The Promise of the First Chapter

Video Transcription: Hi, it's Chris with Write Better Right Now. Last week I talked about fast starts for novels. You can go back and check out that video if you missed it. I want to go into a little more detail on first chapters today.

I have written a number of novels over the years. Some of them have even gotten published. I've learned a lot and I wish I had learned some things earlier.

The first chapter is so important because it is what hooks the reader. But it's not enough to just get off to a fast start that grabs the reader. You have to get off to the right kind of fast start for your novel. My friend Suzanne Morgan Williams, author of Bull Rider and other books, talked about the promise of the first chapter in a workshop that she gave.

This is an important concept because sometimes when writers are trying to grab the reader's attention right away, they start with a big action scene. That might work if you have an action novel, but it doesn't work if you actually have a quieter lyrical novel about someone coming to terms with grief.

You want your novel to have the right first chapter that fits the book, and you want the rest of your book to fulfill the promises you make in that first chapter.

That opening chapter has to do a lot. It should establish the genre, especially if it's not a contemporary story—if it's fantasy, science fiction, historical. You want to give clues early on that this is not ‘right now.’ If you’re writing for young people, you want some idea of the appropriate reader age range. You want to establish the setting.

You want to introduce one or more main characters. Ideally, you get some kind of a goal or problem with tension for that main character. You might not be able to introduce the main problem yet, but there should be something happening actively where the main character is trying to solve a problem or reach a goal.

You want to establish the structure. Now, if you switch point of view between chapters, then you can't necessarily show that in the first chapter, but you don't want to wait too long to let the reader know that's what you're doing. And if you have any kind of unusual format, like it's a novel in letters or alternating newspaper articles and emails and so forth, you probably want to get that up front.

Then you want to establish the tone or the voice. That can include things like whether it's serious or humorous, whether it is fast paced or more leisurely and lyrical.

You want to have all of those things showing up in your first chapter so that readers know what to expect. Those are your promises.

Let's look at an example from Bull Rider. It opens like this:

Folks in Salt Lick say I couldn't shake bull riding if I tried. It's in my blood, my family. Around here, any guy named Cam O'Mara should be a bull rider. But if you've ever looked a 1600-pound bucking bull named Ugly in the eye and thought about holding onto his back with a stiff rawhide handle, some pine tar, and a prayer, well, you’d know why I favored skateboarding.

This isn't the whole first chapter. This is only about 70 words. But look at what we have already. The genre, it's roughly contemporary. It could be a few decades in the past. The reader age range: it feels like a young adult novel. The setting: we might not know where Salt Lick is precisely, but that certainly sounds like a small town or rural community in the West. The main character is introduced.

Goal or problem? Well, there is some hint of it already, that his priorities are different from what his family and his community might expect from him. Plus the whole thing about bull riding being potentially very dangerous.

We get the point of view, first person, and it sounds like a teen boy from a rural western community. All that is in that first paragraph.

In Haunted the Ghosts on the Stairs, I opened with dialogue. You will sometimes hear you shouldn't do that, but I think it works as long as you make it clear who's talking and where they are. So it starts:

   "I don't like it," Tania said.

    I glanced down at my sister, then back at the hotel. "It looks like an old castle."

    "It looks haunted."

    I laughed. "Don't tell me you're starting to believe that garbage!"

    She hunched her head between her shoulders. "Of course not. I only mean it's spooky."

    "You just feel that way because... because of everything that's happened."

This is a ghost story. That's pretty obvious from the cover and the title. But in the book itself, Jon, the narrator, doesn't find out that Tania has seen a ghost until the end of chapter two. Then it takes him a little time to believe her. I wanted to still establish up front that you're going to get a ghost story. I found this way to work in those words like haunted and spooky to give the reader that promise right up front.

It also starts to establish the relationship between the two. Jon's goal throughout the book is to protect his younger sister, because they lost a different younger sister in the past. You also get some hints of other things going on. You don't want to keep too many secrets, but giving a hint and then explaining it shortly after is a good way to hook the reader into turning the page to find out what's going to happen next.

With The Genie's Gift, this is a fantasy novel. In an earlier draft, I started with:

   Anise and Cassim crept across the grassy courtyard to the kitchen building. They squatted, one on either side of the doorway. Anise glanced over at her friend, tall and lanky in his pale blue robe and white turban….

I was starting to establish the setting and give that Middle Eastern flavor, but in revision, I realized that I didn't have any fantasy elements until chapter 5, and that I felt was far too late. It started to feel like a realistic historical novel, and then the fantasy elements came in suddenly. In revision, I changed it:

    Anise knew the candy must be enchanted. The genie cook always put some kind of protection on the food, so no one could eat it until he said so. Would it stick her jaws together so she couldn’t speak? Turn her lips and tongue blue? Taste like camel dung?

We still get words that give the flavor of a Middle Eastern setting, but we also get definitely a fantasy element. This opening doesn't introduce a huge problem. It's certainly not the problem of the book, which is that her father is trying to arrange a marriage for her, so she goes on a journey to find a genie to help her get out of that situation. But it is still a little bit of problem, to maybe hook the reader on that first page. They turn the page to see what happens, and by the end of the first chapter, you know a lot more about the situation.

You can't usually write the perfect first chapter when you start a book, because often you may not know what the promise is until you finish the book. But at some point during your revisions, you definitely want to revisit that first chapter and make sure you have the right promise for your story!

Revision Exercise:

•         After you have a draft…

•         What are your first chapter promises?

•         Does the rest of your story deliver on those promises?

•         Do they match your goal?

•         Make notes on revising your opening for the right promise, or on other places to start.

Next week, I’ll share some additional specific examples of openings. After that, we’ll start looking at how to keep the rest of the novel equally dramatic and compelling.