We start to make up our minds about other people within seven seconds of first meeting them.
— Roger Ailes, You Are the Message
Act I, the beginning portion of the novel, has several tasks to perform:
Do these things well, and your plot will have a strong foundation. Your readers will feel they are in the hands of a competent storyteller. And that’s not a bad thing to be, is it?
The first task of your beginning is to hook the reader. Period.
And remember, that first reader is going to be an agent or editor. Tough crowd. These are people who have too many manuscripts to go through each day. They are just itching for a reason to put yours down.
Don’t give them that reason.
Then you have the bookstore browser, who might (because the marketing and design departments have done their jobs) open up to the first page to see what’s there.
This is the battle you fight. There are nine billion other things the reader can do besides read your book.
First impressions are tough to shake. Make a bad one, and you have to work twice as hard and twice as long to get back to square one. You may not even get the chance.
So it pays — in life and in fiction — to make a great first impression. Here are some ways to grab readers from the start.
Take a look sometime at the openings of Dean Koontz’s novels. Often, they are one-line paragraphs with a named person and some sort of immediate interruption to normality:
Katharine Sellers was sure that, at any moment, the car would begin to slide along the smooth, icy pavement and she would lose control of it.
— Dance With the Devil, written as “Deanna Dwyer”
Penny Dawson woke and heard something moving furtively in the dark bedroom.
— Darkfall
Tuesday was a fine California day, full of sunshine and promise, until Harry Lyon had to shoot someone at lunch.
— Dragon Tears
In his onyx-walled room in the occupation tower, Hulann — a naoili — had disassociated his overmind from his organic regulating brain.
— Beastchild
What are the successful elements of these opening lines? First, they give the name of a character. This specificity creates the illusion of reality from the get-go. A variation on this is to begin with a pronoun: She heard something moving in her bedroom.
What I like about the Koontz approach, however, is that a name gives that extra measure of verisimilitude and makes the “willing suspension of disbelief” that much easier.
The second thing to notice is that something is happening or about to happen to the character. And not just anything — something ominous or dangerous. An interruption to normal life.
Give readers a feeling of motion, of something happening or about to happen. Give them this feeling from the very start.
If you begin with long, descriptive passages (something that was much more acceptable in the past), the feeling you’ll create is not one of motion but of stasis.
Don’t misunderstand. Descriptions are not out of bounds — so long as you include text that gives the feeling of motion.
And only a character can be in motion. So — give us a character as soon as possible. Take a look at this next example from Anne Lamott’s Blue Shoe:
The world outside the window was in flames. The leaves on the pistachio trees shone fire-red and orange. Mattie studied the early morning light. She was lying on the side of the bed where her husband should have been sleeping.
Here Lamott starts with description. But she gets a character into it in the third sentence. And then she drops in a line of something amiss — her husband is not there, where he should have been.
We have a feeling of motion, that Mattie is in the midst of a troubling situation and is going to have to do something about it.
That’s what a feeling of motion is. Not necessarily overt action (though that works, too) but the sense that action is or is about to take place.
Unless something disturbing happens to your Lead early on, you risk violating Hitchcock’s Axiom: A good story is life with the dull parts taken out.
So stir up the waters.
What happens doesn’t have to be huge, like a house blowing up. It can be something as seemingly innocuous as a telephone call in the night or a bit of unsettling news.
For example, we meet Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlett O’Hara at the very beginning of Gone With the Wind this way:
Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.
This is Scarlett and her world at the beginning — she can catch men with her charm. She likes to do so.
She meant what she said, for she could never long endure any conversation of which she was not the chief subject. But she smiled when she spoke, consciously deepening her dimple and fluttering her bristly black lashes as swiftly as butterflies’ wings. The boys were enchanted, as she had intended them to be …
So far so good. Scarlett is charming the twins, controlling them. Then the conversation turns to the upcoming barbecue at Twelve Oaks. The twins want to tie up Scarlett for the waltzes, and promise to tell her a secret if she’ll consent. The secret is that the engagement of Ashley Wilkes and Melanie Hamilton is going to be announced at the party.
Scarlett’s face did not change but her lips went white — like a person who has received a stunning blow without warning and who, in the first moments of shock, does not realize what has happened.
