Creating a strong opening requires an understanding of what to have on the page to engage your reader and pique their curiosity, what to leave out so you don’t lose them, and how you might go about shaping the beginning that works best for your story. One thing is key: your opening chapters need to establish the reader’s trust in you as a storyteller so that the reader feels in safe hands and wants to keep turning the pages.
What to put into your opening chapters
When submitting work to an agent or publisher or development program you are usually asked to send through your opening chapters. As chapters can be of varying lengths, most submission requirements these days stipulate a certain number of opening pages – usually forty or fifty – formatted to industry standards, which equates to somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 words.
Within these opening pages you need to introduce the key characters; set the scene in terms of era and place; raise a question, a problem or mystery to be solved; include an inciting incident which kickstarts the action through the way the characters respond to it; establish your voice; and establish the tone.
Cate Kennedy advises writers to ‘Get straight into it. Stories should start on the brink of change, on the precipice of action, and at the latest possible point in order to engage and involve a reader.’ She uses the analogy of the theatre. ‘When the lights come up on an empty stage, how long do you think an audience will sit patiently waiting for something to actually happen? Scarily, the answer is seven seconds. Something of this kind happens in prose, too. A page spent describing furniture or the weather is a page in which you waste your reader‘s time and lose their attention.’
I agree with Cate. I sometimes see opening chapters laden with unnecessary details or too much backstory, as if the writer doesn’t trust that the reader will be able to follow the story or care about the characters without a lengthy preamble. Good beginnings can often be obtained by amputating the first paragraphs, pages or chapters of a draft – called ‘throat clearing’ by editors. On the other hand, occasionally I see writers starting a little late, with the moment of change having already happened, which can make it difficult for the reader to understand what’s going on and why.
Inciting curiosity
I’ve seen a trend towards writers putting a highly dramatic event in the first chapter. This can be effective, but only if the placement of the event is appropriate to the way the story as a whole is structured. Just as every film does not need to start with a James Bond-style wild chase in which the central character’s life is threatened, not every book need begin with an emotionally charged scene. Kennedy draws attention to a moment of change, not necessarily a moment of incendiary drama. And if you tease out her theatre metaphor, it’s not that the audience is waiting for a real or metaphoric explosion to take place, they are waiting for the imaginary world to be introduced, for the characters to be revealed, for the relationships and events to vibrate with the potentiality of change.
As Corner-Bryant and Price say in their book On Editing, ‘It’s more helpful to think in terms of the opening chapters encouraging the reader to wonder, explore and question: What’s going on here? How can this possibly be resolved? How are they going to get out of this one?’ As you can see, these questions imply that something significant happens in the opening chapters to incite our curiosity.
Arriving at the beginning
There is no one way to write a good beginning; it depends on the story being told and on the writer’s style and voice. It is likely to take many drafts. Some writers rework their opening chapters again and again before pushing through the remainder of the manuscript, wanting to lay the foundation on which to build the story. Others know that they won’t be able to nail the opening until they get to the end and have more clarity about the plotlines and characters, and have honed their voice; only then can they determine the right foundations to put in place.
Everyone has their own creative process, but the goal is the same: to captivate and engage the reader, to garner their trust in you as a storyteller, to pique their curiosity enough to propel them through to the middle and, ultimately, the end.
See also Opening Sentences