by Anne R. Allen
Happy New Year!
Congratulations if you won NaNoWriMo in November. And even if you didn’t. In fact, you deserve congrats if you didn’t join in the madness at all, and you’ve been writing slowly and steadily all year. No matter how long it took you, pat yourself on the back for writing that book!
Finishing a novel is awesome. Only a tiny percentage of people who start to write a book actually finish.
But no, you’re not done.
Now it’s time to face the editing process.
I know. It can feel awful, killing off your darlings and deleting all those words you poured onto the page to reach your daily wordcount.
Look at it this way: when you’re writing your first draft, you’re writing for you. You’re getting to know your characters and their world. You need let everything spill out on the page free of your inner editor’s censorship.
But when you’re revising, it’s a different story. You’ll need to cut a whole lot of info you’ve put into the opening chapters. Don’t delete anything—save it for later to scatter through the book.
You’ll probably end up with an opening chapter that’s very different from the one you started with. And that’s as it should be. Your entire original Chapter One may end up being one of those darlings you have to kill.
I usually write the final draft of my first chapter last. That’s because I won’t know exactly what needs to be in there until I’ve got the ending all polished up.
An ideal first chapter should do the following things:
1) Introduce the main character.
You want to open with a scene involving the protagonist. Yes, I know the standard opening of every cop show on TV involves random strangers discovering a body or getting killed. This is something that works great in drama but not in a novel.
Whoever readers meet first in a book is the character they’ll bond with. If that person gets killed on page five, people feel cheated.
They don’t need to know a huge amount about the MC right away, but they need to know enough to care. You can be very sketchy about looks (all Jane Austen told us about Elizabeth Bennett is that she had “fine eyes”.)
They probably need to know gender, age and maybe social status/work/position in society, but most of all, they need to know about the emotions the character is feeling in the scene—preferably emotions the reader can identify with.
Here’s how I open Ghostwriters in the Sky:
“The subway car was so crowded I couldn’t tell which one of the sweaty men pressing against me was attached to the hand now creeping up my thigh. I should have known better than to wear a dress on a day I had to take the subway, but in the middle of a New York heat wave, I couldn’t face another day in a pants suit.”
I haven’t used any description of the protagonist, but we can tell she’s 1) female 2) a worldly city dweller who takes things in stride 3) not rich enough to take a taxi 4) employed in some way that usually requires wearing a suit 5) way too polite for her own good.
We can also identify with her distress at being groped. She’s in an uncomfortable situation and we hope for her to escape without harm.
2) Make us care enough to go on a journey with that character.
This is trickier than it sounds. What makes us care? There’s no formula and no one thing will work for every reader in every genre.
Agents and editors are always telling us they want a “sympathetic” protagonist, but that doesn’t necessarily mean somebody you’d like to like to have as a friend.
Scarlett O’Hara is shallow and narcissistic, but readers have found her fascinating for nearly a century. Dexter’s Dexter Morgan is a sociopathic serial killer—not exactly a guy you’d want for a BFF. And who’d actually like to hang out with Jay Gatsby, Hercule Poirot or Lisbeth Salander? Even Jane Austen’s Emma is something of a witch. And as for Sherlock Holmes…
You don’t have to present us with a protagonist as flawed as those characters. But they do need to have weaknesses. My sleuth, Camilla Randall, is terminally polite, and always believes things are going to be perfectly fine, although the reader can see sure-fire trouble looming. (You can read more about Camilla at my new blog, The Camilla Randall Mysteries.)
Some people like a kick-ass-first, ask-questions-later character, and some prefer a more thoughtful, honorable hero. And a comic hero has to be lovable so we’ll forgive the faults that carry the comedy. Everything depends on genre and tone.
What readers generally don’t find sympathetic is arrogance, whining, or a victim mentality. A hero needs to be brave in some way, so you want to let us see the potential for that right away.
3) Set tone.