Disturbance! A few pages later, we learn why:
Ashley to marry Melanie Hamilton!
Oh, it couldn’t be true! … No, Ashley couldn’t be in love with Melanie, because — oh, she couldn’t be mistaken! — because he was in love with her! She, Scarlett, was the one he loved — she knew it!
So the world Scarlett thought she ruled — the world of beaux and marriage — has been riled up.
Consider the opening from Jonathan Harr’s brilliant book, A Civil Action. This is nonfiction, the true story of a complex case involving several deaths and illnesses caused by two large companies that recklessly poisoned the water supply of a small town. But it reads like the best fiction, and it does so right from the start.
The first sentence reads: “The lawyer Jan Schlichtmann was awakened by the telephone at eight-thirty on a Saturday morning in mid-July.”
What this does, from the very start, is give you a Lead character and a phone call that wakes him up. We’ve all received late night or early morning calls, and they usually portend bad news. So we want to read on and find out why the call was made. We’re hooked from the very first sentence.
The opening chapter then goes on to reveal that the call is from a creditor telling Schlichtmann that if he doesn’t pay up, his car will be repossessed. Twenty minutes later another call comes from the County Sheriff, who is coming for the car. We learn Schlichtmann is involved in a huge case and is at the end of his financial rope. Things are so bad he could lose everything — his business, his home, his possessions. And we learn that the jury is out, deliberating on this case that will make or break Schlichtmann. We follow the now carless Schlichtmann as he walks down to the courthouse to wait in the corridor while the jury begins another day of deliberations. Our last image is of this lawyer, alone, waiting.
This brilliant opening now allows the author to drop back in time and spend the rest of the book bringing us back to the point where it begins. We want to read because we have a character who is immediately sympathetic and interesting, tied up in the battle of his life. We were there from the very first sentence.
Here are some other ways to grab readers from the start.
James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice begins: “They threw me off the hay truck about noon.”
We are, as they say, in medias res — in the middle of things.
Another form of immediate action is dialogue. If there is an element of conflict in there, so much the better. I chose this for my opening in Final Witness:
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Going into your third year?
”“Yes.”
“Second in your class?”
“Temporarily.”
“Isn’t it true you have a motive to lie?”
“Excuse me?” Rachel Ybarra felt her face start to burn. That question had come from nowhere, like a slap. She sat up a little straighter in the chair.
This cross-examination style plunges us into instant conflict between two characters.
The Quiet Game by Greg Iles begins with a father holding his four-year-old daughter in a line at Disney World:
Annie jerks taut in my arms and points into the crowd.
“Daddy! I saw Mama! Hurry!”
I do not look. I don’t ask where. I don’t because Annie’s mother died seven months ago. I stand motionless in the line, looking just like everyone else except for the hot tears that have begun to sting my eyes.
We bond with the Lead through his deep feeling of a universal emotion.
Still another way to capture attention from the start is with the look-back hook. Here is how Stephen King does it:
The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years — if it ever did end — began, so far as I can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.
— IT
The two things Sarah remembered about that night later were his run of luck at the Wheel of Fortune and the mask. But as time passed, years of it, it was the mask she thought about — when she could bring herself to think about that horrible night at all.
— The Dead Zone
The idea is to immediately suggest there is a not-to-be-missed story about to unfold.
When using first-person narration, especially in literary fiction, your can capture attention through voice and attitude as J.D. Salinger does here:
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
— The Catcher in the Rye
Grab your readers with judicious use of the methods outlined above. You still have a long way to go to keep readers turning the pages, but at least you’ll be off to a good start.
The use of prologues is a venerable one, used by all sorts of writers in many different ways. But the most effective prologues do one simple thing — entice the reader to move to chapter one.
All of the rules we talk about in this chapter apply to prologues as well, with one primary exception: The prologue does not necessarily have to introduce your Lead character. It does, however, eventually have to connect to your main plot.
The primary ways prologues are used are as an action hook, as a frame story, and as a teaser.
With the action prologue, a staple of suspense fiction, we start off with some sort of big scene, many times involving death. This sets up the tone and stakes right away. Chapter one will begin the main plot, and what has just happened will hover over the entire story.
