Look for a place to enter the story. All right, you already have, but I’m asking you to float your decision for a moment, because comparing it to other possibilities helps you evaluate it. Consider more than one way you could open the novel, weighing the dramatic effect of starting at that moment; the trajectory toward the climax; the need for exposition of what went before; etc. You want a story opening that is compressed enough to create tension (it raises a question) but elaborated enough to introduce aspects of character, plot, and theme. Try writing two new sentences to begin the first chapter. You may discover something you can use to improve what you have already done. Read into your chapter and see if you can find a new opening lying in wait.
You probably have already heard or read advice about jumping right into the action, creating suspense, and raising a big question about what will follow. Some books require a heavy-action start, but I have a different expectation of first chapters. If you can introduce the story question that early, fine; perhaps you can introduce a deeper question, the something in the protagonist that hurts or makes a demand. But what you must do is establish the sound of your voice.
I think the primary function of the first chapter is to establish the writer’s contract with the reader:
Here is the narrator, and this is the voice you will hear.
Here is a person you will come to know and care about.
This is the pace of things, the way I lay prose on the page.
This is how big a chapter is and how fast it reads.
This is a story that will make you laugh; draw you into compassion and sorrow; pull you along with suspense; fill your pockets with information and commentary; take you to exotic places; explore the drama of a small world; and so on!
WHAT WILL YOUR NOVEL DO?
The reader should know what she is getting into. Personally, I don’t consider tension in the first chapter all that important; often it feels artificial, and I dislike the feeling I’m being manipulated. Someone can tell me that Novel X is the best read ever, but if I don’t fall in love with the sound of the narration, the intelligence of the sentences, the feeling of being drawn into the consciousness of someone intriguing and deep and mysterious, I’m just not interested. If I try to write like that myself, and it puts off the reader who is looking for a romp and a fast ride, that is fine with me. If you are writing an adventure story, a suspense novel, or a thriller, you will surely know what you have to do in the first chapter, because you will have read a lot of other novels like what you are writing. You want your first chapter to give the reader a good idea of what the novel is going to be like.
So how the chapter sounds lets the reader know what kind of consciousness is guiding the story. Then you can worry about what question(s) you raise. Not, already, “Will Samantha escape the burning house?” but “Who is Samantha? What is she looking for and where will her search take her?”
Here we are, the first chapter says. Come in.
Sometimes, an event occurs in the first chapter that sets things moving; this isn’t necessarily the “catalytic” or “inciting” event that raises the big story questions. Rather, the opening event creates context. Bernard Grebanier calls this “establishing the ground for the story.” Turning the soil. Opening some doors. Lighting a lamp. The first thing that has to happen in order for the next thing—the more dramatic thing—to happen.
A child is born but given away and the mother is told the child died.
Two boys set out to ride across the border into adventure.
A shamed woman flees to a resort to give things time to calm down.
A dog is killed and a boy decides to find out who did it.
A mother on an errand in World War II–era San Francisco sees the notice requiring all people of Japanese ethnicity to report to transfer centers.
A small boat carrying a very pretty woman approaches a totally out-of-the-way Greek village.
A woman is asked by her government’s secret service to take on one more assignment.
Note that the catalyst doesn’t have to be big and brassy. In the first chapter of Sue Miller’s The Good Mother, the scenes seem to function merely as information, a look at the relationship of mother and child, which we know will somehow be sundered. But consider what happens after the mother picks up a letter at the post office. She carries it all through the day and evening, until she finally reads it. It’s a minor matter related to her impending divorce. You hardly notice it, but the repeated appearance of the letter creates a subliminal expectation in a reader: Something more is ahead. It’s like the trickle into a thread of water into a stream into a river. The divorce makes her vulnerable, though she expresses confidence that it’s being handled very amicably and efficiently. The letter is significant in the same way the first cut in fabric is significant; the way the car turns when it backs out of the driveway. It doesn’t have to feel portentous at the time, it just has to be the first step.
There are a few good general rules in writing a first chapter, such as:
Don’t get bogged down in describing the setting. Unless, of course, the novel is about an adventure on the great cold Atlantic and so that’s the first thing you want the reader to know. Unless it’s a tale of the Civil War and you open on a battlefield littered with corpses. Unless it’s about a murder on a movie set. You get the idea.
Don’t try to set up what’s coming by telling what happened before. I’m sure you’ll find an exception. But it’s still basic advice: Start the novel where the story starts. Don’t launch into a setup. The reader wants to be there, not hear history. As long as you keep in mind that you are beginning the story, you’ll do the right thing.
