Whistle Worthy Words: The Scent and Tickle of Your First 500

Essay #5 —The Scent and a Tickle: Your First 500 Words

🎶
I really don’t like your point of view.
I know you’ll never change.
You’re ninety-nine percent an embarrassment,
with just one quality.

I don’t mind it when you [whistle].
🎶
—Eliza Doolittle, Skinny Genes (2010)

Most people don’t realise that it’s not Eliza Doolittle doing the whistling in her song. You can hear it in the quality. The moment the whistle comes in, it sounds like it was lifted straight from the era of scratchy wax and early vinyl. And I happen to know for a fact that the whistler in question is Andy Williams, performing his 1957 hit Butterfly.

When any agent worth an Andy Williams whistle reads your manuscript, he’s going to know who you’ve been sampling from, too. The trick isn’t to hide it. The trick is to make him not mind.

And here’s how to do exactly that, straight from the whistler’s mouth

No, the whistle isn’t mine. It belongs to world-renowned author and agent Donald Maass, who contributed Chapter 4 to The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing from the editors of Writer’s Digest.

Can I have some, please, of that [whistle]?

Essay #5 — Chapter 4: Fire Up Your Fiction

True to an agent’s nature, Donald Maass starts off his chapter in The Handbook by scaring the carriage returns out of aspiring authors with this opening statement:

‘Many fiction manuscripts submitted to my literary agency feel lackluster.’

He further denigrates these so-called lackluster manuscripts by also calling them stale and failing to excite.

Oof.

That’s a brutal thing to hear when you’re courting an agent, hat in hand, manuscript trembling. But if you want to be a successful author, respond to it you must.

So all right, Mr. Maass. Stop slapping me in the face with my fifty-pound, New York City phone book of a manuscript and tell me what you want.

Surprisingly, in his very second paragraph, he declares:

“Originality is NOT the key.”
(Emphasis mine.)

Neither are overused clichés or copycat novels. It’s not even whether your tale boasts some dazzling new premise.

Well, for heaven’s sake. No wonder publishing agents can be so thoroughly exasperating. Copycat novels and clichés are fine, and originality is not?

Whatever, then, my dear Mr. Maass, are you actually looking for?

‘Passion,’ he says.

And ‘inspiration.’

He wants us to dig deep into the way we view the world, and use it to infuse our manuscript with insightful wordplay and thoughtful prose that reflect on the human condition. It’s kind of like we’re back to rehashing what I posted in my previous essay about Sparks. But it’s not the concept of an “A-ha!” surprise that Mr. Maass harps upon.

I mean, come on — let’s face it — an agent is going to start forming an opinion on your novel after having read about five paragraphs. This opinion will typically take on one of two forms:

Either he’s going to drop your story in a dustbin the next time a tired cliché or a tortured sentence causes him to roll his eyes, or he’s going to forgive such glaring errors in order to see if there’s promise in the premise you’re hawking.

So how do we avoid the horror of the dustbin, and instead become a member of that prestigious second group?

Here’s where what is known as The First 500 Words comes into play.

The First Sentence vs. The First 500 Words

The first sentence of your novel is for the likes of a book browser like my dear friend Erin Latimer. Remember her from my second essay? She devours books by the dozen as she prowls the bookstore aisles.

‘Ooh!’ our ravenous bibliophile might say. ‘A snappy title and a way-cool cover! Let’s read the first sentence!’

And then your novel either gets put back on the shelf—or that first sentence tastes so delicious it sticks in the craw of a lass as lovely as Miss EL, who promptly buys a copy and takes it home.

(We must pause at this tender moment as I indulge a vision of the lovely Miss EL purchasing all my books.)

Okay. Vision over.

The First 500 Words of a novel are for an agent such as Mr. Maass.

Within them, you must introduce:

• A bit of the Plot
• The Premise
• A Main Character or two
• Set in an eye-popping place

You see, an agent will have finished forming their opinion about your cinder-block-thick masterpiece by the time they reach Word 502.