Sometimes the Lead character is involved in the prologue. In Final Seconds, by John Lutz and David August, the prologue involves a bomb scare in a New York public school. Harper, the Lead character, is a grizzled veteran of the New York Police Department’s bomb squad. He arrives on the scene with his young partner. Tension builds as Harper tries to defuse the bomb. Finally, left holding a bit of explosive, Harper is almost there when … boom. And his hand is mostly blown off.
Chapter one opens two-and-a-half years later, with Harper going to see his partner — who was at fault for the accident. Harper is no longer with the NYPD.
Thus we get a prologue of incredible excitement and suspense, and as chapter one begins, we wonder how Harper has handled life after this traumatic experience.
Another example is Harlan Coben’s Tell No One. The narrator, David Beck, opens by recounting an anniversary trip with his wife Elizabeth to a romantic lakeside, a place of good memories. Eventually they go swimming in the dark lake, make love, and lounge on a raft.
Then Elizabeth steps onto the dock. Beck stays on the raft. He hears a car door slam, and Elizabeth is gone.
Beck swims to the dock, shouting his wife’s name.
He hears her scream. As he gets out of the water, he’s struck by something and topples back into the lake. He hears her scream again, “but the sound, all sound, gurgled away as I sank under the water.”
That’s the end of the prologue. Chapter one begins eight years later.
More common is the prologue involving characters other than the Lead — characters who may or may not show up in the main plot.
In Dean Koontz’s Midnight, we are introduced to Janice Capshaw, who, as we know from earlier discussions, likes to run at night. As she jogs through the foreboding darkness, Koontz gives us some of her background, building up identification and even sympathy.
Suspense starts to build as Janice gets the feeling that someone — or something — is following her. How right she is. And at the end of the prologue, she is killed by some mysterious, horrible creatures.
The first chapter begins with Sam Booker, the Lead, arriving in the little town where the killing took place.
Which offers up this rule: If you do not introduce your Lead in the prologue, make sure you do it in chapter one! Readers want to know whom they are supposed to follow.
Note: Koontz labeled this prologue chapter “1” and the real opening chapter, chapter “2.” That’s a choice you can make if you so desire. What matters is not the tag, but the function.
To use an action prologue, remember:
A prologue can also give us the view of a character about to look back and tell the story. Why do this? In order to set up a feeling that what is about to unfold has consequences that reach into the present and the future.
Stephen King’s novella, The Body, begins with the narrator looking back to 1960, a “long time ago,” when he first saw a dead body. But he indicates that the incident was much deeper than a visual image — it was one of those things that “lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried. …”
The Catcher in the Rye is a frame story, though Salinger does not mark it with Prologue or Epilogue. That comes out purely in the writing.
The narrator, Holden Caulfield, informs us he is going to tell about “this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.”
Where is here? We don’t find out until the last chapter, where we learn Holden is in a sanitarium.
With a frame prologue:
Though rarely used, the teaser can work on occasion. Mary Higgins Clark has done it more than once.
In the teaser, you present a scene at the beginning that will happen later on in the book. It’s like a preview of a coming attraction.
Why do it this way? Because you grab the reader with action. You don’t play the scene to full fruition, leaving a mystery. You leave the reader wondering, How did this character get herself into this predicament?
When you get to that scene in the novel, you then play it out, and answer the reader’s initial question.
Some purists object to the teaser, as it is not adding anything to the plot. It’s just using plot material earlier, they say.
To which one answer is, So what? If it functions to grab the reader and create interest, then it is doing its job.
For a teaser, do this:
Before I started to sell my fiction, I had a major weakness with characters. I would come up with a plot or situation, but I’d stock it with cardboard story people, characters who seemed to be on the page just because I stuck them there.
Then I happened across Lajos Egri’s advice about living, vibrating human beings being the secret of great and enduring writing. Egri suggested that if you truly know yourself, deeply and intimately, you will be able to create great, complex, and interesting characters.
That’s because we have all experienced, to a greater or lesser degree, every human emotion. By tapping into our emotional memories, we can create an infinite variety of characters.
This is not a book on character creation though there is overlap. Plot doesn’t work without characters; the stronger your characters, the better your plot. For your character work, I recommend reading Creating Dynamic Characters or Write Great Fiction: Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint, both by Nancy Kress. Strong characters draw readers into your plot. This dynamic is called the bond.
