Andrew Sean Greer’s latest novel, Villa Coco, opens upon a young man waiting for his ride to arrive in a small Tuscan train station. The setting is warm, enticing, and overwhelmingly charming, as is the main character: “Our young man himself was overburdened with books, luggage, gin, fish oil, and doubt.”

And then, on page three, this novel—which has ostensibly been in the third person—takes one of the most delightful turns I’ve read in quite a while. Which leads us to our quote of the day:

A novel tells you how to read it

Novelists obsess over their first pages. The opening of a novel must accomplish a ridiculous amount. To make a quick and shoddy and non-exhaustive list:

1. It must reveal who the main character(s) are, what they desire, and what stands in their way. (Okay, that’s actually, like, three really big things.)

2. It must establish the setting.

3. It must hook the reader, capturing their sense of curiosity and/or creating enough of a mystery that they want to keep reading.

4. It must begin to incorporate the themes of the book.

5. In some (or most?) cases, it must foreshadow the trajectory or even the ending of the book. This creates a sense of tension or dread that can help get the reader hooked.

Now, if that didn’t seem like enough, I’ll add something else: the novel must tell you how to read it. And that’s exactly what Greer is doing from the first sentence onward.

Greer has called Villa Coco a “charm novel”—the kind of book that you “reread yearly as a balm to the soul.” He points to the work of Nancy Mitford and Gerald Durrell as examples of this genre. For me, the novel’s lightheartedness, its healthy helping of humor, its lively characterizations felt instantly and cozily familiar, not just because they’re evocative of the singular voice of Greer’s Less, but because they remind me of—I struggle to pinpoint it exactly, but something from my childhood: Edward Eager’s Half Magic or the adventures of John Bellairs. Which is not to say this is a book for children or young adults. It’s simply that the novel signals early on that you will be safe inside it, joyful and accompanied and, well, charmed.

All of this is communicated clearly within the first pages, but today’s quote does a particular kind of work. It tells us that, as the narrator looks back upon his past, he sees it as a kind of dream unattached in some ways to his present reality. He is not the same person now as he was then. And so any trials and sorrows that may have touched him later in life—that touch us all as we wend our way toward “elderly toad” territory—they will not touch this story. The repetition of “young man” has planted the seed that this story lives more in the domain of fairy tales than it lies in the world you or I occupy on a daily basis. It releases us of that world.

It also intentionally hollows out the main character, calling him “a soulless marionette” and making of him a really rather foppish and unserious character. He is, in some ways, an emblem of youthful ignorance, a stand-in for any of us at that age. He therefore offers us forgiveness for our foolishness while also opening the door for us to step inside this character and live the adventure with him, even as him—as close as we can come to it. For weren’t we all just as aimless and naïve in our youths? Of course you were, the book says, and wasn’t it lovely?

The role of the first-person retrospective

When, after more than a decade of focusing on poetry, I shifted my attention back to fiction, I was often quite ashamed at my lack of vocabulary when it came to all the technical aspects of fiction-writing. I felt there must be a definitive text out there that I hadn’t been able to locate. Maybe there is. I haven’t been able to locate it.

(Okay, there’s John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, which did help me years ago. But when I re-read it more recently his tone became grating, his self-assuredness exhausting, and when it came down to it, his conclusion was that the only “right” point of view is third-person omniscient. Not that helpful.)

All of which is to say that I had to look up this term, though I know it when I feel it: the “first-person retrospective.” Which is a perspective that today’s quote embodies very well.

There is a determination you must make when you’re writing in first person as to whether the character who’s speaking will be:

A) Looking back on the events of the novel from some distance, or

B) Recounting them in the same state of mind in which they happened. (Don’t worry about tense here; B can happen in the past tense, too.)

This quote from Villa Coco is an example of the former. And if you choose the former for your book, you’ll have to decide how far removed from the events of the novel they are: a matter of months? Years? Decades? You’ll choose this approach if there’s some distinction between how they feel about the events of the book now versus how they felt when those events happened. This might be because they experienced some growth or change as a result of those events.

