First novels, Part 3-Chapter One

Graphic by Peg Ihinger

When you’re writing your first novel, there are two main things you need to remember about Chapter One: First, the opening chapter is just as important, in terms of catching the interest of readers and/or editors, as nearly every how-to-write book or website says it is. Second, it is absolutely, positively not worth struggling to make into a perfect hook-the-reader opening on your first try.

So for a first draft of a first novel, don’t overthink things, and don’t be afraid to write stuff that you may have to cut later. “Where the novel opens” is usually one of four things: just before, just as, or just after something big changes in the protagonist’s life (though the protagonist may not realize for a while that a Big Change has happened, any more than Frodo doesn’t realize what he’s getting into when he opens Bilbo’s farewell letter and finds the One Ring), or else in medias res, when the reader is dumped into the middle of something (often a battle or an argument).

There are all sorts of lists of “what the first chapter of a novel has to do” floating around. The thing is, what the first chapter has to do for a reader is often not quite the same as what it has to do for a writer. When the reader reads it, they see a finished version for the first time that, yes, has to let the reader know where/when they are, who the characters are, what kind of story this is, and so on…basically, enough information to settle the reader into the book.

What a writer needs is whatever gets them more involved in writing the story…and the story may have truly begun twenty hours, days, or years before the opening of the novel. The important thing for a first novel is to get oneself going on writing the first draft. If you make it all the way through to the end, your writing will be a heck of a lot better just from the practice you’ve gotten from writing three or four hundred pages (or more), and you are going to want to revisit the opening in order to fix the stuff you didn’t know how to do when you produced the first draft.

So for starting your first novel, start wherever and with whatever feels right. If that’s a historical prologue or a scene that occurs forty years before the main story, when the king married the wrong lady, don’t worry about it. Write it and keep going.

This is not to say that you pay no attention whatever to the things that have to be established early in a story—things like time, place, viewpoint, characters, inciting incident, mood, genre, central story problem, etc. Try to get as many of them into your first draft as you can, but don’t get obsessive about following some sort of master checklist.

The single most important thing about Chapter One—about any chapter, really—is to be interesting.

And “interesting” applies to both the reader and the writer. If the writer isn’t interested—if they’re going through the motions because they think they have to do X, Y, and Z in that order—it is highly likely that the reader won’t get or stay interested, either. It is therefore seldom a waste of time to pause and ask yourself, “What would make this more fun to write?”

From a writer’s viewpoint, Chapter One also lays a lot of groundwork for the entire rest of the novel…and I’m not talking about plot. I’m talking about things like viewpoint, voice, tense, and structure. These are writing choices you will probably be stuck with for the rest of the first draft (unless you get totally sick of them somewhere in mid-book, and start over—which is not recommended—or decide in mid-book to try something else, which is a legitimate decision if what you are doing isn’t working, but which always means massive revision to however much you’ve already done, and that discourages a lot of people).

Fortunately, most writers are voracious readers, and therefore have some idea what sorts of viewpoint, tense, structure, etc. they like to read. If you have never thought about it (which I hadn’t when I started), pull your top ten favorite books off the shelf and see whether they are first-person or tight third, present tense or historical past, linear or full of flashbacks, single or multiple viewpoint, and so on. If you like reading it, you will probably find it easier and more familiar to write. (Note: “easier” does not mean “easy.”)

At this point, you also want to think about how you work. Some writers do best by slamming things down without worrying about style, grammar, or anything else…but in my experience, for the majority of writers, this leads to sloppier and sloppier first drafts, which get harder and harder to turn into worthwhile prose. Trying to get things right the first time is not the same as demanding that everything be perfect on the first go. (Hint: It is never going to be perfect, but if you don’t even try, odds are that your skills will, at best, stagnate.)

The majority of writers I know get the most done by doing a bit every day, come hell or high water, whether they’re inspired or not. There are, however, also some who get the most done by writing nothing at all for a week or two, and then cranking out 20,000 words in a couple of back-to-back sixteen-hour writing days. Statistically, you are probably better off trying to work for fifteen minutes a day, or 300 words a day, every day, but if you end up in a three-day blitz, you’re probably the other sort of writer.