Once Upon A Time
If you’ve been in the writing community for more than five seconds, I’m sure you’ve heard about how important your first chapter is. There are whole writing courses on how to craft a first chapter. Some editors even offer a service where they critique only your first chapter, and all the hype is for good reason. Your opening volley is what readers see when they use the “Look Inside” feature shopping online, and if they’re browsing a paperback at a physical store, they’ll likely flip to Chapter One as well. If they don’t see something intriguing, they’re probably not buying the book. So today I thought I’d discuss what I, as a reader who also writes, like to see in that all-important Chapter One of a book.
We Need To Meet The Protagonist
There’s a unique issue with the Sci-Fi and Fantasy genres where authors sometimes cram the first chapter of a book with the whole history of the society which makes the setting, or a litany of rulers is thrown at the reader, before we ever meet an actual character. But other genres can clog up the opener as well.
I once critiqued the first chapter of a thriller novel in which two spies were chasing each other around a city, only for the chapter to end on a cliffhanger in which they got into a knife fight. My main note for the chapter was that I didn’t really know what each of the spies stood for, so it was hard to tell whose side I should be on. I was unclear on which of these two characters was the protagonist, and which was the antagonist. The author replied to me and said, “Neither of them is – we haven’t met the protagonist yet.” Another time I read a fifteen-page prologue of a book, with a three-dimensional soldier character who had hopes and dreams and a family, who was going off to war for the first time, only to learn he was nothing more than a framing device and I would not be seeing him again until the end of the story.
If you absolutely must show some action that occurs before your main character arrives in the book, you can write a prologue, but keep it short, as in five pages or less. By Chapter One, we need to know who we’ll be following, so we can strap in for the ride.
We Need To See What The Protagonist’s Life Is Like
Now, this is NOT the same thing as “the protagonist wakes up and we watch them go through their mundane daily routine”. Unless your main character lives in the year 5000, or they’re a demon, or something about their routine is mundane for them but exotic to the reader. We want to see what life is like for our protagonist to give us some insight into who they are as a character.
For example, in my novel The Case Of The Cheap Suit Plot, the first thing that happens is Chloe nearly getting publicly outed as a magic user. This tells us that magic is not okay in this setting, and Chloe has some abilities. Then we see her get hassled on the street and pretend to give somebody the Evil Eye, which gives us some insight into how she deals with adversity. From there, she’s off to accept a job which will be the catalyst for everything else that happens in the story. So now we also know she’s a detective. Once the reader has a firm grasp on who the main character is…
We Need To See A Problem
If everything’s going great for the protagonist, things need to be going not-so-great by the end of Chapter One. If their life is in the dumpster at the outset of the story, they should be presented with a solution to the issue that will lead to the rest of the story. Chloe is a detective who needs money, and then is tasked with finding a missing person. So here, in Chapter One, we’ve got a problem and we’re going to see how she solves it. This problem may not always be the same as the Inciting Incident of the book, which could happen at any point in the first three chapters. It could be something as low stakes as the main character hating their job, or wondering if they’ll ever find love. It could be as high stakes as a Battle Royale-style death tournament. Either way, we want an inkling about where the book will go by the end of Chapter One, and that’s what introducing a problem accomplishes.
So there you have it. Start your story at the beginning, when the main character appears, show us some salient facts about how they are, and tell us what’s wrong in their life that needs to be solved. If all these elements are present in your first chapter, you’re well on your way to telling a compelling story.