You don’t want to start out a romantic comedy with a gruesome murder scene, or open a thriller with light, flirtatious banter. You want to immerse your reader in the book’s world from the opening paragraph. Since novelists don’t have music and visuals to set the scene, we need to use words that convey tone.
Long descriptions of weather or setting aren’t in fashion these days, but broad descriptive strokes can offer a lot in terms of setting the mood of your story.
My above opener is light and humorous. The sticky weather echoes Camilla’s sticky situation. In another kind of book, this could be a situation of grave danger, or something that would cause the heroine extreme distress. Then describing the humid weather in terms of darkness or heaviness would convey a different mood.
But you don’t have to use weather or description to set tone. Sharp, staccato dialog can convey danger, or a self-deprecating narrative voice can show we’re going to be in for some laughs.
4) Let us know the theme.
If you’re dealing with a particular theme, you don’t want to hit us over the head with it, but give us some foreshadowing. Great authors can do this in the first sentence.
Look at how William Gibson began Neuromancer, the novel that defined cyberpunk:
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
Gibson lets us know from the get-go this is about the dark side of technology.
I start my mystery Sherwood, Ltd with this paragraph:
“Anybody can become an outlaw. For me, all it took was a little financial myopia, an inherited bad taste in spouses, a recession—and there I was, the great-granddaughter of newspaper baron H. P. Randall, edging around in alley-shadows, about to become a common thief.”
You know right away we’re dealing with a theme of poverty, outlaws and thieves—echoing the Robin-Hoody title.
5) Let us know where we are.
You don’t need to give a ton of physical description, but readers need to know what planet/historical time period they’re in.
In spite of everything you’ve heard about showing-not-telling, it’s perfectly all right to give the reader some basic information in a straightforward way, as Jeffrey Eugenidies does in Middlesex:
“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”
In SciFi and Fantasy especially, you need to do some world-building, but limit it to the absolute necessities and fill in the details later. Most new writers tend to tell way too much about their fantasy world up front. You want to tell just enough to allow the reader to picture the scene that’s taking place, but not bog down the action.
6) Introduce the antagonist.
An antagonist is someone/something that keeps the protagonist from his goal.
The concept of an “antagonist” is probably the hardest thing for most new writers to grasp.
You may think that if you’re not writing a mystery about a sadistic serial killer, or a spy novel where the hero must thwart the evil genius plotting to take over the world, you don’t need an antagonist.
But there’s a difference between an antagonist and a villain.
An antagonist can be a whole society, an addiction, a judicial system, or anything that might thwart a hero from achieving his goal. But you absolutely need one. (I found that out the hard way. I wrote a novel for 10 years that had no antagonist and I couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t end.)
Kristen Lamb writes some of the best stuff I’ve seen on the subject of the antagonist, which she calls the Big Boss Troublemaker. Here’s one of Kristen’s great posts on the BBT.
7) Ignite conflict.
We need conflict not only in the opening scene, but we need to see an over-arching tension that will drive your plot.
In the Hunger Games, the burning question in the opening scene is who will be chosen for the games. But the larger conflict is with the Hunger Games themselves. When the conflict of the opening scene is resolved, we still keep turning pages because of the underlying tension from a bigger story question—how will Katniss survive?
Conflict does not have to be an actual battle. In fact, starting in the middle of a battle can be awfully confusing for a reader. It’s better to start with something like the heroine preparing for battle by stealing her brother’s armor after her father forbids her to fight.
8) Tell us what your protagonist wants.
We need to know what s/he wants right now, which might be for the troll who just killed his companions to stop swiping at him with that pointy sword.
But we also need to know pretty early in the story what your hero really, really wants (apologies to the Spice Girls) The reader wants to know the protagonist’s ultimate goal, like maybe taking a magical jewelry item to Mount Disaster to destroy it forever.
This overarching goal doesn’t always show up in chapter one, but readers do need to see a goal in chapter one that will lead to the ultimate goal.
9) Present an exciting, life-changing inciting incident.
