What do readers consider a perfect beginning?
Let's rake over how to craft beginnings in fiction. There are many ways to do it right, and some ways to do it wrong.
This week, we’re cracking open the bonnet of fiction and preparing for a good root around inside. A few weeks ago, I surveyed my readers to see what they wanted to have more of and craft posts landed near the top, so here we are. Beginnings.
I’m outlining a new new novel at the moment and it’s led me to read the openings of dozens of different books. Nailing the opening of a novel takes time and more often than not, many, many iterations. At this point, I've read the opening three chapters of so many books that I can almost see the author’s red pen as it scribbles lines out and shifts details to the foreground. There are patterns that emerge across books and even across genres. Essentially, readers have expectations about the opening of a book and if they aren’t met, it’s unlikely that they’ll continue reading beyond that.
Pssssst. I am hosting a workshop on Beginnings and Endings in fiction on Sunday 22nd September from 7-9pm. ✨ Tickets are £30 but there is an early discount of £5 off until Saturday 24th August. ✨ Come for a good time and I’ll send you off having learnt a bunch, ready to jump back into your story. Tickets can be bought here.
You know what it’s like. You’ve sat down to watch TV for forty-five minutes before your FitBit yells at you to go to bed. You don’t have time to ‘see how it plays out’. The same can be said for books. I would hazard a guess and say that it takes around ten pages for a reader to decide whether a book is vibing with them, and that’s because it’s exactly what I do when I pick up a novel for the first time. As a writer, you have to hook them in, show them what’s at stake, who they’ll be spending time with, and then keep them there with the promise of a good time, a good story, and a good arc.
In an essay on what constitutes good beginnings and endings, Giuliana Adamo writes:
It has been proved by psychologists that starting and concluding points are the parts of the text that strike the reader’s imagination the most, since they are kept in the mind longer than other parts of the text.
They are, in essence, narrative signals: an invitation to step into a world and a reminder that, at it’s close, you are about to leave it. So, what goes into a beginning?
There are few elements that need to be established in your opening chapters to lay the foundations for a good story.
A clear indication of who the protagonist is and why we’re following them
A sense that the protagonist’s world is about to expand or become upended
The stylistic and linguistical tone of the story
Enough context for your reader to understand why the conflict is interesting
The point-of-view that the book is written in
I’ll touch on that last one for a moment, because I think it’s important. Sometimes, we can be so concerned about starting with a bang—with the big problem that steers the protagonist on a narrative course—that we forget to give the reader an opportunity to care about why this matters. Take Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yaros, for example. Violet, the story’s protagonist, faces her inciting incident in the second chapter; a physical and mental test that will determine whether she will enter the dragon rider’s quadrant, or die in the process. If this had happened straight away, we wouldn’t know what was at stake. Instead, we see her lining up for the challenge, watching her sister and mother argue about how ill-suited she is to the challenge and rapidly discussing what she might do to survive. Using secondary characters to do this is clever, because it allows us to find out more about Violet without her needing to do all the exposition herself, which would be less compelling. Also, it means we start with dialogue, which has more energy. Description is only ever given to help us understand Violet’s connection to the setting, and therefore, the problem. Here, we can see this in the very first line:
Conscription day is always the deadliest. Maybe that’s why the sunrise is especially beautiful this morning—because I know it might be my last.
and a little further down, where we learn why Violet is the most interesting character to focus on, because of her unique familial connection that sets her apart from the other cadets:
Basgaith War College isn’t known for being kind to… well, anyone, even those of us whose mothers are in command.
There are so many opportunities for creativity in a beginning
Your protagonist may be have lived a life before the story starts. You know, lived a life, in the same way that you can take one look at Dot Cotton from EastEnders and tell that she has Lived. A. Life. So, how do you decide where to start their story? Ideally, you’ll have a plot in mind for them—a journey to take them on that will see them changed at the end—but where do we meet them at the start?