Good grammar and sentence structure are a bonus, but those mistakes are easy to correct and again, this is not what Mr. Maass says agents are looking for.

What he wants most of all is captured in the first two sub-titles of his chapter:

FIND THE UNCOMMON IN THE COMMON
FIND THE COMMON IN THE UNCOMMON

And what he means by these sub-titles is this:

What excites you and inspires you should excite and inspire your characters. What makes you happy must make them happy. What makes you sad must make them sad.

This holds true whether your characters are super hedgehog dragon trainers, or regular plain-old boring folk, just like you and me.

Of course, as you may have noticed, I’m a cuddly and kawaii, furry horned purple monster. But I trust you know what I mean.

Poe, Common Ground, and Honest Emotion

The point Mr. Maass makes in this section of his chapter was once eloquently expressed by Edgar Allan Poe. In 1846, in his essay entitled The Philosophy of Composition, Poe states:

“I consider whether the story can be best wrought by incident or tone—whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or by the converse, or by peculiarity of both incident and tone.”

So, where is the common ground in your story?

• Is it in the events?
• Or is it in the voice?
• What part of it mirrors the real world?
• Where is the honest emotion?
• The important issues?
• The driving theme?

Readers want to understand who your characters are before they invest their time in getting to know them better. They want to be able to see themselves being put into their shoes, and imagine how they might react to the travails you put them through.

Whether your characters are fantastic beasts or normal human beings, you must present them to your reader in a way that’s relatable and unique.

And oh yeah.

Don’t forget.

You’ve got to do it in the first five hundred words. A treacherous path to tread, that’s true.

Mr. Maass can be so very harsh.

The Jericho Writers “First 500” Contest

We shall pause again, my dear and avid readers, in my endless praise of The Handbook to address the snickers I hear coming from your end of our interaction, as you scoff at this “First 500 Words” bender I am on.

Oh yes! I can hear you! I got ears like a bat.

Let me introduce to you an annual contest I’m aware of that’s been going on for quite some time.

Jericho Writers is a website founded by Harry Bingham, who is a whirlwind of literary note. He has a working relationship with the world’s largest publishers, raking in multiple six-figure book deals with them for the novels he has written.

For lo these many years, Jericho Writers has hosted an annual contest called First 500, where writers submit the first 500 words of their story. The winner gets a prize package worth many thousands of dollars that involves professional help with hawking their manuscript, as well as one-on-one phone calls with agents, and free editing and self-publishing.

Mr. Bingham also offers workshops and advice on how to better your chances at winning the heart of an agent — and the Jericho Writers First 500 contest.

In 2025, his advice included details on crafting your elevator pitch, and tips on how to present the Main Character of your story.

He also emphasizes the importance of your opening scene. He calls it the ‘story promise,’ and an ‘author’s trust.’ He further refines this as establishing your voice.

A reader needs to feel confident in their decision to commit to your story. They want to be intrigued. It’s your job to convince them them that your book is the one they should be reading right now, and not the one that’s sitting next to it on the shelf.

Mr. Bingham clarifies this statement by emphasizing that the idea is not to try too hard.

It’s about you being you.

Interesting, completely cool you.

It’s about honoring your story and your characters, and the intelligence of your reader. He calls it ‘a kind of authority’ in which you say,

“I know what I’m doing, and you’re going to enjoy it.”

He also calls it, most eloquently:

• The Scent of a Character
• A Tickle of the Story

I like that. Scent and Tickle. That’s cute.

I’m going to remember those words.

The Dinner Party Paradigm

The last bit of advice I wish to offer that comes from Mr. Bingham is what he calls The Dinner Party Paradigm. (Doesn’t he have such cool names for things?)

He suggests you imagine you’ve been invited to a rather swanky dinner party. You’re seated beside people you’ve never met, yet you sense they’re your kind of people.