This incident has to cause something to happen that will propel us to the next scene—and the one after that—and through the entire book. Think of it as the explosion that launches the rocket of your story.
This one is easier for some genre writers. If you’re writing a mystery, somebody can find a dead body and the story is off and running.
Or in a romance, the lovely Genoeffa can meet Lord Malatesta when his horse accidentally knocks down her grandfather’s vegetable cart and she vows to hate him forever.
But in other genres, it may be tough to get the inciting incident close to the opener. Do work on it, though, because everything else will seem like throat-clearing to the reader. Most readers aren’t going to admire your lovely prose until you’ve got a story going.
10) Introduce the other major characters.
“Major” is the key here. Don’t let minor characters upstage the hero in the opener. In fact, you’re better off without minor characters in the opening scene. There’s so much stuff to cram in to the opener, you don’t have much room for the maid/sentinel/pizza delivery person who opens so many dramas.
Readers need to be introduced to Lord Malatesta fairly early on—or at least hear about him. Ditto Genoeffa’s bratty sister whose loose morals threaten to disgrace the poor but honorable family of vegetable mongers, and maybe the stalwart plowboy Jack, who has loved Genoeffa since childhood. But they don’t need to know about his Lordship’s groom or his tailor unless the bratty sister is going to run off with them both in a scandalous ménage a trois in chapter ten.
A lot of new writers tend to clutter up the opener with colorful characters who never appear in the story again. This can irritate a reader, who expects people in the opener to re-appear and play an important role.
***
Hold on there, sez you. I can think of half a dozen bestsellers off the top of my head that don’t do any of these things.
Yup, I can too. I didn’t say these are hard and fast rules. But they’re something to aim for. If your prose is so mesmerizing the reader doesn’t notice, then more power to you. But with most novels, readers are happiest when they get as much info as possible in the opener.
If your present opener doesn’t do any of this stuff—and most first drafts don’t—try this trick: cut off the first two chapters. Does chapter three give you a better beginning? Start there. Then feed us the info from the first two chapters a little at a time later on in the book.
by Anne R. Allen (@annerallen) January 3, 2016
Anne R. Allen is the author of ten books, including the bestselling CAMILLA RANDALL MYSTERIES and HOW TO BE A WRITER IN THE E-AGE, co-written with NYT bestseller Catherine Ryan Hyde.
How about you, scriveners? Are there any other things you absolutely want to see in an opener? Do you have hard time cramming all this stuff into chapter one?
BOOK OF THE WEEK
The first book in the Camilla comedy-mystery series is now only 99c!
Ghostwriters in the Sky is a spoof of writers conferences, full of funny situations most writers will identify with. It’s “Janet Evanovich for English Majors”
Ghostwriters in the Sky is available in ebook at all the Amazons, iTunes, Google Play, Kobo,Inktera, Scribd and NOOK. It’s available in Paper (regular and large print) at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. (prices may be higher at some retailers.)
A wild comic romp set at writers’ conference in the wine-and-cowboy town of Santa Ynez, California.
When a ghostwriter’s plot to blackmail celebrities with faked evidence leads to murder, Camilla must team up with a crossdressing dominatrix to stop the killer—who may be a ghost—from striking again. Meanwhile, a hot LA cop named Maverick Jesus Zukowski just may steal her heart.
Don’t worry, you don’t get much world building up front from me. (Not because I knew not to do that – I just don’t like a lot of description.)
Good point that the antagonist doesn’t have to be a person or a villain. I used to stress that I didn’t include one in most of my stories. But there were other things that became the antagonist.
Did you ever finish that ten year story?
Alex–I’m with you on the description. We don’t need much of it in today’s world where we have so many visuals out there in media. Most people already have an image in their heads of everything from a medieval queen’s boudoir to the bridge of a spaceship.
I finally did get that book into shape, with the help of a great editor and a major overhaul. It became my Boomer novel “The Lady of the Lakewood Diner”
Says it all! As I embark upon teaching my 46th fiction writing college course, this is the blog post I will point my new students to. Sums up the first half of the course, I swear. (Okay, I only swear a little.)
Brilliant post, Anne!
Melodie–Congrats on teaching 46 college course. That’s amazing. Makes me feel exhausted just thinking about it. I’m glad to hear this post can help your students.
Superb analysis of what’s needed in the all-important first chapter with very well-chosen illustrative examples. Thanks, Anne, for a classic, bookmark-able post to start the new year!
Ruth–Thanks! I probably could have broken it into two posts. I only think of these things 2 minutes before it’s set to go live :-).
Great post to open the year, Anne. I remember how excited I was that the first chapter of my first novel so perfectly described every minute detail of the crime scene, right down to the spider webs behind the bookcase in the living room. I think it was around page five before anything actually happened. Ugh.
Loved almost everything about this post and will be sharing it with others. What didn’t I like? I’ve got that Spice Girls song stuck in my head now. Thanks. 🙂
Tom–Sorry about the Spice Girls 🙂 Oh yea. My early stuff was like that too. I thought that meant you were a “good writer”. Lots of musing, too. I loved me some backstory musing. I could go for many chapters without anything happening in real time.
Terrific points Anne- I’m especially impressed with how you took account of various genres and the variations in the “rules” you suggested here. I cringe when I compare mentally to my own tales; I think I’ve run roughshod over each of them at one time or other. And hey look at that, no bestsellers. Coincidence? You decide.
On world-building, I’d only add this- don’t wait for the first reader to compliment you on how well you did it and how grateful they are, because no one can wait that long.
Finally, I shout “yes” to your early point- save everything, delete nothing. Especially now, when it’s just a Cut-and-Paste away from immortality, there’s no excuse. I have found those excerpts to work like cuttings, growing into their own stories away from the original “plant”.
Will–Different genres have wildly different rules. That’s why critique groups can be so dangerous to a fledgling muse. What’s accepted or even required in one genre can be totally weird in another. But critique groups do help for just the reason yuo say. You don’t want to wait till your published to find out if what you’re doing is working or not.
And yes! Save everything. I’m going through my discards to find things for my new book blog. Lots of fun things I’d totally forgotten about.
One of my favorite novel and short story writers was Shirley Jackson. She had the uncanny knack of doing most of the above, and often in the first few paragraphs of her stories and novels like “The Haunting of Hill House.” In her classic short story, “The Lottery,” she sets the scene, tone, describes characters, and starts off with one of the story’s main themes–blindly following tradition. The story question is immediately in the reader’s mind and keeps her turning pages: “Why are people in this small village gathered in the square for a lottery?” When I was teaching myself how to write fiction, I studied many of her short stories and she was simply the best. Paul
Paul–Sounds as if you taught yourself in the best possible way. Studying the great storytellers is a fantastic way to learn to write. Jackson certainly was one of the greats. Her stories are still vivid in my head, even though I read some of them 50 years ago.
Honestly, the only thing I don’t want to see in an opening chapter, is where the protagonist is snarky and condescending right from word one. It’s fine if the he/she is generally snarky/condescending, but if you make the reader want to loathe from word one, you stand a very good chance of losing that reader, no matter how good the story might be.
GB–That kind of chatty opener is common in chick lit and comic YA, but not so much in other adult genres. A book needs to be a comedy to get away with an opener that sounds like a stand-up comedy routine. If people don’t like a character, they’re not going to want to go through a whole book with him.
A fabu post, as usual. Thanks again.
Thanks, Charlie 🙂
Enjoyed this post Anne! I especially like the new looks and the fact that you’ve started another blog just for your readers. I’m in the process of separating my old blog into 2 for the same purposes. I’ll be putting all this great advice to good use. Happy New Year, looking forward to all your posts for 2016.
Cindy–Thanks! This new blog is a whole lot more work than the Blogger one. There are so many more moving parts that can break. JB and I have been working like mad, but it’s still got some bugs.
I started the new blog partly because I wanted something easy to work on to take a break from tech-heavy WordPress. Blogger is so simple to use. Also I realized it was time. I don’t advise new writers to start multiple blogs, but once you’re established, you really need a place for readers who aren’t all that interested in the nuts and bolts of writing craft. They want to know about your characters and story.
Luckily I have Ruth and a fantastic bunch of guests to take the burden off this one, so I can devote some time to Camilla fans.
I like the idea of cutting the first two chapters and adding in the info from them in the third. I did something like that and it really did the job.
I do things very similar to you, in that I rewrite the first chapter after I type “The End.” Even though I plan my novels, that all-important opener always seems to become clear after the first draft is complete. I love James N. Frey’s description of Chapter One: the author clearing his/her throat.
Sue–That always happens to me. I have this “perfect” opening chapter, but by the end of the book, it doesn’t cut it. I took a workshop from James N. Frey once. He was really helpful on first chapters.
Definitely agree with the conflict aspect. In a story opening, I need to have some sense of where this story is going. That doesn’t mean the major conflict has to be introduced in the opening scene, or even the first chapter. But I like to see some hint, at least, of what that conflict may be, and especially what is amiss in the protagonist’s world. What does he/she need to resolve? And what makes this character unique? What circumstances can I feel for and connect with as a reader–or at least, that are interesting enough for me to follow this person through an entire book? If these are in the beginning of a story, I’ll be intrigued enough to continue.
Sam Taylor, AYAP Team
Sam–The modern reader definitely wants to see some conflict right away. 100 years ago, authors could meander through a landscape or muse on the human condition for pages before something actually happened. Now, we need to put as much info as possible into that first scene or readers will click over to the next book on their Kindle or watch a video instead. There are so many books and other forms of entertainment at our fingertips that authors have to work harder to grab readers and keep them.
Anne, excellent post as always! And I wanted to join in at this level of the discussion because you say something very true: 100 years ago, readers had time to read, no distractions from TV or the movies or video-games…In fact, my son (age 33 and a techie, already 4 start-ups under his belt) keeps telling me, “Mom, nobody reads anymore!” Very depressing – even if largely true, especially in his generation (the Millennials).
But I do want to say that there are exceptions and new forms of writing are turning up – I’m thinking of Jonathan Franzen. Perhaps a lot of people here don’t like him, but one has to admit that he is a hugely talented guy and everyone of his books have turned into bestsellers. And it’s not just his “lovely” prose (which I often don’t find lovely at all, but it is extraordinarily raw, he hits you with the “right” words). It’s also the way he constructs a novel, with truck loads of backstory that he throws at you…upfront! The way he starts a novel (and continues it) is totally different from the usual advice of show-don’t tell. There’s a lot of telling and he’s not afraid of it. He even rambles on and on and it’s perfectly delightful, you keep turning the pages, sinking deeper in his characters’ past.
I’m just pointing out that there are many ways to write a successful novel, though Franzen’s way is decidedly unusual – not mainstream at all – and probably not a good model to follow. And in any case, not an easy model to follow: it requires not just a lot of research (including into psychology) but also unusual powers of observation (in his “Corrections”, he carries it to extremes when describing an old man’s struggles with Parkinson’s).
This said, I’m totally convinced that this is the only way novel writing will survive in the long run,indeed, be saved in the face of the modern onslaught from movies and tv series. In fact, if I were younger and could do it all over again, I would certainly not write books but make movies! Marguerite Duras did that, she went into movies, my hat off to her – but then, I’m not a “grande dame” of French literature!!
Yeah, show, don’t tell – that’s precisely what movies do. And that’s why literature has it one up on the movies: it is able not only to “show”, but also to “tell”. It can move INSIDE a character’s head and tell us what she thinks and why she feels the way she does. It doesn’t need to stay outside, the way a movie camera does.