After conceiving a compelling Lead character, you must go a step further and figure out how to create an emotional bond with the reader. You can accomplish this by mastering four dynamics — identification, sympathy, likability, and inner conflict.
Since the Lead character provides access to a plot, it follows that the more the reader can identify with the Lead, the greater the intensity of the plot experience. With identification, you create the wondrous feeling that the story, in some way, is happening to me.
Identification means, simply, that the Lead is like us. We feel that we could, under the right circumstances, find ourselves in the same position in the plot, with similar reactions.
The Lead appears to us to be a real human being.
What are the marks of a real human being? Look inside yourself. Most likely, you are: (1) trying to make it in the world; (2) a little fearful at times; and (3) not perfect.
In The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Stephen King gives us nine-year-old Trisha McFarland, who is walking in the woods with her mother. The trouble begins when Trisha gets lost, and why does she get lost? Because she petulantly stomps away from her mother to relieve herself. It’s such a simple, human response that we easily identify with it. That’s how King draws us into his Lead character’s immediate crisis.
Trisha’s not perfect. She has normal human flaws.
Your key question here is: What does your Lead do and think that makes her just like most people? Find those qualities, and readers will begin to warm to the Lead.
This works even with (perhaps most crucially with) the heroic Lead. Take Indiana Jones. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, it would have been tempting to leave him as some sort of superman, overcoming all odds without a hitch. But the filmmakers wisely gave him an understandable human flaw: a fear of snakes. This humanizes Jones and makes him more accessible.
Another word for identification is empathy.
In contrast to mere empathy, sympathy intensifies the reader’s emotional investment in the Lead. In my view, the best plots have a Lead with whom some sympathy is established. Even if the Lead has negative qualities, like Scarlett in Gone With the Wind, you can find ways to generate sympathy nonetheless.
There are four simple ways to establish sympathy. Choose wisely. Don’t overload them, as it may make the reader feel manipulated.
[1] Jeopardy. Put the hero in terrible, imminent trouble and you’ve got the sympathy factor at work right away. In Tom Gordon, Trisha is lost in dangerous woods after she stomps away. That’s immediate, physical jeopardy.
Jeopardy can also be emotional. Dean Koontz often uses this device. In Midnight, FBI agent Sam Booker is close to an emotional abyss. His teenage son hates him, and he is fighting to find reasons to keep on living. He is in emotional jeopardy. Part of the depth of the book comes from his finding reasons to carry on.
[2] Hardship. If the Lead has to face some misfortune not of her own making, sympathy abounds. In The Winner, David Baldacci gives us a poor, southern woman who grew up without love, education, or good hygiene (even her teeth are bad). So when she takes steps to overcome her state of affairs, we are rooting for her.
Forrest Gump, who suffers from physical and mental challenges as a boy, gains our sympathy from the start.
The key to using hardship is not to allow the character to whine about it. Sure, there can be moments when the character lashes out emotionally due to the hardship, but don’t let her stay there. We admire those who take steps to overcome.
[3] The Underdog. America loves people who face long odds. John Grisham has used the underdog in many of his books. One of his best, The Rainmaker, is the classic David-and-Goliath story switched to the courtroom. We can’t help rooting for Rudy Baylor as he battles a huge defense firm.
Rocky Balboa became a permanent part of our culture when Sylvester Stallone brought him to the screen in Rocky. The movie was a phenomenon not only because it was about a pug fighter’s chance to beat the champ but because it was like Stallone’s own story as a struggling actor.
[4] Vulnerability. Readers worry about a Lead who might be crushed at any time. In Rose Madder, Stephen King follows a battered wife who, after years in a hellish marriage, finally gets up the courage to run away from her psychopathic cop-husband. But she is so naive about the ways of the world, and her husband so good at tracking people down, we worry about her from the moment she steps out the door.
A likable Lead, not surprisingly, is someone who does likable things. For example, likeable Leads do favors for people. Or they are witty in conversation. They are supportive and engaging. They are not selfish. They have an expansive view of life. These are people we like to be around. Think about people you like, and then incorporate some of those characteristics into your Lead.