My debut novel, Underlake, was written in the latter mode: alternating first-person perspectives between two characters experiencing the events as they unfolded. I chose this because I wanted the reader to experience the growth of the characters alongside them, through their eyes. As the main characters of Underlake, Otta and May, dove deeper into a lake to search for May’s missing daughter, I wanted the reader to feel the literal and figurative pressure they were under, and come out the other side with the sense that they had changed alongside the characters.

There’s no right choice between these options. It’s entirely dependent upon the story that you’re telling.

What’s interesting here is that Greer chooses the first-person retrospective not so much because he wants the narrator to look back upon his younger self with the benefit of superior wisdom. Rather, it seems to me that his argument is that there was real value in those youthful years and the experiences that came with them—value in stumbling through life, feeling one’s way forward. This naïveté, which can seem so silly to us now, contains the seeds of magic, of adventure, of curiosity, of all the things a meaningful life are built upon.

“Our young man,” imperfect as he is, has much to teach us. We could benefit, in fact, from spending some time with him—from remembering the dreams that, when we were younger, seemed all so possible. Perhaps, Villa Coco suggests, we can dream them again.

This week’s prompt

Reread the first few pages of your novel. If you knew nothing about it, what type of book would you think this is? Funny or serious? Atmospheric or grounded? Plain-spoken or lyrical? Domestic or epic? You’re setting your reader’s expectations now—so make sure you’re telling them what kind of novel this is.

If your first pages aren’t quite doing the work they need to do, try this exercise.

Stepping into a novel is like stepping through a door. Imagine entering the “room” of your novel. What does it look like? Describe it. Is there lots of natural light or is it full of shadows? Is it cluttered or bare? Are the furnishings old-fashioned or modern? What kind of tchotchkes are on the sideboard? What books are on the shelves? What does it smell like? What food is laid out on the table?

Write at least three hundred words describing this room. Then use this as your model as you revise. The first few pages of your novel should feel like stepping into this room. It’s a place your ideal reader will want to stay a while.

The Next Sentence is a weekly newsletter for people who are writing a novel. It’s written by Erin L. McCoy, author of Underlake (Doubleday), one of the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2026 and one of People’s Best New Books. Erin also wrote the poetry collection Wrecks (Noemi Press), winner of the 2026 Florida Book Award.

Each week in The Next Sentence, we’ll explore a quote or passage that teaches us some element of craft, followed by a writing prompt. Along the way, Erin will also share her own experiences as she works through her second novel. Paid subscribers receive additional missives on process—everything from time management and motivation to tracking your progress and practical tool recommendations.

Learn more about Erin at erinlmccoy.com.

What a way to kick off chapter seven of Anna Burns’s stellar novel, Milkman. This book tells the story of a woman who grew up during the Troubles, and what I love most about it is the particular mind of this narrator, who see-saws around a central truth that, most of the time, she cannot quite touch: the profound violence that surrounds her every day. The way she’s learned to survive that violence and the daily state of terror it engenders in the populace is to live with blinders. She even reads while walking down the street—a near-impossible task (at least for me) that must require great concentration. I can’t even read in cars.

I’ll get back to the character and all that this quote reveals about her. But first, let’s talk about tension.

There are plenty of ways to build narrative tension. Sometimes you create dread in the reader: they know what’s coming, but they don’t know how it’ll come to pass. Other times, it’s about anticipation: they don’t know what’s next, but they’re so invested in the characters or the story (or hopefully both) (or maybe there’s no difference?) that they want to spend more time with them. Either way, tension is necessary: without it, your readers won’t want to keep on reading.

Here, Burns is deploying a little bit of both. And, I mean, there’s no surer way to create that tension than with an actual gun.

(Insert obligatory Chekhovian reference: the famous narrative advice from the famous Russian goes that you can’t place a gun on the stage unless at some point it’s going to go off. Although, in Burns’s case, it’ll be used for pistol-whipping. Close enough.)

