Openings are hard. There’s an expectation that our story openings have to be perfect, and it’s a lot of pressure. It needs all the right ingredients of a powerful hook, but it can’t have too much of this or have too little of that. It can be frustrating and overwhelming to know what is actually important in your story’s opening. Here are a few questions you might be asking yourself if you’re struggling with your first chapter:
- Where do I start my story?
- What information do I reveal to readers?
- How do I hook readers?
My first piece of advice? Stop trying to get it right on the first try. Your opening will change as you revise the story because your story will evolve as you spend more time with it. Your opening should be a reflection of what is to come in the story, but you don’t know what happens until you’ve written it!
Below is a checklist of specific and actionable steps you can take to strengthen your first chapter.
1. Your Opening
Is Your Protagonist Performing an Action That Is Unique to Them?
When writing your opening image, choose a situation or action that is unique to your protagonist’s journey. The opening image is not just the first line or paragraph of the story. It’s what your protagonist is doing the first time we see them. How you choose to open the story tells readers a lot about the trajectory of the plot and what the protagonist’s goals will be.
When authors struggle with where to begin the story, they often start in the wrong place. They feel that there has to be a leadup to the main action, resulting in the use of familiar images. Common opening images include waking up, dreaming, the weather, or being in transport. These images are familiar, but not unique. They are a condition of the human experience and have been used time and time again. It’s often stronger to use an image that is unique to the specific story you are trying to write.
If your story opening uses a familiar image, look at where the story really starts. Where does the familiar end and the unique begin? What is the earliest action or situation that signals your protagonist’s specific journey? That’s usually where the story hooks the readers.
There is an exception to this rule:
Don’t start with a familiar image unless it foreshadows a critical plot point or core aspect of change in the story.
A popular example of this is The Hunger Games. In this opening image, Katniss wakes up to an empty bed. The image here is that her sister, Prim, is not in the bed next to her. Prim’s absence foreshadows that Katniss’s journey begins with Prim (as Katniss volunteers herself in the Hunger Games to save her sister) and how Katniss will have to leave her. So while this example opening does rely on a familiar image, it is done with symbolic purpose.
2. Your Opening Line
Does your opening line point to your protagonist’s journey?
There’s so much pressure surrounding the opening line. It does so much of the heavy lifting of getting readers interested in the story. With one or two lines, you have to convince your reader that your book is worth their investment. To do this, you want to be meticulous and precise with the language you choose.
Just as with the opening image, you can create a strong opening line if you use language that foreshadows the protagonist’s journey. On a micro level, the language you choose signals a couple things to readers:
- the tone of the narrative
- the theme of the story
- the direction the story takes at the climax
Ingraining these elements into your first line will not only hook readers, but they’ll also think you’re clever. Let’s look at some popular examples:
“When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold.” —The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
Again, this opening line foreshadows how Katniss will be thrust into her new journey alone, without her family and without Prim. It also gives readers some insight into Katniss’s motives. She volunteers herself in place of her sister because Prim is the first thing Katniss thinks of every day. And even deeper than that, the choice to describe Prim’s side of the bed as cold foreshadows Prim’s eventual death later in the series.
“Cold fog had settled over the depot like a burial shroud, and Iris Winnow thought the weather couldn’t have been better.” —Divine Rivals, Rebecca Ross
In this example, words such as cold fog and burial shroud evoke strong images. The language is specific and, better yet, foreshadows a few major plot points in the novel without giving anything away. If you’ve read the book, you know that the climax takes place among gas and smoke that results in death. Much like cold fog and burial shrouds. In this way, the language has been chosen to foreshadow images that will be similar to those at the climax of the story.
3. Your Focus
Are you drawing readers’ attention to the wrong details?
When writing your first few pages, you want to mention only the details that move the story forward or create stakes for your protagonist. I’ve seen many manuscripts where a character is introduced on page one, only to never be seen again. Or there’s an object that the author describes in detail, only it’s not really important to the story. Readers are perceptive and are constantly looking for clues that signal where the story is headed. So when you mention a detail in your first chapter, you draw readers’ attention to it. If you focus on details that don’t move your story forward or are not relevant to the overall story, then you are misleading readers by placing unwanted emphasis on those details.
If you want to make your first chapter airtight, scrutinize any details that don’t fit the rest of the story.
Introduce characters, objects, places, and ideas with relevancy and intention.
4. Your Descriptions
Are you dumping too much information on readers?
As writers, it’s a natural inclination to frontload all of the information you have about the world you’ve built and the characters you’ve brought to life. It’s almost like a word vomit that spews out in the beginning because authors think their readers need to know everything from the jump. Often, this inclination leads us to overexplaining or giving the readers details by way of info dumps.
An info dump is a large chunk of information that disrupts the natural flow of the story. These can be in any part of the story, but most info dumps get buried in the first few chapters. Info dumps can be about anything—character backstory, character motives, character relationships, setting, and world building. You can identify an info dump in three ways:
- It slows down the pace of the narrative
- It bisects the action of the scene
- It unloads too much information on readers all at once
As a rule of thumb, only give readers the information that is relevant to making it to the next plot point. That’s not to say you shouldn’t get creative with your way of presenting information. It just means that you are being mindful and meticulous about which details you provide readers at any given moment. Not every detail needs to be given to readers in the beginning—especially when it comes to world building and character backstories. It’s often better to drop hints along the way, giving readers a puzzle to piece together based on the crumbs you leave behind. Evaluate if the information you want to give readers upfront would work better in a spot later in the story.
Info dumps are for writing. Strategic info dropping is for revision.
Ask yourself:
- Is what I’m telling readers relevant to what’s happening in this scene?
- Does this information slow down the pace of my scene?
- Can this information be taken out without readers losing any substance?
- Would this information be more relevant to a scene later in the story?
5. Your Conflict
Does your opening lack purposeful conflict?
Lastly, you want to ensure that your first chapter has conflict. If your opening scene doesn’t have some source of conflict, that’s a sure sign your story is starting in the wrong place. This conflict might not always be the big C Conflict that acts as the catalyst for the protagonist’s journey, but regardless, this conflict should reveal something about the world, foreshadow the big Conflict, or reveal the protagonist’s goals and motivations.
Another issue might be that, rather than having a lack of conflict, the conflict is instead displaced onto a secondary character. Authors sometimes have a hard time figuring out how to give the protagonist purposeful action in the beginning because they don’t know what actions the protagonist has to make to lead them into the big Conflict. To account for this, authors will instead allow a secondary character to pursue the goals that the protagonist should be pursuing, leaving the protagonist in a period of waiting.
Let’s look at some examples of conflict:
In The Hunger Games, there is both internal and external conflicts. The internal conflicts include: Gale suggests they run away (Katniss struggles with should she stay or go). The external conflict occurs at the end of the first chapter, when Prim’s name is called out for the Hunger Games. igniting the big Conflict.
In Divine Rivals, the story begins with Iris bidding her brother goodbye as he goes out to war. This is a more subtle internal conflict. Iris clearly doesn’t want her brother to go to war, though she doesn’t stop him from doing so either.
Need Help Evaluating Your First Chapter? Contact Fiction & Fable for Help!
If you need an extra set of eyes to evaluate whether your first chapter has a strong opening, I’d love to help you with your novel! Check out my developmental editing services or my chapter critique services.