A witty character, a character who doesn’t take himself too seriously, is likable. So is the character who cares about others without calling attention to himself.
Irwin Fletcher, in the Fletch books by Gregory MacDonald, is witty and self-deprecating. So is Elvis Cole, the private investigator creation of Robert Crais.
But note that people who try too hard to be likable often miss the mark. It’s a fine line your characters walk, but worth the effort to get it right.
You can write about an unlikable Lead if you compensate in other areas. Giving the Lead power is one good method. Scarlett O’Hara has a certain power over men. She also demonstrates her power to overcome obstacles as the story progresses.
In The Godfather,Michael Corleone is a monster, and a powerful one.
Make the unlikable Lead fascinating in some way, or readers will be turned off.
Characters who are absolutely sure about what they do, who plunge ahead without fear, are not that interesting. We don’t go through life that way. In reality, we have doubts just like everyone else.
Bringing your Lead’s doubts to the surface in your plot pulls the reader deeper into the story.
In How to Write a Damn Good Novel II, James N. Frey writes that inner conflict “can be thought of as a battle between two ‘voices’ within the character: one of reason, the other of passion — or of two conflicting passions.”
Many times it is fear on one side, telling the Lead not to act. Inner conflict is resolved when the Lead, by listening to the other side — duty, honor, principle, or the like — overcomes doubt and acts accordingly.
What sort of world does your Lead inhabit? Not merely the setting, though that is important. But what is life like for the Lead?
In Mystic River, Dennis Lehane gives us Jimmy Marcus’s story world in the first chapter after the prologue:
After work that night, Jimmy Marcus had a beer with his brother-in-law, Kevin Savage, at the Warren Tap, the two of them sitting at the window and watching some kids play street hockey. There were six kids, and they were fighting in the dark, their faces gone featureless with it. The Warren Tap was tucked away on a side street in the old stockyard district …
We get a sense of Jimmy’s life and routine here. He’s an average guy in a working-class location (near the stockyard). The rest of the section gives us more explanation of Jimmy’s situation — how he’d been in prison, but now has a wife and three daughters and owns a store. He’s a guy just trying to make it in the world.
Sometimes we begin with the Lead practicing his chosen profession. This allows for some explanation, as in Lawrence Block’s Eight Million Ways to Die:
She said, “You used to be a policeman.”
“A few years back.”
“And now you’re a private detective.”
“Not exactly.” The eyes widened. They were very vivid blue, an unusual shade, and I wondered if she were wearing contact lenses. The soft lenses sometimes do curious things to eye color, altering some shades, intensifying others.
“I don’t have a license,” I explained. “When I decided I didn’t want to carry a badge anymore I didn’t figure I wanted to carry a license, either.” Or fill out forms or keep records or check with the tax collector. “Anything I do is very unofficial.”
“But it’s what you do? It’s how you make your living?”
“That’s right.”
Notice this isn’t just raw exposition. Block shows us the narrator’s close observations, and some of his attitude about “official” things.
Chapter one of Steve Martini’s The Judge begins like this:
“You have two choices,” he tells me. “Your man testifies, or else.”
“Or else what? Thumbscrews?” I say.
He gives me a look as if to say, “If you like.”
Armando Acosta would have excelled in another age. Scenes of some dimly lit stone cavern with iron shackles, pinioned to the walls come to mind. Visions of flickering torches, the odor of lard thick in the air, as black-hooded men, hairy and barrel-chested, scurry about with implements of pain, employed at his command. The “Cocoanut” is a man with bad timing. He missed his calling with the passing of the Spanish Inquisition.
We are seated in his chambers behind Department 15 …
A legal setting and a tough tone from the narrator; a lawyer facing a tough, unfair judge. We know this is going to be a certain kind of book with a distinct voice.
Contrast that to the following excerpt from Tom Robbins’s Another Roadside Attraction:
The magician’s underwear has just been found in a cardboard suitcase floating in a stagnant pond on the outskirts of Miami. However significant that discovery may be — and there is the possibility that it could alter the destiny of each and every one of us — it is not the incident with which to begin this report.
Notice any difference in tone? I think you do. Readers want to settle into a consistent tone. That does not mean a serious novel can’t have comic relief, or a comic novel some drama. In fact, that variety is a good thing — it keeps readers engaged.
