Everybody knows how important the first chapter of a novel is. It’s your readers first taste, so to speak, of your book, and more importantly, of your writing in general. If your chapter falls flat on its face, your reader isn’t likely to read the rest.

Keeping your readers engaged is the crux of writing, and it all starts in the first chapter. I would even argue that the first five sentences are the most crucial part of writing a story. 

In this post, I will be going through three first chapter beginnings that I am tired of, and most of them occur in beginner writing.

1) Waking Up

Possibly the most common introduction to beginners’ novels is the classic waking-up-in-the-morning scene. Typically, the main character is a teen in high school who has slept in on a school day. 

Though to start your book you are to show what a character’s “normal” is before introducing the main plot (how the character’s life departs from this “normal”), many beginners use this too literally. The reader doesn’t need a “day in the life” introduction. 

2) A Dream (More Specifically A Nightmare)

The reason I hate this intro is because of how useless it is to the story. In real life, people don’t dream about their worst fears. Usually dreams are a strange product of recent events in our lives, twisted and muddled until they are hardly recognizable. Normal people do not dream in flashbacks. Rarely are these flashbacks exactly, word for word, what really went down. So, when a character has a dream, and that’s what starts the story, I immediately think that the author doesn’t truly know what they are doing.

If you must start your story with a dream, give it a meaning, or a reason why. Maybe your character is a prophet and their dreams are always prophetic. Or perhaps they are a telepath and they watch the dreams of others.

3) Worldbuilding

In the case of a high-fantasy novel, world building is essential, but must be introduced to the story correctly. Nobody wants to read about the world’s history in the first chapter. 

As a general rule of thumb, always make sure your main protagonist is introduced on the first two pages of chapter one. Readers read for the characters, and I think I speak for many when I say we want to know whose story we are reading. If your first chapter is a story of a long-dead king who wrote a law proclaiming that no women can fight in the army, with no mention of your main character, please change it.

I began reading a book (Bring Me Their Hearts was the name, I believe) because I had time before work, and the opening scene was the main character kneeling before the king. Scattered through the present was the character explaining the world’s past and more importantly her past. That is a very good alternative to simply explaining the world.

Conclusion

Sometimes it’s hard to avoid these cliche’s, but I promise it will be entirely worth it. Keeping the reader’s attention is key, especially for new writers publishing their first work.

Disclaimer: this post was taken from my old blog and re-posted here 🙂