We’ve all done it. We’ve picked up that book that looked exciting and read the first chapter and put it down, never to finish it.
Why is that? Why did we put it down?
As a reader, sometimes we don’t
know, or couldn’t say. As a writer, all I can say is what I have heard from
many others; first chapters are HARD!!! Personally, I think that is one of the
greatest understatements of all time.
Let’s ask ourselves a couple of questions; what
should I put in my first chapter and how do I make it work to hook the reader?
An ideal first chapter should have the
following 7 points:
1) Introduce the protagonist.
You always want to open your novel with a
scene involving the main character. In other media forms, this is not always
the case, movies and TV often start with others and move to the MC but they
move quickly and the audience can follow the progression.
Usually, we bond closely with the characters
we meet first in a book. If characters that we’ve bonded with get killed early
in the story, we feel cheated. (Hush now, I never mentioned George R. R. Martin.)
For me, I think one of the most important
things to hook the reader here is also the first line of the novel. It needs to draw the reader in. Preferably a
line that tells or infers as much as possible about the protagonist as possible
That first line should try to project the gender
and age of the MC. Also if possible the show the social status or position in
society, but most of all, that first line needs to project the emotions the
character is feeling in the scene. It sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? It is not
impossible. Usually most of it will be inferred but it helps set the stage.
Here’s how I open Forged By Betrayal:
“I guess now I will finally get to find out why my life has been flipped
upside down and I’m headed down to this muddy fringe world instead of starting Marine
Leadership Command School.”
I haven’t used any description of the
protagonist yet, but we can tell a few things from just this first sentence.
The Protagonist is:
·
Coming from another
planet.
·
In the Marines.
·
Not happy about the
change in her life.
·
Wants answers to why they
are here.
We can also identify with the stress of her
not knowing why she is on the new planet and feel her frustration. She’s in an unknown
situation and we hope to find out her future and see her succeed.
2) Help the readers want
to follow your protagonist through their journey.
This is the important part. The readers have
to WANT to see her succeed. What makes the readers care? I don’t think
there is any formula that will always work, especially for different genres.
You just have to make your MC into someone they care about and create problems they
can identify with and tell a good story. Easy, right?
We are always reading and being told that
every ‘good’ story needs a “sympathetic” protagonist, but that doesn’t
necessarily mean a person you’d like to go to a ballgame with.
Spock is cold to those around him and holds
his emotions back from everyone, but he is one of the most influential
characters of the last half-century. Dexter Morgan is a sociopathic serial
killer. Even Han Solo is a lawless smuggler. It could be argued that some of
these were not the protagonists of their stories but they were still characters
that drew the audience to follow their story.
Your MC doesn’t have to have such obvious
flawed as those characters. But they do need to have weaknesses. My protagonist,
Sheli Chowdhury, hates not being in control and finds herself in a completely
new environment where she is far outside her comfort zone. This leaves her
floundering and sometimes, lost.
There are some readers who prefer aggressive, dominant
characters, and others prefer a more laid-back, thoughtful hero. Sometimes it
just depends on what genre you are writing in.
What you can’t have is an MC that is pushed by
the story instead of being his own hero. He or she needs to make the story
happen. The story can’t happen to them. The first chapter needs to show
that hero being a hero in some way. It could be a small way this early in the
story but they need to start here.
3) Ignite conflict.
I think the next most important thing that we
need in the opening chapter is actually one thing that comes in two parts. We
need conflict. Without conflict, we have a wonderful ‘day in the life’ memoir,
but not an actual story that will pull a reader in. We need conflict not only here
in the opening chapter, but we need an overarching tension that will propel
your plot throughout the novel.
In our second book Day of Reckoning,
the burning question in the opening scene is whether Lieutenant Monica Samuels
will survive on having been left on a ship full of mutineers. But the larger
conflict is with the orders she was given by Captain Brighton before he was
forced off of the ship. Is she just supposed to survive or is she supposed to
fight back? When the conflict of the opening scene is resolved, we still keep
turning pages because of the underlying tension from a bigger story question—what
will she do and how will she survive if she decides to fight back?
Setting conflict does not mean that you have
to have an actual battle. It can sometimes just mean a character is having an
argument with themselves. The reader just needs to see that the character has a
problem that they need to solve and then watch them try to solve it.
The second part of the conflict equation is
introducing the antagonist. An antagonist is someone/something that keeps the
protagonist from reaching his goal.
I think sometimes the term “antagonist” is hard
to understand. I know for me, when I first started, I wanted to use the term ‘antagonist’
and ‘villain’ as meaning the same thing. It is not quite the same. Of course,
the villain of your story would be the antagonist but, in some stories, the
antagonist can be the whole society, an addiction, a judicial system, or
anything that might keep your hero from achieving their goal.
