Next week I’ll be a part of the faculty at the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) Spring conference in Portland, Oregon. Besides teaching various workshops, I have the privilege to participate in a WOW panel. In WOW, attendees pre-submit the first page of a manuscript. The first pages are read aloud (anonymously) and in random order, after which Scholastic editor Anna Bloom and I must respond. Distilled to its blunt essence, a WOW session asks the question, “Would you turn the page?”

Sounds straightforward, but alas, nothing is so easy. Aspiring writers aren’t the only ones who wear their hearts on their sleeves — even us old stogies can be like trembling rose petals waiting to be crushed. Responding to the pages in the WOW session will require honesty yet compassion. It will require an ear for good storytelling, recommendations for revision, mixed with the bunny-eat-bunny realities of the children’s publishing industry.

A few weeks ago I attended a “First Pages” session at an SCBWI conference in Redmond, Washington, in which Elizabeth Law of Egmont USA Publishing and literary agent Michael Bourret commented on the first pages. They must have read forty first pages, and out of those forty I could count only two in which I personally would have turned the page, and even those two didn’t blow me away. As I sat there, I kept wondering what was missing from those other thirty-eight. The answer was myriad and complicated, but also simple and at the heart of writing itself. And while I can’t answer my own question in the space of this one post, I propose to teach the elements of story beginnings in a series of weekly installments. So send a quick prayer up to the powers that be for my WOW session in Portland, and meanwhile, stay tuned . . .