But the overall impression one gets from a novel should be consistency of tone.
All of this Act I material described above exists to move the reader on to Act II. Why should they care to read on?
Because you have given them the following in Act I:
And when the Lead passes through the first doorway of no return into Act II, we must know who or what the opposition is.
Not that a complete identity has to be established. It is perfectly all right that there is a mysterious opponent out there, someone to be revealed later. But that there is an opponent is all important.
Make sure the opponent is as strong as or, preferably, stronger than the Lead. And do not scrimp on the sympathy factor! Give the opponent his due, his justifications. Your novel will be the stronger for it.
Nothing will slow down plot faster than an information dump. This is where the author merely tells the reader something he thinks the reader needs to know before moving on with the plot.
It’s bad enough when this is done in the narrative portion, but dreadful when it is done in dialogue.
For example, you might run across a paragraph like this:
John was a doctor from the east. He went to medical school at Johns Hopkins where he was a star student. He completed his residency in New York City when he was 30 years old. He lived with relatives on Long Island while he was an intern. John loved New York.
Now, in certain contexts this might be perfectly fine. Sometimes telling is a short cut, and if it is indeed short, it can work. But take a look at all exposition like the above in your manuscript, and ask yourself if you can be more creative in how you give this information to your readers.
I have a few rules about exposition in the beginnings of books. I have formulated these only because I saw in my own writing the tendency to put in a lot of exposition up front, thinking the reader needed this to understand the story.
Not so. Most of the time I could cut with impunity and not lose the flow of the story; in fact, my novels started to take off from the beginning.
Don’t start slowly with useless exposition. Thus, the rules:
Rule 1: Act first, explain later. Begin with a character in motion. Readers will follow a character who is doing something, and won’t demand to know everything about the character up front. You then drop in information as necessary, in little bits as you go along.
Rule 2: When you explain, do the iceberg. Don’t tell us everything about the character’s past history or current situation. Give us the 10 percent above the surface that is necessary to understand what’s going on, and leave 90 percent hidden and mysterious below the surface. Later in the story, you can reveal more of that information. Until the right time, however, withhold it.
Rule 3: Set information inside confrontation. Often, the best way to let information come out is within a scene of intense conflict. Using the characters’ thoughts or words, you can have crucial information ripped out and thrown in front of the reader.
In the first chapter of Midnight, Dean Koontz skillfully weaves in exposition during a tense jog at night:
First sentence: “Janice Capshaw liked to run at night.” Follows the rule: Open with a character — named — in motion.
Next two sentences: Author explains something about her running, gives her age and something about her appearance (healthy).
Next five sentences:We learn the time and place (Sunday night, Sept. 21, Moonlight Cove). Description of the place. Mood established (dark, no cars, no other people). Background on the place (quiet little town).
Next three sentences: Mood details in the action (as she runs).
Next two sentences: Background on Janice’s likes about night running.
Next five sentences: Deepening details about Janice (why she likes night).
Next three sentences: Action as she runs. More details and mood.
Next sentence: Action as she runs. How she feels.
Next seven sentences: Deepening Janice by describing her past with her late husband.
Next two sentences: First sign of trouble.
Next three sentences: Her reaction to the sign.
And so on throughout. Read this opening chapter. It is a great example of handling exposition.
For the next example, let’s widen our scope and look at how Final Seconds, by John Lutz and David August, progresses within the first six chapters:
Prologue: New York public school has bomb scare. Harper, a grizzled veteran, and his young partner, arrive. Tension builds as he tries to undo the bomb. Finally, left holding a bit of explosive, Harper is almost there when … boom. His hand is mostly blown off.
Chapter one: Two-and-a-half years later, Harper is going to see his partner (who was sort of at fault for the accident). He’s working security for techno-thriller author Rod Buckner. Harper is no longer with the NYPD.
Chapter two: Harper can’t talk his old partner into coming back to the NYPD. As he’s driving away from this very secure complex, a tremendous explosion is heard. The whole house, along with Buckner and all the others, is blown up.
Chapter three: Harper tries to get information on the investigation into his ex-partner’s death, but his old captain isn’t giving any. Tension builds here.