If you read the quote at the start of this post and didn’t want to read more—well, I don’t know what to tell you. As a reader, I have to know how this character, an apparently hapless young woman who’s being stalked by a (non-)milkman, is going to find herself in a situation in which she actually strikes someone with a gun. And you can imagine we’ll have to read a good deal further before we find out what happens.

What’s also fascinating is the work that this quote does to reveal character. She seems to make little distinction between the seriousness of slapping someone with a hand versus a handgun. In fact, she goes on immediately afterward to describe a scenario in which she wanted to slap someone and didn’t. It tells us a great deal about her—and also what it was like to live during the Troubles—that she has more successfully avoided minor confrontations than acts of serious acts of violence, in self-defense or otherwise. This quote reveals her level of desensitization to it, and the degree to which it has been normalized in her life.

The minimization of violence is reinforced especially in the second sentence, which buries the seriousness of the gun by choosing to land the sentence on the slap, which subtly lends greater weight to the latter. We are watching her in the act of convincing herself of the normality of an abnormal violence.

This week’s prompt

Write a sentence that builds tension by foreshadowing something that comes later in your story. Give them a hint as to what’s coming, but make sure that the reader can’t yet foresee how the story could possibly arrive there. This can serve as a great chapter opener or chapter ending. In fact, many such sentences may appear throughout your novel to encourage the reader to keep reading.

Bonus points if this sentence also serves to reveal character. What does it tell us about their priorities? Their desires? What they think or feel about the event to come?

From the notebook: Riding the waveform

But how do you keep writing? A novel is a commitment of years, with more discouragement than encouragement along the way.

I had a good writing day yesterday. It was the first one in a while. I’m about halfway through the second draft of my second novel, and it’s been progressing more slowly than Underlake did. I’ve had to step away from it, sometimes for weeks at a time, to launch and celebrate Underlake (the good part) and also because my full-time job has become much more than full time lately. It’s hard for me to keep all the plates spinning when I don’t write every day. Spinning plates is a bit of a cliché, but in this case it’s apt, because that’s exactly what it feels like: balancing a dozen moving objects simultaneously and knowing where each of them is at every point in time. Did I already have a scene where character A reveals this secret about themselves? Did I use this word or metaphor I wanted to make sure appeared early in the book? Exactly how long ago did we last check in on this plotline?

As I’ve found more time to return to the book in the past few weeks, I’ve been frustrated at the pacing and structure, certain that the whole thing would have to be redone again after the six months I spent post–first draft writing into each character, theme, and plot point, then laying out an excessively detailed outline that now felt totally wrong.

But I’ve learned that the emotional journey of writing a novel follows a waveform. There were days as I was writing Underlake when I was certain that the whole thing was a colossal failure. Yet there were other days when I felt sure I was on to something.

Yesterday, I did less writing than reading, going back over the manuscript to remind myself of a few plot points, a few plates I’d dropped. And the passages I re-read gave me a little jolt of pride (for me, the rarest feeling). The book is moving along better than I thought.

At least, that’s how I feel now.

The highs pass, but so do the lows. I try not to look either in the eye. If I believed too fully that I was writing something great, I’d never edit. If I believed all those negative voices, I’d never write. In the world of novel-writing, this is simply the substrate. You pass over it. You try not to let it slow you down.

The Next Sentence is a weekly newsletter for people who are writing a novel. It’s written by Erin L. McCoy, author of Underlake (Doubleday), one of the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2026 and one of People’s Best New Books. McCoy also wrote the poetry collection Wrecks (Noemi Press), winner of the 2026 Florida Book Award.

Each week in the Next Sentence, we’ll explore a quote or passage that teaches us some element of craft, followed by a writing prompt. Along the way, Erin will also share her own experiences as she works through her second novel. Paid subscribers receive additional missives on process—everything from time management and motivation to tracking your progress and practical tool recommendations.

Learn more about Erin at erinlmccoy.com.