Last week, we covered my secret to writing introductions that stick in the minds of readers, and it involved not being too precious with your words (you can view the blog about my 3X Rule here). But that doesn’t tell you exactly what your story needs for a successful beginning.
What needs to be present at the start of your story to hook readers and entice them to finish the book?
I think that every successful beginning requires the same recipe. Here are the elements that you should keep in mind when you start with Once Upon a Time.
A Stunning Opening Image
Save the Cat talks at length about your opening image, and I think that it’s the only logical place to start talking about successful beginnings. The opening image sets the stage for everything that is going to come next in your book.
I believe that you should have two images in mind when you begin writing: your opening image and your final image.
This is true for more than romance novels where you have to know that the couple gets a happily ever after on the final page. It applies consistently across genres, but why?
The reason people pick your novel up off the table at their independent bookstore is because they want to take a journey of self-discovery with your characters. They want to know what those characters learn and feel as well as how they change from page one to three hundred. If there is no change in the character, they feel cheated.
So, what is a writer to do?
That means that you should think about who your character is at the start of the book. Start with a scene that truly captures the essence of who they were before the change. This is the only way that their transformation is going to resonate with readers by the time they hit that final page.
Establish Your Characters
A beginning is a great place to start establishing the voice of your characters or narrator. Nobody else in the world can tell a story the way that you do. Show readers a glimpse of what makes you special as a writer and why they should follow along with your characters.
We want to hear their voices and let their thoughts echo.
To convince a reader to follow along for hours to come, then you need to make sure that the main character is distinct. You love your protagonist. (Otherwise, you wouldn’t be writing their story. You would have picked someone else.) Make sure that your reader does too by establishing their voice early on.
If they are funny, let’s see their sense of humor. If they are bored out of their mind at that dead-end job, show us how they cope with it. There are endless possibilities to give readers a taste of what makes the story stand out.
Present the Problem
In addition to establishing character, your beginning also requires some sort of dilemma. This may not be the problem that is posed throughout the story. It could be something minor that impacts them right now but will be quickly resolved in the coming chapters.
Conflict entices readers, and they expect to see your character in hot water. It could be something minor: a fight with a friend, being passed over for a promotion at work, a breakup with a serious partner, a grocery store that’s out of the one ingredient they need to bake a last-minute birthday cake.
In other words, you don’t want to start your story at the happily ever after point.
Show us what they do under pressure so that we can get a sense of how they’re going to handle the main conflict in the meat of the rest of the novel. This also speaks to the change they will go through as they navigate these new waters. Maybe they would have coped with this situation one way at the beginning, but their change means they have healthier coping skills by the end.
Raise a Question
What is your character working to resolve over the course of the book? The beginning might not be the place where you want to start this conflict and narrative tension, but it can be a great place to start thinking through the questions that the protagonist will wrestle with through the rest of the book.
This could be a question related to your theme: Does love really conquer all? Is it possible for evil to triumph over good?
Because the story is going to start with a problem right off the bat, there is room to explore the first inklings of what your theme will be. You don’t have to hit readers over the head with it just yet, but give them some taste and idea of what the book is truly about before they get to the final chapters.
If there is simply no way to tie your theme to the inciting incident of the novel, then you could take an alternate route and insert some foreshadowing or a taste of a mystery to come. The goal is to leave the reader with some questions to ponder as they start to read forward.
Start with the Action
You might think that your novel requires pages of description. After all, how else will we know what your characters look like, where they live, and what they are doing? But the fastest way to lose readers is to make them wade through purple prose for pages on end. Even if your words are technically gorgeous, there is no hook for the reader.
Instead, consider starting with action or some dialogue. This will center your readers in your world and get them to the heart of the story much faster. Description can be woven in as you go along or can be detailed at a later point.
The beginning is for the hook and we don’t care about hair color and height – unless they are pertinent to the rest of the story premise.
An Example of a Stellar Start
This is especially true in Celeste Ng’s novel Everything I Never Told You. Her opening line is:
“Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast.”
Talk about powerful action and the promise of the premise. We are immediately faced with a very pressing question: what in the world happened to Lydia? We see her as a character without tons of descriptive prose and Ng grounds us in the story without hitting us over the head with details.
We have some sense of who Lydia is: she isn’t the kind of girl to be late to breakfast. But we don’t have to see pages of description for this absent character to get to that idea.
Overall, it’s one of the more powerful starts that stuck with me since I first read the book.
Where Will You Start?
These guidelines give you a quick glimpse at where you could start your story and what should be included to convince readers to follow you from once upon a time to the end. I would challenge you to pick up some of your favorite books and read the first five pages, searching for these items.
My guess is that you’ll come away with some rockstar examples of what good writers do and how they handle the blank page in front of them to start writing their stories. Take what you learn and apply it to your own work in progress to see how it shores up the rest of the story.
What is the best introduction you have ever read?