Getting First Chapters Right

First chapters are an absolute bear for any novel, but especially so for works in the speculative fiction family of genres. Think about it. In that first 2500 words we have to do the following:

Introduce the main character
Give the reader a reason to become emotionally connected to the main character
Introduce the world
Reveal enough about the world to intrigue the reader but…
Refrain from dumping so much information about the world that we bore the reader to death
Introduce the story’s conflict
And start everything off with enough energy that readers will keep going.

There are practical tricks for doing some of this. Take, for example, the third, fourth and fifth points concerning the world. I repeatedly tell students that they need to look at their world and condense everything one needs to know to make it work down into a half-dozen sentences.

BattleTech is easy: Pilots drive giant robot war machines. DropShips move the Mechs to JumpShips which can go thirty lightyears at a jump. There are six main and countless secondary power factions that struggle for supremacy in the universe.

There, that’s it. That tells you everything you need to know to characterize the universe, and sometimes you don’t need to know all that. If the story isn’t moving anyone off-planet, forget the DropShips and JumpShips. If it’s local story, you can skip the faction stuff. Everything else is detail to be delivered as encountered.

Once you’ve broken the universe down into tiny fragments like that, you layer that information into the chapter in context, everyone will get the information, and they won’t be overwhelmed or bored. Simple enough.

Likewise, solid characterization will do the same thing with a character. A lot of writers make the mistake of believing that they have to have establish everything about the character at first glance. Not true. Picking up on the reason to become emotionally connected is far more important because, once that connection is made, the reader will hunger for details. If you don’t target that first, you give the reader a bunch of data without providing either a reason to care, or context within which to organize things.

Imagine introducing a character with this:

The boy looked at his father, then eyed the wide stream again. “I don’t think I can make the jump, sir.”

“You will if you know what’s good for you, lad.” The grizzled warrior spat to the side. “You can’t do this, you’re no son of mine.”

That little two paragraph scene defines the conflict as an emotional one. Sure, the boy is trying to jump over a stream. We presume it’s a long jump. Clearly he’ll be punished if he fails. Physically punished most likely, but his father’s reply lets us know there will be emotional punishment there, too. And yet, because the old man is described as a ‘grizzled warrior’ there isn’t a single reader of fantasy fiction that isn’t figuring the old man is training his son to follow in his footsteps because there’s some dire emergency in the offing.

On the other hand, we could have gone with the standard:

Jere shivered. A slender youth who was years from growing into a man, he looked at the stream. His father, huge and battle-scarred, stared sternly at him from the far shore. He expected Jere to make it in one leap. Sure, he had space to run up, and the clean-limbed, brown-haired youth could be quick, but he just didn’t believe he could make that leap. If he failed, he’d get wet, or banged up on the rocks. Worse yet, he’d face his father’s ire.

Same information delivered there, but what’s being described is a physics problem, not anything to do with characters. No place to make an emotional connection. Because the problem is described as physical, we’re almost expecting Jere to find a different solution than just a physical one. It’s a physical challenge, so maybe he outsmarts it. Perfectly acceptable behavior for a fantasy character.

Introducing the conflict and starting things off with a bang can be tough because they tend to work against each other. Conflict is based in why. Why is never something that gets dealt with in just a few words. Getting things off to the races, on the other hand, demands action or suspense. You can write that stuff without ever referring to why. Authors often have to choose between one or the other. The absolutely worst thing a writer can do, of course, is to do both by starting off with action and, dead in the middle of it, launching into a page of explanation. That’s a great way to kill a story.

I saw a review of my In Hero Years… I’m Dead in which the first two chapters were described as being “slow.” In fact, they’re not slow at all—the rest of the book is just off on a rocket from that point forward. (You can see that for yourself, starting here, since the first three chapters are available for free here on my website.) It’s not a surprise the opening chapters are seen as being slower, though: I think that’s the case with many novels, simply because readers are trying to make sense of things. In a second read, those chapters will read as fast as everything else.

The need to get readers to soldier on through them, then, goes back to making that emotional connection with the main character. If you can do that, readers will push on through the slow chapters, just to see what happens. That’s the key to getting you book from the “to be read” stack and onto the “finished in one sitting” shelf.

This sort of writing advice is what my writing newsletter, The Secrets, is all about. If you’re interested in subscribing, just click the link. It’s an investment that will pay off in writing success.