Don’t try to “hook” the reader by jumping ahead to something really, really exciting and mysterious. Also known as a prologue. There are certain genres where prologues are acceptable, but I think they are a bad idea. If you can’t get your reader’s attention in the right now of the story, find a different place to begin telling it. Sometimes, instead of a prologue—a piece of story to come later—an author begins his novel with a meditation on an aspect of life, family, fate. It’s a risky and challenging approach, requiring a strong voice, the ability to carry the reader into abstractions, etc., but it can be very satisfying and attractive, too. Such an opening should segue into something active, in that first chapter.
Don’t get lost in explaining why what is happening matters, or what the character is thinking about. I know I’m repeating myself; it bears repeating. Let the unwinding of event pull the reader into the story.
The single best thing you can do now is to look at many sample beginnings: first lines; first paragraphs; first pages; first scenes; first chapters. Take a stack of books to the bookstore coffee shop. Get your cappuccino and read openings. Take notes that describe what you observe that you like. Try out strategies with your own story, like doing calisthenics. Take a break and then sum up what you most liked and what seemed most helpful to you in writing or evaluating your own opening.
In the first chapter of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time the boy Christopher discovers the neighbor’s dog, still warm, but dead. It actually takes five short chapters to introduce the story problem—he is accused wrongly of killing the dog and then undertakes to solve the murder. First he tells the reader who he is and what he is like. Each brief chapter is charming and intriguing. The voice is definitely the come-hither element.
Madame Bovary, interestingly, does not begin with Emma. It delays introducing her, making the reader wait—and a reader does want to get a first glimpse of her. But the early chapters create the world in which Emma and Charles will meet and marry. It is all about time and place and chance. It is interesting. It is also a novel from the nineteenth century, when books didn’t have to compete with television and movies.
The first chapter of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos is a different case. It is all a scene in the ele
gant Manhattan apartment of the protagonist and his wife, a $500-a-plate charity dinner. Other rich people are mingling about. Some odd people show up (they were hired to come) and make a scene. I liked it well enough to keep reading, but I think it was the weakest part of the novel. It was a setup for the theft of the painting hanging in the bedroom, but characters were introduced that we never saw again, the threat that an intruder would ruin the party didn’t lead to anything, and I was relieved when it was over. Mind you, it meant more later, but it would not have made me buy the book if I hadn’t read a review and been intrigued by the subject (art forgery) ahead of time.
EXERCISES
Read the first chapter of a novel you love. Describe the voice. What expectations are raised for what is coming? How would you describe the contract the author offers you as reader?
Repeat with many novels!
Now work your way through this evaluation list with your own novel.
1. Does this chapter truly begin the story? (In other words, will the next chapter pick up where it left off? If not, what is the chapter tied to eventually?) Is it not making any false promises?
2. Is this chapter written in the voice of the novel from now on? Is there irony? compassion? sorrow? delight? gravity? buoyancy? Decide what effect you think you have established and point to the specific sentences that build it.
3. Do you think the reader will feel drawn in and swept along by the sense of having entered a large story to come?
4. Is there a sense of a story question being raised? This can be one or both of two kinds of questions: (a) an immediate problem or (b) an overarching problem. You get a gold star if you do both. You get it later if your opening chapter is about context and is so interesting we don’t care that we have to wait for the problem.
5. Is the first sentence perfect? Read it aloud. Several times. Read the first sentence of lots of novels. There’s also a feature in each issue of Poets & Writers that presents first sentences.
6. Do you think the reader will rightly expect the story to be laid out the way it is, in terms of chapter lengths, for example?
7. Write out what your chapter establishes about the story as a whole. This isn’t saying what happens in the chapter, it’s saying what expectations are being raised, what the reader will assume about the experience of reading your book. (Of course she won’t know what’s going to happen.)
8. Does your chapter have a beginning, middle, and end? What is its balance of narrative summary and scene? Does that represent your style throughout the book? Is there satisfaction in reading the chapter, as if it is a story of its own?
9. Does your first chapter make your heart thump? (And I do mean yours, not the reader’s, necessarily. I mean: Right now, reading it, are you excited about your book?)
5. Choose six noncontiguous scenes and describe how they connect across the plot.
How do scenes connect? Well, one leads to the other. But I am asking you to read six disconnected scenes. The logic of the ongoing action won’t lull you from your evaluation. Each scene has to be successful; all scenes have to have something viable to do with the overall story.
This is a little tricky. I want you to choose any six scenes you like, from six different chapters. Pull those chapters from your hard copy and lay them out in consecutive order. The scenes won’t—indeed, should not—follow one right after the other, one, two, etc. This is random sampling, but I wouldn’t use all scenes that you know are among the most important ones; you’ll get to them later. They don’t have to be long scenes, but they need to be long enough to have action, tension, a turning point, character response (all of the things a good scene has). Of course every scene should contribute to the forward movement of your story. Otherwise, what is it doing there? If this turns out to be a way to catch a weak scene, all the better. You can tag it for rewrite right now.