Chapter four:We see Harper’s home life. Then he gets a message from an old FBI friend to come see him about the case.
Chapter five: Addleman, a profiler who is now a drunk and eccentric, says he has a theory. There is a serial bomber out there, targeting celebrities!
Chapter six: Now a scene with the bomber, the villain, getting stuff from a contact in a remote area. The contact is surly. When the deal is finally made, the contact takes the money. But it is laced with napalm, and a trick detonator. The guy burns up.
We are now on page 64, the plot is set up, and the cat and mouse begins.
Let’s have a look at some great openings from best-selling novels and see what the writers are doing. We’ll begin, once again, with the master, Dean Koontz, and Sole Survivor:
At two-thirty Saturday morning, in Los Angeles, Joe Carpenter woke, clutching a pillow to his chest, calling his lost wife’s name in the darkness. The anguished and haunted quality of his own voice had shaken him from sleep. Dreams fell from him not all at once but in trembling veils, as attic dust falls off rafters when a house rolls with an earthquake.
Again, notice that Koontz gives us a specific name and a haunting first line. But then he expands upon that line with two others that are almost poetic in their descriptive power and emotional impact. This is one of the greatest opening paragraphs in any thriller you’ll ever read.
From The Stand by Stephen King:
“Sally.”
A mutter.
“Wake up now, Sally.”
A louder mutter: lemme alone.
He shook her harder.
“Wake up. You got to wake up!”
Charlie.
Charlie’s voice. Calling her. For how long?
Sally swam up out of sleep.
King uses the dialogue starter, which always gives the impression of instant motion. Somebody is saying something, so we’ve got action (dialogue is a form of action, a physical act to gain a result or reaction). As the dialogue continues, we know only that Charlie is in some distress, and that Sally, swimming out of sleep, is about to find out what it is.
If you’re writing a comical novel, there is another possibility for a grabber opening: using the look and sound of the text itself to create an oddball impression. From Sacred Monster by Donald E. Westlake:
“This won’t take long, sir.”
Oooooooooooooooooohooooooooooooooooooooooooohooooooooooooo oooooooooooohoooooooooooooooooooooooohoooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooohooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooo, wow.
I hurt all over. My bones ache. God’s giant fists are squeezing my internal organs, twisting and grinding. Why do I do it, if it makes me sick?
“Ready for a few questions, sir?”
Westlake makes sure we are sufficiently intrigued, too, by making us wonder just what it is the narrator does to make himself so sick.
Now let’s have a look at some great openings in literary novels. Can we get any more literary than Herman Melville’s Moby Dick?
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.
When writing in the first person, it is the voice that must reach out and grab. Melville’s does.
The famous first line, “Call me Ishmael,” had perhaps a deeper meaning to nineteenth-century American readers, steeped as they would have been in the Bible. Ishmael was the son of Abraham by Hagar, a servant. Thus, he was not the child of God’s covenant, as Isaac, son of Sarah, was. Ishmael was sent away by Sarah so he would not share in Isaac’s inheritance. He was an outcast. That is what Melville establishes immediately.
Then the narrator goes on, in this haunting passage, to say, basically, that he goes to sea to keep from killing himself. But Melville is poetic — damp, drizzly November in my soul.
There’s also a touch of humor to keep things from getting too maudlin — Ishmael says he sometimes wants to methodically knock people’s hats off.
He’s got an attitude. That’s one key for literary novelists. If you’re doing the book in first person, then give us a voice that intrigues us.
Earlier, I warned about not starting with descriptions of setting, weather, and the like. That is not an ironclad rule, but simply a helpful tip. Readers today are impatient, and want to know why they should keep reading.
So if you want to use description to start, make sure it does three things: (1) sets mood; (2) gets a character involved early; (3) gives us a reason to keep reading!
Here is how Janet Fitch’s White Oleander begins:
The Santa Anas blew hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves.
Already we have a mood. The weather does not just exist; it portends. The first sentence gives us desolation. The second gives us something that thrives, but it is dangerous. Read the rest of the book to find out how this applies!
Now Fitch gives us the narrator, getting the character involved early:
We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I. I woke up at midnight to find her bed empty. I climbed to the roof and easily spotted her blond hair like a white flame in the light of the three-quarter moon.
