Here’s a piece of advice commonly given to writers:

Start with a bang and you won’t end with a whimper.

It’s frequently attributed to the poet TS Eliot, but in fact he didn’t give this guidance; he attributed it to an ending, not a beginning, at the close of his poem ‘The Hollow Men’:

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Still, I believe that the advice is sound: if you start writing at a time of intensity in the story, you’re more likely to engage the reader. I believe this is especially important in the romance genre. Romance is dramatic and deeply emotional, especially at the beginning, so the start of any love story should have the sense of a ‘bang’.

My debut novel, Burning Embers, opens thus:

Coral Sinclair was twenty-five, and this should have been her wedding night. Instead, she watched a full moon sweep the Indian Ocean with silvery beams as a silent ship carried her through the night, its path untroubled by the rolling swell. It was misty, the air was fresh, and a soft breeze blew through her flowing blond hair. A solitary passenger on deck, outlined by a strapless, white-silk evening dress, she stood upright and still, her slender fingers clenching the rail, her voile scarf floating behind.

Coral could not sleep. She gazed into the tenebrous light, feeling helpless, lonely, and utterly wretched. Not a star interrupted that dense unity, not the smallest star, the tiniest speck of hope. The only sound was the thrumming of the ship’s engines and the rhythmic echo of the waves smashing relentlessly against its hull.

I endeavored to make this an intense opening to the book. This should have been Coral’s wedding night but – bang! Everything has unraveled and instead she’s on a ship. All alone. The language conveys the emotions with which Coral is struggling: solitary, tenebrous, helpless, lonely, utterly wretched, hope, smashing relentlessly…

As the scene unfolds, Coral meets an enigmatic stranger. Unlike Rose and Jack’s first fateful meeting aboard the ship Titanic, there is no grande drama here – no desperate thought of suicide; no near-fall into the ocean necessitating a rescue. In this scene I let the emotional connection of the characters and Coral’s inner turmoil create all the interest. Readers who enjoyed the book told me that this first scene really drew them into the story; it affected them emotionally. Bang.

In The Echoes of Love I open the book at a masquerade party as follows:

The clock struck midnight just as Venetia went past the grand eighteenth-century mirror hanging over the mantelpiece in the hall. Instinctively she looked into it and her heart skipped a beat. In the firelight she noticed that he was there again, an almost illusory figure, leaning against the wall at the far end of the shadowy room, steady eyes intense, watching her from behind his black mask. An illusory figure indeed, because when Venetia turned around he was gone.

This sets the atmosphere and hints at the central theme of the book – that of illusion versus truth. The masquerade is an important visual element of the book for the reader to hold in their mind; hence the masked woman on the book cover. But I only allow a few paragraphs for describing the party before launching into the very height of drama:

Suddenly Venetia saw two figures spring out in front of her from the surrounding darkness. They were enveloped in carnevale cloaks, with no visible faces, only a spooky blackness where they should have been. A hand materialised from under the all-encompassing wrap of one of the sinister creatures and grabbed at her bag. Chilled to the bone, Venetia tried to scream but the sound froze in her throat. Struggling, she hung onto the leather pouch which was looped over her shoulder and across her front as she tried to lift her knee to kick him in the groin, but her aggressors were prepared. An arm was thrown around her throat from the back and the second figure produced a knife.

Just as he was going to slash at the strap of her bag, an imposing silhouette emerged from nowhere and with startling speed its owner swung at Venetia’s attacker with his fist, knocking him off balance. With a grunt of pain the man fell backwards, tripping over his accomplice who gave a curse, and they both tumbled to the ground. Then, picking themselves up in a flash, they took to their heels and fled into the hazy gloom.

‘Vatutto bene, are you alright?’ The stranger’s light baritone voice broke through Venetia’s disoriented awareness, and he looked down anxiously into her large amber eyes.

Bang: Venetia and Paolo have met in a dangerous situation, and Paolo has taken the role of rescuer, which, once she recovers from her shock, will not sit entirely well with the independent Venetia! Again, I choose dramatic words and phrases to build the atmosphere: suddenly, spooky blackness, all-encompassing, sinister,grabbed, chilled, scream, froze, struggling aggressors, slash, imposing, startling speed, attacker, gloom, anxiously.

In both books, I made a conscious choice to have the lovers meet right at the outset, because these are the love stories of those characters, and so they are what matters most. But in any story conflict is required, and I wanted to place that conflict at centre-stage from the start. In Burning Embers the conflict is internal; in The Echoes of Love it is, initially, external.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote: Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending. When you’ve tried to commence a story on a ‘bang’, it becomes all the more important that the conclusion is explosive in its power to create an emotional reaction. Of course, I won’t give away my book endings here, but I hope that they build to an emotive climax and that the only whimper that remains afterwards is that of a reader wishing for more…