So your six scenes might look like this:
From chapter 3, second scene.
From chapter 7, first scene.
From chapter 13, third scene.
From chapter 15, third scene.
From chapter 24, first scene.
From chapter 33, last scene.
Start by writing a brief summary of each scene, just a few lines. Write it at the top, or on a sticky note.
Identify the “high point” or turning point of each scene and mark it in some way. Consider how it moves the plot forward. Or does it serve some other function, such as deepening understanding of the protagonist? Is it part of the “now” of the novel, or is it part of the backstory? Describe its function on a sticky note. Seeing a scene out of context is an arbitrary thing to do, but it helps you cast a cold eye on it.
Read the scenes one by one as separate entities. Is the scene interesting, never mind that it might refer to things that came before? Remember that you have no ticket to skip pages, or paragraphs, or sentences. Everything must interest the reader. Choose a page at random and note the details: the scum on the dishwater, the faint sound of giggling through the walls, light striking the rim of a glass. Everything alive, evocative, belonging, interesting.
Does the passage have heft? Does it need to be a scene? Does it feel like a little story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end? Or is it a scene introduced as a placeholder for a passage of backstory or response? What is its function?
If I were a reader, and I opened the book to this scene as a sample of the book, would it make me want to read the rest of it?
If you don’t like the answers to these questions about a particular scene, you know you need to consider whether it belongs in the novel at all, and if it does, you need to rewrite it.
Now skim the scenes and study your notes. How do the scenes connect? If it’s not evident that they connect plot points, consider the settings, the tone, the characters. Do they sound as if they are from the same book? Are there any echoes from one of the scenes to another? If the protagonist is in all of them, is he a consistent character, without being repetitive? Has something happened to him between the first and the sixth scene that affects his behavior? If he isn’t in a scene, can you connect the character who is there to the other scenes? Do you feel there is a stream going by and these are six times you have stepped into it?
Write out your answer. I would start by saying how one scene connects to the next one—in the example above, chapter 3 to chapter 7. (If nothing else, time will have passed. Does anything that happened in chapter 3 seem to affect what happened in chapter 7?) Does the later scene have any “seed” in the first scene that has been developed by this scene? Are there different characters in the scenes? Does the second scene push any plot point raised in the first scene? How has the character changed from an early scene to a later one?
Then go to the next pair—chapter 7 and chapter 13—and so on; in each dyad, consider how one scene has jumped in time and plot progression to the second one. In essence, you are considering the elisions—what has come between them.
Can you tell that the story has been driven by complications that intensify?
If you have chosen scenes that are not closely connected, there will be some sense of disjunction in the set. However, they should read as excerpts from the same story; they should have connective tissue, even if it is subtle. They should indicate rising (and perhaps falling) action—that is, complication. What happens in, say, the fourth scene should depend in some way on what happened in the earlier scenes. You are putting a dipstick into your manuscript; you want to see if the same fluid is running under all its pages.
What do you think of the way these scenes relate—to one another, to the story as a whole? As samples, would they make a reader want to read more? What kinds of questions do the scenes raise? How important are those questions to the novel? Is there tension?
If one of your scenes is wimpy, do something now: Decide why you wrote it, what it was supposed to accomplish. Then find a way to fo
ld that into another scene and eliminate this one. If you thought this was an important scene, it has to be dramatic. It has to have energy and conflict. What complication can you add or intensify?
If you think the scenes are too disparate, make notes about the elements that seem “off.” See if there are ways to make these separated scenes more like relatives instead of strangers.
EXERCISES
Consider doing this first with the novel you have chosen to study.
For each scene, find a moment you can capture in a “snapshot.” Freeze time. You take a photograph of that moment in your mind. Write a caption for it on a piece of paper. Now lay the papers out and think about the snapshots laid out side by side. Envision the snapshots—those moments caught in time. Are they intriguing? Do they seem to belong together? Is there a sense of mystery in them? Do you wonder what the connections are? Why did you choose each one?
For each scene, identify the highest point of tension. How is it related to the overall question of the plot?
Where is this photograph taken (the setting at this point in the story)? Is there something special about this moment, in this place?
Take any two of the scenes and answer these questions:
1. What is there in both scenes that makes them recognizable as being from the same story?
2. What is there in each scene that makes it different from any of the other scenes?
3. How is the world of the novel brought to life in each scene?
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