So you begin.

You offer a few clues about who you are. You watch their reaction. You reveal a little more. Then a little more again. And so on.

Don’t bend your book out of shape in order to impress the person you’re sitting next to you. Just write the best, most honest story you can. Polish the opening scene, and to get it to shine as bright as it can possibly be.

Then enter Jericho Writers First 500 contest.

Or not.

This is good advice regardless.

Back to Maass: The Fifty Questions

And now back to The Handbook.

Mr. Maass’ Chapter Four is crammed with questions that are so numerous and onerous that I’m not going to bother with counting them, nor answering many, or quoting any. I mean, you know. Come on! How are we supposed to convince an agent to hawk our book if we first have to play a game of Fifty Questions with them?

Well you see, the fact is that we don’t.

Just like in my Third Essay, where I tell you that you must be able to write a dozen different blurbs about your story at the drop of a hat, you must also be able to answer questions shot rapid-fire out of an agent’s mouth, both clearly and succinctly, should the need arise.

Mr. Maass groups his fifty-or-so-odd million questions (I told ya I’m not gonna count’em!) into four or five blocks of about eight bullet points apiece.

I shall now, in his honor, summarize and extrapolate.

Passion, Authority, and Emotional Core

Of utmost importance, you must be able to describe what inspires you as an author, and how that inspiration fuels your passion for writing.

If you can’t intimately articulate how you feel about something you’ve worked on for so long and so hard, the thousands of words you’ve written won’t do it for you either.

Your passion must come from you.

Right there.

You.

In the mirror.

If you can’t describe how you feel about your story to an agent such as Mr. Maass, how then shall he do it for you to a publisher? You must be able to express how your characters make you feel.

• How you love them.
• Hate them.
• Fear them.
• Whatever.

The emotions that motivate your characters must also motivate your reader, only if you want them to keep reading, that is. Which means those emotions have to motivate you, too.

And to pull off such a feat of literary derring-do (in the first five hundred words of your novel!), Mr. Maass wants you to dig deep and answer questions such as these:

• What should you be asking yourself?
• What is ordinary about your story?
• Where’s the real-world common ground? Your readers need to relate to it.
• What is beautiful in your story?
• Where’s its inner grace? Your readers want to imagine themselves as part of your world.
• What is the ONE cause (note the singular!) your main character stands for above all else?

Infuse us with your Hero’s emotional commitment.

Then complicate things:

• Throw curves and hardballs at ’em.
• Narrow their available options.
• Make failure seem inevitable.

So that, in the words of Edna Mode, your Mrs. Incredible heroine can:

“Go! Fight! Win!”

Then come back, and let’s do lunch. I enjoy our little chats about finding the common ground.

Finding the Common in the Uncommon

Okay. So most of all that stuff up there is about Finding the Uncommon in the Common. But some stories are about finding the Common in the Uncommon. Stories of this sort are steeped with fantasy and magic. Mythical creatures or oddball aliens from distant far-flung galaxies, tossed about in a punked-up world, or the fever of a dream.

You know what I mean. Weird stuff like that.

And to sow common ground in an uncommon story, Mr. Maass suggests you find answers to questions such as these:

• What bedevils your characters?
  Frustration and mistrust exist in every world — and they are imperative to an uncommon novel.
• What part of your story reflects what is real?
  Readers need guardrails and signposts if they’re to grasp the point you’re making.
• What must always hold true in your world?
  Just as in the real world, some things must remain constant, no matter where your characters roam.
• What do all your characters have in common?

Reference one or two of these truths in those precious First 500 Words to establish an image of the world you intend to portray.

A Personal Encounter with “The First 500”

Next, I’d like to offer an experience I once had with a publishing agent of note. He’s asked me not to use his name, but he has allowed me to relate our interaction to you.

Purely by a stroke of luck, I was offered the opportunity to hawk the manuscript for my series of seven Light Novels called DOTS.

