me to the opera at the Bastille. He gave me a historical book about Rome.

The opening line. That ever important first impression. The way to draw the reader into your story. Those previous words were easy to write. But the real thing is not.

Every writer struggles with the first line of his or her novel, because they know that if that first sentence is killer, the reader will most likely read the second one.

Stephen King spends “months and even years” (see this article) writing his opening sentences. When reading other writers’ first lines, King says, “It’s a voice, and an invitation, that’s very difficult for me to refuse.

In a few weeks, I want to contact literary agents with my young adult novel. I wrote this post to wrap my mind around how to go about it, and maybe, help other people in the process.

Literary agents help navigate the business side of publishing a novel.

They will negotiate a stronger contract with the publisher than you could manage by yourself. Agents usually take around a 15% commission on the sale of your book.

Start with five or so agents who might be a good fit. Make sure they’ve represented authors with books similar to yours.

Some say there are only two plots in the world—a stranger comes to town and someone goes on a journey.

My novel’s plot definitely falls into the latter journey category. So I decided to find out a little more about the Hero’s Journey.

I was familiar with Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces concerning the journey of the archetypal hero in world mythologies and that Campbell made famous the term “monomyth.”

Interestingly enough, I learned that Campbell borrowed the term “monomyth” from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
I then found out that Christopher Vogler had distilled Campbell’s ideas into a book titled The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers.