Seven Sizzling Tips to Write That Absolutely Killer First Chapter

 

A first chapter is a tricky beast. If you don’t get it right, you’ll lose your reader in a flash. I’m sharing an excerpt of that post here–you can read it in its entirety in the link below.

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Irrespective of genre, writing the beginning of a novel is all about seducing the reader. In today’s world of easily available and multiple avenues of entertainment, a novel has to compete with far more than other novels.

You need a beginning that will snag the reader’s attention right off the bat.

As humans, we’re geared to find answers to questions and notice anything that is out of the ordinary. Without these two essential skills, we wouldn’t have lasted long in a pre-historic jungle. This is why stories hold our interest, why readers pick up stories to read.

Here’s how to hook their attention, and keep it:

1. Write a killer first line or paragraph.

 

That first line needs to lead into the second and the third.

You can either go with a big voice, active opening like: “Call me Ishmael.”

 

Or something off-kilter: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

 

You can also set the tone of the entire tale with the first paragraph:

 

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

 

2. Give the Who, Why, What, Where, How.

 

A writing teacher I once learned from, said: While telling your story, imagine your reader has been in a coma, and that you have to orient them to what happened when they were unaware. Who are the characters? What do they want, what are they up to, and why? How do they achieve it? Where are they?

 

Not in a journalistic fashion (though exceptions to this exist, depending on the voice of your narrator), but so that the reader is somewhat oriented in your world.

In my recent novel, THE BLUE BAR, I spend a lot of time making sure the reader sinks into the setting, all the while curious about this child-woman in a blue-sequinned saree, posing at a crowded railway station for the pleasure of a distant voyeur.

 

 

 

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