Realize that this was at a point back in time where I was struggling to find my voice, and still learning how to write. So I asked if he could please tell me what it was he wanted.

And guess what he said he wanted.

Yep. That’s right.

The First 500 Words.

So I looked at those first 500 words of DOTS that I had written at that time, and I kinda went *urk.*

Then I kinda went *blech.* And *gah!* and *ARGH!*

Cuz those words were terrible.

A bunch of blah-blah-blah about the Cool World I Built, all painted Lit-Fic pretty with fancy words and cutie-pie, tutti-fruit phrases.

Mr. Anonymous Agent was very kind to me, for we had built a sort of rapport. So I entreated upon him again:

“Ahm… What exactly are you looking for, in those 500 words?”

“I want to see the Main Characters,” he said. “I want to know where the story’s going, and I want to be intrigued.”

Well. Back in the days of me still finding my voice, those first 500 words were not that. So I worked and I worked and I worked at rewriting the opening of my story, and I sent him something that was entirely different than what I originally had.

So yeah. He said, as you may imagine, “That was terrible.”

And I agreed with him. Cuz it was.

So we talked some more about what the opening scene of a story should be, and I then presented him with what is pretty much right now the first 500 words of the first chapter of the first Light Novel of the series: LIBERALITY.

TAKE ONE

In the Age of Enlightenment, Mankind has discovered Genius.

Anyone could be a Genius, and at almost any thing. The Personal Enhancement Program—nowadays known as PEP—searched the world for special people, testing those who asked for free. A quick scan at a PEP Center determined if a person was a Genius and, if the first test came back positive, a second one done at a later date uncovered what skill they possessed.

PEP Geniuses received a free education, to hone their God-given gift. The Personal Enhancement Program produced scientists and artists and doctors, and all of them in great number, turning wordsmiths into Shakespeare, tinkerers into Thomas Edison, and humanitarians into the next Mother Theresa.

Hank was a possible PEP Genius, as his first test had come back positive. Sometimes though, the second test would be unable to determine what special talent a person possessed, leaving them with a face full of red splotches and no Genius prize. These losers were called Dots and, for some reason, society shunned them.

No one wanted to be a Dot, especially Hank. Tall and young and lanky, he had sandy brown hair that always seemed to be in need of a trim. His face seemed ready to smile, although he rarely did. But people typically liked him, even though at times they might not remember his name.

If he was brought up in conversation for whatever reason, two things were mentioned the most. One was that he never said much, and if he ever spoke, he avoided eye contact. He preferred to look at the nose of the person he was talking to, or perhaps at their chin, or at some distant point past their head.

This was truly a shame, because the second thing about Hank were his eyes. Toasty warm and almond brown, they were framed in lashes the color of chocolate, thick and rich and long. So much so that when he blinked, it was as if two butterflies were resting on his face, gently folding their wings.

Hank liked his life for the most part, but he knew it had to change if he wanted his future to not suck. He’d been a stockboy at Asok’s Asian Deli for over six years, ever since he was seventeen.

It was time for Hank to be different.

One thing special about Asok’s were its big front plate glass windows. They gave Hank his view of the world, as he liked watching people walk by. Today, he spent more time than usual watching people walk, because he knew Anna was coming, to buy groceries for her family. She had graduated from high school in the spring, but it was now October, and at some point in the summer she had turned nineteen.

Sometimes it freaked Hank out knowing when Anna was coming to Asok’s. He didn’t know how he knew, and he kept what he thought to himself as, at exactly the right moment, she broke free from the crowd about a block away.

“Okay,” Mr. A.A. said. “So this is some sort of love story about Hank and Anna.”

“Ah… No,” I gulped. “It’s not. It’s about saving the world from evil.”

“I’m not seeing that,” Mr. A.A. kindly — let’s say — replied.