Even if you don’t have a specific villain, you
need some kind of antagonist, and you need to introduce them in the first
chapter.
4) Tell us about the
World.
This is the first chapter so you don’t have to
give a huge amount of description, but there is quite a bit that you can do
here. And again, I think there are three pieces to this section. The first is ‘World-building’.
Several years ago, I took a SF novel-writing class and Michael Stackpole was the instructor. He is a great author and I thought he was a greater instructor. One of the first things he had us do was make a list of the six things that the reader needed to know about our world. These things, he said, needed to be in our first chapter. Preferably in our first few paragraphs. Since the novel I was writing for that class was Forged by Betrayal, here is the list that I created for that novel.
· Limited
FTL travel is possible through jump gates and several worlds have been settled
outside the Sol system.
·
National
and planetary governments have been co-opted by rich Corporate ‘Families’
·
These
Families are loosely governed by a Ruling Council formed by representatives from
each Family.
·
The
Ruling Council controls the Earth Combined Fleet but not each Families’ fleets
or militaries.
·
The
Fermi Family Governor of the planet Humboldt hasn’t been complying with
humanitarian laws.
·
Sheli
Chowdhury is a young officer assigned to her first command as a Combined Fleet
Marine on Humboldt.
Don’t try to show too much in the first
chapter. Tell the readers what they need to know and fill in the rest of
the details, in pieces, throughout the rest of the novel.
The trick is to tell us enough to give us a
picture of the scene that’s taking place, but don’t slow down the movement or action.
The second part of setting up your world is
setting the tone of your novel. What do you want the reader to feel?
You don’t want to start out a murder mystery
with a light dialogue or open a romance with a serial killer slashing a throat.
You want to your reader immersed in the book’s world from your first sentence. You
need to use your words to convey that tone because there is no other method
available in the novel. Describe the weather, to set the tone. Change the pace
of your sentences. Short, quick sentences increase the pace and show danger.
Mocking, first-person joking can show a different tone. Or sarcasm can show anger
repressed in the MC. Use their voices to set the tone, and do it early.
The last part of building your world is to let
the reader know the theme of the story. I have to say, this is not something I
do well because I don’t think about it often enough. If you plan to deal with
a particular theme in your novel, you don’t have to make a big play in the
opening chapter but you can throw out some hints. Foreshadowing is never
wasted.
This is the opening paragraph of our book Day of Reckoning:
“Ensign Monica Samuels dispassionately watched Clint Morrison in
his engineering enlisted uniform tap the butt of his pistol on the door frame
before quickly bringing his prisoner back in its sights. The hatch opened and
he eyed the young officer as she passed into her own quarters. The barrier
closed again, and the metallic click indicated that it would not open again
until someone on the other side came for her.”
You know right away that Ensign Samuels is in trouble, she’s locked up,
she’s a prisoner, and she’s alone.
5) Show the
readers the protagonist’s goal: what does he/she want.
The readers need to know what the MC wants immediately,
which in the story above, is to get out of her room.
But we also need to know pretty early in the
story what your hero really, really needs before the end of the story. Going
back to our story Day of Reckoning, her ultimate goal was to take the ship back
from the mutineers.
Of course, the MC’s ultimate goal doesn’t need
to be outlined in chapter one. But we do need to see something early that
will lead the MC to that ultimate goal. Show the readers something in chapter
one that will lead them to that goal.
6) The MC needs to
have a life-changing event.
Just like closing each chapter with some kind of mini-cliffhanger to pull the reader into the next chapter, you need a big, life-changing event in the MC’s life to kick your story into high gear and pull
your readers in. This ‘inciting event’ is what starts your plot moving and it
needs to be in the first chapter.
This event is what gets your protagonist off
of his couch and moving forward to solve his goals. It should also be what hooks
your readers and pulls them into the story and pulls them from chapter one to
chapter two.
This event is usually easier to get into the
first chapter if you are writing genre stories. In the new book I’m
writing now, it is a murder mystery, I just had to throw a dead body and a
serial killer into the first chapter and the story is off and away.
For other genres it might get tougher but make
sure you do it, it will definitely pull the readers along.
7) Let your readers
meet the other characters.
Let’s be careful here. In the first chapter
you only want to introduce characters who are going to be major characters in
the novel. Don’t confuse the readers with characters who they are never going
to see again. You are trying to hook the reader into reading the whole book. Don’t
confuse or upset them. They’ll put your book down and find someone else’s.
(One thing I saw in a book I was reading a few
years ago was two characters who’s names were very similar. At the beginning of
the book, it was hard to tell who was who. Try to avoid doing things that
confuse the reader that way.)
These are my opinions on how to hook a reader
in your first chapter.
What are your thoughts?
***
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