We want to meet them at a moment that demonstrates key traits of their personality on the page alongside their context so that we understand why this character is terribly placed to deal with the conflict you’re going to send their way. I say terrible, but what I really mean is ‘objectively most compelling to the reader’. Someone’s worst day is another person’s best day. Whatever situation you’re setting them up for, amplifying the contrast between what they experience and what we know they’re equipped to handle is a good starting point.
Here are a couple of examples for you.
Bilbo Baggins (The Hobbit): Homeboy, never left The Shire, physically small, likes peace and good meals—> compel him to accompany a band of dwarves to recover treasure from a dragon. The opening chapter gives us an overview of hobbits before honing in one meticulously laid out burrow, lived in by iconic inebriate of adventure: Bilbo.
June Hayward (Yellowface): Struggling author, full of envy, financially languishing —> faced with a successful author’s unexpected death and being the only one to know where her unpublished manuscript is kept.
I recently read The Cassandra Complex and it’s author, Holly Smale, makes a bold and fantastically self-aware choice with how to open the story. It’s written in first-person POV, which is key here, because the protagonist is deciding how to start the story herself.
The Cassandra Complex, Holly Smale
I know, right? Such a good opening. We get a strong sense of the character’s cynical personality, the stylistic tone of what to expect from the writing, and a nod to an event that signifies a real bend in the protagonist’s journey. The opening chapter goes on to list a number of things that Cassandra has been asked to leave, including her relationship, and her job, which is where we meet her in the present timeline as she packs up her desk.
Stories don’t always have to be revealed with a sucker-punch to the gut, however. Sometimes, a gentle unwrapping of location, of accents, of people, of landmarks, can be used to paint a picture before contrasting it with an event that seems at odds with what we’ve just been told. Think about the beautiful, stainless, natural aesthetic of Midsommar. Because of that, the horrors that unfold there are heightened in contrast.
What other features make for a decent beginning?
Dialogue
Movement / action (in media res if you want to sound fancy)
The aftermath of a key event, as observed by a detached supporting character or in the third person POV. Here’s a couple examples for you:
The first thing the groundskeeper saw when he went to tend to the small cemetery behind St. Sebastian’s was the body that someone had forgotten to bury.
Picture Perfect, Jodi Picoult
The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.
The Secret History, Donna Tart (the character whose POV this belongs to is the protagonist, but they are framed as part of a group in this opening chapter).
What should you avoid?
Your character waking up
Too much detail about what your character looks like, what their setting looks like, or any other description that doesn’t have anything directly to do with what’s about to happen. Think: why do we need to know this?
Writing that is overly poetic or lyrical, as this can muddle the reader about what the hell is going on. Write it if you need to, but you’ll probably have to crop it out later.
Alas, I could go on, but I think that’s enough for us to be wrapping our heads around today. In a few weeks, I’ll go over Endings in Fiction, which has always been the hardest part of plotting books for me. Every writer has a different thorn they repeatedly have to pull out of their side!
If you want to come and put some time into the Beginnings and Endings of your own novels, come join me in September for my workshop.
In the meantime, here are some more posts on craft that may be of interest:
❔ A question for you! Tell me about the last book you read that had an opening you couldn’t forget
About the author:
Abigail Mann is an author, book coach, and writing mentor. She is currently editing her fourth novel for HarperCollins and has a thing for sharp contemporary literature with a comic edge. Abigail coaches with the London Writer’s Salon, is a Fellow with the Royal Literary Fund, and privately mentors writers who need to cloud bust their plots, clean up their submissions, or reach a fiction milestone. Her other internet home is here.
Love this! That Holly Smale beginning is incredible - a gamble that really works. The Secret History beginning has always been one of my favourites (that needs a re-read). My favourite recent beginning would be What I'd Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma (International Booker shortlisted): "Waterboarding, I told my mother. It's when someone places a cloth over your face, then continually pours water over it. It feels like drowning. It is drowning. And you're going to do it, she said. Yes." It's a really interesting book, and that really had me hooked.