The Idiot's Guide to Writing

Lesson 12: The Beginning

The beginning of any story is the most important from an engagement standpoint. If people don't judge books by their covers, they judge them by their first chapter, and it's not really surprising that some writers are intimidated by that first page. The first chapter has to do a lot of heavy lifting: it has to establish its protagonist and cast, the setting, and make them interesting enough to be worth following.

But oddly enough, I've noticed from my review shop that chapter 1 is almost always a story's best chapter in terms of quality. Why? That's a great question, I have no idea. It might be a perception thing, because I haven't made any judgments about the story yet, but I find that there's usually more interesting word choice, characterization, and it's overall just more engaging than the rest of the story. It may be counterintuitive, but I think writers are usually excited to start their stories and rise to the challenge. In the pacing chapter, I mentioned that if you're bored writing any particular section, it's probably not going to be any good. Vice versa is also true. So don't sweat it—seriously. It's bad for you.

Anyway, the most important thing the beginning does is 'hook' the reader. The first scene should be interesting enough to engage them and get them to the later plot. Some writers take this to mean that you have to open with a bang, but action is not necessarily interesting. You want to make the reader care, and you want to introduce them to what the rest of your story will be about. For example, if your story's most important element is magic, show us a little magic. Magic is inherently intriguing—it shows the reader something about the world, the characters wielding it, and is probably involved with the main conflict. If your main conflict is about complex interpersonal relationships, show us a downscaled version of those conflicts. Something, anything that's interesting.

Though be careful with how dramatic you make your opening chapter. The first chapter shows what's to be expected, but it also shows what's normal for the characters. If the plot is all gas from page one, then readers don't know what the protagonist's life is like before the inciting incident, and therefore they have no point of comparison and they can't get a full understanding  of how much the characters' lives have changed. This isn't saying you can't start with the inciting incident—plenty of great stories go off like a shot—the point is that if you're starting with the inciting incident, it shouldn't immediately take your characters out of normalcy—whatever 'normalcy' is for them.

Sometimes you can introduce multiple conflicts at once in the beginning, but that's a little tricky. It's really hard or even straight-up impossible to balance that all in one beginning chapter. Prologues can help with that and give some extra versatility. For example, in my book Stormbreacher, I use my prologue to introduce the high-stakes conflict that will gradually consume the plot, and then chapter 1 introduces an important interpersonal conflict. A prologue tells the reader to remember something and keep it on a tab—choose carefully what you show in a prologue and why it's important. If it's not important, you're just delaying the story.

There's also a big obsession about the opening line of the story. It's true—the first sentence should make an impact on your reader. However, this overemphasis on that one line causes authors to obsess over it and make silly mistakes. One such silly mistake is writing an opening line that is too cryptic or irrelevant to be meaningful. It's focusing too hard on the impact of the line, shocking the audience—rather than introducing them. An opening line should introduce at least one of the following: the tone, characters, setting, mood, conflict, and/or themes. It doesn't really have to be flashy—just meaningful. My favorite opening lines pretty much all follow this rule:

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." –The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader"

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer that they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York." –The Bell Jar

"Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much." –Parry Hotter and the Sorcerer's Stone

The first two are great because not only do they surprise you, but they surprise you in a relevant way, not a cryptic one. The surprise tells you something about the character in question: in The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader", you already know that this boy who got saddled with this awful name is an asshole. The Bell Jar's opening line is a little more subtle—the Rosenbergs don't seem immediately relevant—but you at least know that the character is probably a bit of klutz if she doesn't know what she's doing. But the Rosenbergs are relevant to the POV because she's sort of obsessed with death; so not only is it surprising, it morbidly characterizes her.

The third opening line doesn't entirely work without context, but if you know that the story is a fantasy story (which...I mean, of course you do) the statement that things are very normal is kind of intriguing. Not to mention, the 'thank you very much' ending gives you the tone—a story that's got a little silliness to it.

Note that none of these lines are talking about anything interesting. The first just names a boy, the second shows someone lost in a city, and the third is literally characterized as being boring. The word choice and tone make these pop, not necessarily the subject.

All that being said, you can't tunnel-vision on the opening line. Of course, your first line is the most important and needs care, but what people end up doing is that they have a great opening line...and then the rest of their sentences suck. Sometimes this also happens with one-liners or a line that the author really wants to be quoted and hung on walls and stuff. Of course some lines are going to be better than others, and you can't and shouldn't give as much time into every line as the first, but...everything you write should have thought. That will carry retention through the first paragraph, the next chapter, and all the way to the end.