Here’s a guest post from novelist Clare X. Gailey on your novel’s all-important first chapter.
Chapter One: Hellbeast
The first chapter of your novel will make or break your reader’s experience. The Internet is changing the way people read, and if readers aren’t hooked fast, they might not indulge you in the 20 or even five pages you need to get a grip on their attention.
When it comes to novels, writing your introduction last is almost a requirement. You simply know more things about a story after writing it than you did before writing it, and your new knowledge must change how the story starts.
For my last novel my first Chapter One functioned like movie credit filler. I introduced my heroine by showing her move around her household, established her comfort level with her life (just before a man ruins that life), and basically, painted the lull before the storm.
257 pages later I had a finished novel, complete with a ripe first-person voice, plot, theme, and all the gory details that make a good story. And a bad first chapter.
In the second draft, I made Chapter One more active: I introduced my heroine by showing her break up with her boyfriend (the guy before the guy who ruins her life). You can tell a lot about a person by how she reacts to conflict, so I wanted to show her struggling with a heavy wind, before the real storm.
Another draft and umpteen form rejections later—rejections based on one chapter only—I had to admit that the first chapter still wasn’t working. Was the conflict not steep enough? Or was the voice, so effortless and easy in the rest of the book, missing from the chapter I wrote first?
I asked some folks what their favorite novel openings were, and my friend Craig Bridger reminded me of Catcher in the Rye and Lolita. In both books, the voice is unmistakable from the first word, and the plot is secondary.
Well, it’s just peachy to consider all this theoretically. When I came back to drafting, I had to rely on trial and error. I tried brainstorming better conflicts. I tried setting up the heroine to rant. I tried recruiting a different character from the book to rant. I came up with some tasty first lines, but somehow they were impotent—they couldn’t generate full paragraphs, let alone a chapter.
Finally, I identified the fundamental problem. In a novel told in first-person, do you start the story with who the narrator was, or who the narrator became? The story starts at the beginning so the heroine is her old self, but the story is told in past tense so the heroine is already her new self, but then how do you transition from new to old… AGH! This is hell!!
The answer was, both/and. As soon as I figured out how to let the heroine’s old self speak while her new self added commentary at the same time, I nailed the chapter and could finally get on with the rest of my revisions. Phew!
Clare X. Gailey is a writer living in New York City. She is a novelist and a co-author (with Jacque Fletcher) of 101 Smackdowns for Your Inner Critic (101smackdowns.wordpress.com).
If you have suggestions for getting your chapter 1 just right, you can post them here or on the forum.
-Maria Schneider
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
A few years back I judged a Chapter One contest — 125 manuscripts, 20-pages max — and the two most important things that separated the bad from the good were:
1) Too much tell, not enough show. Reciting history instead of picking a character and showing it through their eyes. Long-winded details of what happened to whom and when. Zzzzz…
2) A first chapter is the bait to hook your reader. Unless your book has come highly recommended, most people are giving it 2-5 pages to reel them in. An interesting character, setting, event…something INTERESTING to make them commit the time to reading the whole thing. Because nobody wants to put a book down halfway through and walk away.
With the instant gratification our children are becoming, writing will be tighter than it has ever been. The first chapter is make it or break it. You need to have a solid character you can feel for and conflict right off the bat. How many trees have we killed reworking that first chapter.-DavidG
Super post. I’ve struggled with the same problem of tense in first person – it influences everything, including when and where to begin the story. It’s very subtle to add that subtle element of time distance in past – how much does your protag reveal about the future as the story bumbles along? Thanks… Peace, Linda
Nailing a beginning is huge. Thanks for having this post out there to be found when I needed it most.
A big fat DITTO to everything above!!
The Web has changed reading.
Writers are still catching up to those changes.
I believe most readers are ready to be ROCKED from word 1. N’ the movie-trailer version of yer story is a GREAT way to think of the opening!
Word:
Change.
Adapt.
Or die.