New beginning

I worked all day today on a new first chapter for my book. This is something I have been trying to avoid for a long time. I knew I needed to start in a different way, but it was too hard to figure out how - especially since the story I'm telling is so complex in terms of who's who and what's what.

I still really like my original first chapter which began:

" When I think about finding my father, I don't think about it for long. It's too late, I think. It's too hard, hopeless, there's hardly anything to go on..."

My book is both a memoir and a journal of the search for my father, but I think starting with a journal entry about the search has been one of my problems - one of the reasons I haven't found an agent yet. Almost every memoir I've read recently begins with a scene & I knew that's what I needed, but, what scene to start with?

I decided to pull something out of the middle of the book and put it up front - which means I won't have to write something new, but I will have to go back to where that scene had been in the manuscript and reconfigure.

This is my new beginning:

"I am sitting at the kitchen table watching my mom make dinner. She's busy with something sizzling in a cast-iron frying pan - pork chops maybe, or pirogues with onions. Dressed in my blue plaid school uniform, I am absentmindedly dipping my finger into the sugar bowl and licking it clean."

I took this scene from my fifth chapter, rewrote it, added some new stuff, merged it with another scene from later in the book, added some more new stuff, and it all adds up to four sharp pages, but now what????

Now I have no transition between this and the next chapters. And it's really hard to figure out how to reveal the vital information that readers need in order to follow the story in a way that makes sense. It's a difficult puzzle.

Today was one of those writing days when I was so absorbed that hours went by like minutes. I did a lot of good work, but it took my WHOLE day. And it will take days and days and days like this if I'm ever going to get this thing finally finished.