First Pages!

Mastering the Middle Grade Opening: Lessons from "Beyond the Moon"

Capturing the attention of a middle-grade reader is a unique challenge. You aren’t just competing with other books; you’re competing with short attention spans, school schedules, and a million digital distractions. On the latest episode of Writers with Wrinkles, we sat down to look at the first pages of a manuscript titled Beyond the Moon to see what makes a modern opening work—and where writers often get stuck.

If you are currently polishing your first chapter, here are the three biggest takeaways from our critique.

1. Match Your Mood to Your Genre

The very first sentence sets a contract with your reader. In the pages we reviewed, the story opened with a "creepy" mannequin in an antique shop, but the protagonist was "giggling" just a few lines later.

This creates a "tonal whiplash." If you want your reader to feel a sense of mystery or unease, let that mood breathe. If the story is a comedy, make sure the humor doesn't undercut the stakes too early. Choose a direction and lean into it from sentence one.

2. Specificity is Your Secret Weapon

We often see manuscripts full of "generalities." A room might be described as "spooky and cool," or a character might be "a stickler for being clean." While these words give us a general idea, they don't paint a picture.

Instead of saying a shop is "cool," describe the specific items that make it so—the smell of old cedar, a cracked glass eye on a Victorian doll, or the dust motes dancing in a single shaft of light. Specificity does the heavy lifting for the reader, making the world feel real and lived-in without you having to "tell" them how to feel.

3. Move the Emotional Hook to the Front

In Beyond the Moon, we see a great "golden sister" dynamic where the protagonist feels like a second-class citizen in her own family. This is a classic, high-value trope in middle-grade fiction because it is so relatable.

However, many writers wait until the end of the chapter—or even the second chapter—to show these relationships. Our advice? Don’t wait. If there is a family conflict or a character dynamic that fuels the story, move it to page one. Show that "snub" from a grandmother or that annoying interaction with a sibling immediately. That is the "hook" that makes a reader care about your protagonist.

The Good News

The hardest part of writing is often finding the "voice," and the author of Beyond the Moon has already cleared that hurdle. Once you have a character that feels like a real kid, the rest is just structural fine-tuning.

Keep your descriptions specific, keep your tone consistent, and don't be afraid to jump straight into the heart of the conflict. Your readers will thank you for it!

Want more writing tips? Listen to the full episode of Writers with Wrinkles on your favorite podcast platform.