Let me point out here that he gave me tons of excellent advice, and we got to know each other pretty well. We talked about different things, and I got to watch him give advice to other authors who had also sent in their first 500 word bits.

One thing I found out during our interactions was that he was a fan of Star Wars. He asked me if my protagonist named Hank was kind of like a Luke Skywalker, to Anna being Princess Leia.

And a light bulb went off in my head. “Anna is more like the primary supporting character of the story. Kind of like Hans Solo. Rio is the female protagonist who fights evil with Hank.”

“Where is she right now?”

“Well,” I replied. “She doesn’t show up until later on.”

My publishing agent friend told me that the original Star Wars movie would have bombed if it began with Luke’s first scene, as a humble spit farmer. Oh boo-hoo! His uncle died. And now some weirdo stranger named Obi sends him off on a quest.

And oh .. my .. god. In DOTS, Hank is a humble stockboy who — Oh boo-hoo! — finds out he’s a Dot. And now some (extraordinarily hot) weirdo named Anna sends him off on a quest.

Mr. A.A. suggested that I write an opening scene where my ‘Princess Leia’ named Rio is fighting an evil ‘Darth Vader.’

And thus, I sent to him the First 500 Words of what is now the Prologue to the first Light Novel of DOTS:

Take Two

Nothing can be won here.

Rio scarcely knew she thought these words, having said them to herself so often. Yet it was undeniable. Death crawled after her, trawling Pacific waters, seeking to extinguish her beacon. She responded the way she always did.

Run. Hide. Get away.

But money was growing scarce. She feared being unable to start her life anew, on another far-flung shore.

Christ. Isn’t this ocean big enough?

She pondered facing down her demon, but after abandoning her sōpurando in Sendai and saying goodbye to her staff of mizu shōbai girls, what little she had going for her on the island she now called home wasn’t worth the fight. She had first hid from Death in the Philippines, to be close to her homeland in Japan, but the throngs of people there made it hard to prevent Realities. So she hopped around Micronesia—the Caroline Islands, and then even tinier Cook Island.

It was not enough. Death was unrelenting. She tried Fiji next. It seemed to have worked, so much so that she relaxed and let down her walls. Maybe here, she could even make a friend.

She was wrong.

On a local ferry from Taveuni to Savusavu, Rio stood on the forward deck and watched the sea grow black. Nothing she did could Prevent it. Disgusted more than afraid, she flicked the stub of her bidi cigarette into the roiling doom before heading in topside, to search the sixty-odd passengers for the Other who was causing the chaos. She found him easy enough, when his Reality placed her below decks in an engine room.

“Greetings, sōpu sōpu girl,” the man said through a razor tooth smile.

He wore silver manicas on both arms, running tight from his wrists to his elbows. They wrapped around the sleeves of a purple peacoat, the color of raisin wine. His shoulders sported leather pauldrons, boiled black like sin. They smelled of putrid fat and flesh, of effluence and animal dung. At his feet lay a pool of diesel, dripping from a rusted tank. Oily rags and other debris lay piled in dark corners, reeking of flammable fuel.

“This is a safety hazard,” he said.

Rio stifled a retch. She pushed her round red glasses further up her nose, to better focus a death-ray stare into the man’s blue eyes. They burned like electric light.

“I will kill you where you stand,” she said with resolve.

“Ho ho!” The man’s voice boomed, echoing off steel walls. “Baka on’nanoko!”

Rio blinked and stepped back. The man took a step forward, bending to glare at her face. He spoke in measured tones.

“Do you know what this is?” He gestured at the fuel tank. “It’s the auxiliary generator. It turns on the instant power is lost to the ship, to keep it from foundering.” He tut-tutted at the filth piled in every corner. “All it would take is one spark in here to cause it to burst into flame.”

Now there is ‘the scent of a character,’ and ‘a tickle of the story.’

Wouldn’t you agree?

Closing

And so, until next time, my friends,

I shall remain most sincerely yours,

R.D. Burger

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