“Oleander time,” she said. “Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.”
Now this is a character I want to know more about. Who says things like this? We read on to find out.
In The Big Rock Candy Mountain,Wallace Stegner gives us a character who is literally in motion:
The train was rocking through wide open country before Elsa was able to put off the misery of leaving and reach out for the freedom and release that were hers now.
Why wasn’t Elsa free before? What is she going to do with this new freedom? Where is she headed?
She tucked her handkerchief away, leaned her shoulder against the dirty pane and watched the telegraph wires dip, and dip, and dip from pole to pole, watched the trees and scattered farms, endless variations of white house, red barn, tufted cornfield, slide smoothly backward. Every mile meant that she was freer.
The car was hot; opened windows along the coach let in an acrid smell of smoke, and as the wind flawed, the trailing plume swept down past her eyes, fogging the trackside. Two men up ahead rose and took off their coats and came back toward the smoker. One of them wore flaming striped suspenders and stared at her.
A small detail — the man staring. It adds to the sense of vulnerability of this woman, and that, as we have seen, is a subtle form of jeopardy. Our sympathy is beginning to build.
W. Somerset Maugham begins Of Human Bondage with description, but then gets us immediately to that change-disturbance that is so crucial:
The day broke gray and dull. The clouds hung heavily, and there was a rawness in the air that suggested snow. A woman servant came into a room in which a child was sleeping and drew the curtains. She glanced mechanically at the house opposite, a stucco house with a portico, and went to the child’s bed.
“Wake up, Philip,” she said.
Why is Philip being awakened? The mood is somber (gray, dull, heavy clouds, raw weather).We want to find out what’s happening:
She pulled down the bed-clothes, took him in her arms, and carried him downstairs. He was only half awake.
“Your mother wants you,” she said.
She opened the door of a room on the floor below and took the child over to a bed in which a woman was lying. It was his mother. She stretched out her arms, and the child nestled by her side. He did not ask why he had been awakened. The woman kissed his eyes, and with thin, small hands felt the warm body through his white flannel nightgown. She pressed him closer to herself.
“Are you sleepy, darling?” she said.
Her voice was so weak that it seemed to come already from a great distance. The child did not answer, but smiled comfortably. He was very happy in the large, warm bed, with those soft arms about him. He tried to make himself smaller still as he cuddled up against his mother, and he kissed her sleepily. In a moment he closed his eyes and was fast asleep. The doctor came forwards and stood by the bed-side.
“Oh, don’t take him away yet,” she moaned.
The doctor, without answering, looked at her gravely. Knowing she would not be allowed to keep the child much longer, the woman kissed him again; and she passed her hand down his body till she came to his feet; she held the right foot in her hand and felt the five small toes; and then slowly passed her hand over the left one. She gave a sob.
A mother being separated from her child. Why? Emotional jeopardy is here in force.
So what have we seen?
Any type of novel can hook a reader, set tone, give a sense of motion, connect us with a character, and set the wheels in motion.
Why would you want your plot to begin any other way? The only alternative is that you start with none of this, hoping the reader will stick with you.
But even if you write with a style that makes angels weep, you’re not going to keep readers interested for too long on style alone.
Why not make angels and readers both happy?
Grab ’em from the start.
Go over the opening chapter of your work in progress (or write one now). What techniques will you use to grab the reader from the very first paragraph? Are you establishing a feeling of motion? If not, rewrite it using the techniques you have learned in this chapter.
What is your story world? How well do you know it? How are you giving the reader a sense of it in detail, without just dumping blocks of description?
How are you introducing your Lead character? What is going to make your Lead memorable?
Brainstorm five possibilities for your Lead in each of the following categories:
What is disturbing your Lead’s ordinary world? What change is causing ripples or waves?
Give your opposition character his due. Dean Koontz once wrote:
The best villains are those that evoke pity and sometimes even genuine sympathy as well as terror. Think of the pathetic aspect of the Frankenstein monster. Think of the poor werewolf, hating what he becomes in the light of the full moon, but incapable of resisting the lycanthropic tides in his own cells.
How can you justify, from the opposition’s standpoint, what he’s doing? What is there in his background that explains the way he is? What aspects of his character are charming, attractive, or seductive?