And that’s precisely what Franzen does -and that’s why his books tend to break new literary ground. But of course, he’s not the only one. And I think it would be interesting for you to explore this whole area – when it’s worth “telling” rather than “showing” – in a future blog post. I’m sure you’d have a lot to say and a lot to teach!
Claude–Thanks for your long, thoughtful comment. As I said in my conclusion, there are plenty of bestsellers who break every single one of these rules. I read Thomas Pynchon’s “Inherent Vice” over the holidays and he’s famous for his rule-breaking. Once you’re an established “literary” writer like Pynchon or Franzen, you can do a lot of things the rest of us can’t, because people will trust you enough to wade through the first few chapters on the strength of your reputation. Look at all the people who bought “Go Set a Watchman”.
I don’t know if the Big 5 will continue to nurture literary writers the way they have in the past. When coloring books are the biggest sellers, it’s hard to tell where the publishing industry will go from here.
Agent Laurie McLean will offer some fascinating predictions in a guest post here next Sunday.
As for telling vs. showing, thanks for the suggestion! I should write a post on that. Sometimes “show don’t tell” results in incredibly tedious writing.
I look forward to that – would love to know how you feel about that “rule” (which is truly getting on my nerves!!)
Great advice! Thanks for this, Anne. I hope you had a wonderful holiday. Happy New Year, and may 2016 be your best yet! 🙂 (And best of luck straightening out the issues with the new blog.)
Jan–Thanks a bunch. Now I hope your good wishes will make it from the blog to the ear of the WordPress elves!
Great advice, for the newbe and the experienced. You are awesome! I hope the new year brings you success and time to relax. Is that possible?
Christine–I sure hope I’ll get a little time off from the blog so I can start working on the next Camilla novel. Anything that doesn’t involve tech will feel like a vacation at this point. Ha!
I love these checklist-type posts, and found this particularly helpful. I’m not sure I could accomplish each of these things in a first chapter (I guess it depends on the length of the first chapter?) but I can certainly see how each of these ‘marks’ needs to be hit within the first chapter or two.
Thank you for the post – I enjoyed it!
Adrian–It’s true that with today’s shorter chapters, it’s tougher to pack all this in. Maybe I should have said “the first ten pages” or something like that. I’m glad you enjoyed the post. Welcome!
Aw, this is a useful post. It’s being copy/pasted into my word docs. 🙂 Thanks Anne!
Happy 2016!
shahwharton.com
Shah–I’m glad it’s helpful. Happy 2016 to you too!
A very organized and thorough post! With points I could go through and apply to my novel. Thanks!
Karen–Welcome! I’m glad this checklist can help you with editing that novel!
I’ve just finished a 300 page memoir that takes place over five month’s time. Even though the events really happened and the people exist as people not characters, so many of your principles apply to this genre as well. In the process of writing memoir, we aren’t reporting what happened or making it up. Its an interpretation of reality, not reality itself. But the responsibility of the first chapter to the reader is the same in a memoir and a novel. So thanks for your timely post!
Amy–Absolutely. Writing narrative has the same rules whether it’s fiction or nonfiction. A lot of people approach memoir as if they’re writing a history or biography textbook, and that usually produces something unreadable and dry. A memoir needs to be shaped like a novel, with an inciting incident, conflict and resolution. I wrote about this in my post from 2011 “12 Dos and Don’ts For Writing a Publishable Memoir” https://selfpublishingsites.com/2012/01/how-to-write-publishable-memoir-12-dos.html
Congrats on learning that before writing your memoir! A 5-month period sounds just right for the span of a memoir.
And what about children’s book? The rule is the same?
Juliano–If it’s fiction, yes. Of course “children’s” books cover a wide spectrum. If it’s a cloth book of alphabet characters for toddlers, obviously there’s no story, so you don’t have to worry. But if it’s a chapter book or a novel for teens, the same principles apply as for adult fiction and memoir.
Thanks to Yesenia Vargas for including us in her Monday Must-Reads!