Susie Helme
If you want someone to read your book, you must ‘hook’ them by your first paragraph—ideally, by your first sentence. Potential publishers or agents may ask you for your first 3 chapters, but in practice they often read only the first paragraph before rejecting you. I’m an editor, and though I ask for the first chapter, I almost never read more than the synopsis and first paragraph or two before deciding whether to take on a client.
It’s possible to start from the beginning of the story, which Horace called starting ab ovo (from the egg). Children’s books often start like this (In a cabin in the woods lived…), but for adult novels, I would advise only doing this when there is something hook-worthy about the beginning of the story. Beginning with ‘Mr and Mrs Smith had been married for ten years’ is quite boring. You want to open with something out of the ordinary.
Or begin with some kind of disturbance, tension, conflict, or question.[1]
The good stuff
A good rule of thumb in writing is—go straight for the good stuff. We do not need to hear, ‘First he did this, and then he did that.’ We certainly don’t need to hear it in the first sentence. We do not need to hear the entire conversation, only the bits which get emotional. We certainly don’t need to hear ‘hello’s and ‘how are you?’s. Skip straight to the meat and potatoes.
Some ideas for opening sentences and examples
ab ovo (from the egg)
Starting from the beginning. Not usually recommended nowadays except for children’s books.
In the beginning, God created heaven and earth.
Genesis
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
J R R Tolkien, The Hobbit
I think this is a successful example of ab ovo, as you’re still creating a question in the reader’s mind—what is a hobbit? Which Tolkien doesn’t immediately answer, instead going into a description of the hole. This opening strategy lends itself to stories that are going to have a linear, chronological structure, like a journey.
- Introduce the central conflict. Character vs character, character vs society or character vs self.
Mr and Mrs Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
J K Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
Make the reader ask a question
I found him in the garage on a Sunday afternoon.
David Almond, Skellig
Set up a mystery, so reader thinks, ‘how could that be?’
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
They say the day the Governor arrived, the ravens did too.
Kiran Millwood Hargrave, The Girl of Ink & Stars
Don’t give away too much about the mystery, but don’t give away too little, either. You don’t want to disappoint.
Describe something unusual
First the colours. Then the humans. That’s usually how I see things.
Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Establish a unique narrator voice
The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the day the milkman died.
Anna Burns, Milkman
You better not never tell nobody but God.
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Use direct address
You don’t know about me.
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Or an invocation
Sing, goddess, of the anger of Achilles, Peleus’ son.
Homer, The Iliad
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Set the atmosphere, tone
It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13.
George Orwell, 1984
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary…
Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven
Paint a striking or unusual visual picture
There was a hand in the darkness and it held a knife.
Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
Focus on the setting
Last night, I dreamt of Manderley again.
Rebecca du Maurier, Rebecca
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
Hunter S Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Dark spruce forest frowned on either side of the frozen waterway.
Jack London, White Fang
I would think that opening with a description of the setting would be most appropriate when the setting is crucial to the overall concept of the story. This can also work in sci-fi novels where it’s important to paint the fictional ‘world’ early in the story. A setting description opening should still be focussed on the protagonist, how they are interacting with the setting. White Fang begins with a description of ‘the Wild’; the book is going to be about a wolf—the setting is crucial.
Begin with a tense moment in the midst of action (in media res)
The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way towards the lagoon.
William Golding, Lord of the Flies
Or in the middle of dialogue
“Where’s Papa going with that axe?” said Fern.
E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
Begin at a moment of high emotion
“Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?”
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Begin with a piece of wisdom or an ancient prophecy
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Introduce an unusual situation
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Make a contrary statement, something someone would not ordinarily say
I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.
Avni Doshi, Burnt Sugar
When I think of my wife, I always think of her head.
Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
Introduce or foreshadow a threat, or start with a chase scene
It was a pleasure to burn.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.
Toni Morrison, Paradise
Present a problem that doesn’t have an immediate, obvious solution[2]
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Bad openings
Starting a novel like these below is all-advised, either because it’s cliché, it’s boring, or it can fail to hook the reader with conflict, character and compelling action:
- A long philosophical discussion
- An explanation of why you decided to write this book (you can put that in an Afterword)
- A chunk of trivial dialogue that has nothing to do with the central conflict
- A long paragraph describing the setting (unless the setting is crucial to the story, as in White Fang)
- Clichés, especially if there is a whole string of them
- A passage full of whole lot of unfamiliar vocabulary or placenames
- An introduction of someone who is not the protagonist
- An exposition of how the protagonist is feeling, before we know what has happened to them
- A piece of wisdom that isn’t really very profound
- A weather report
- An alarm ringing or character waking up
- Characters brushing their teeth or eating breakfast
- A cliché situation like a phone call in the middle of the night
- A transit scene—character on a train, in a car etc
- A ‘rocking chair scene’[3]—character alone, thinking
- Character in the midst of crisis (you need to build up to the crisis first)
- Looking in the mirror
- A bunch of backstory or a summary rather than a scene
- Introducing too many new characters at once
- A genealogy, before we’ve met the family
- Switching point of view
- Telling us irrelevant or boring details like how old people are or what clothes they’re wearing or which house they lived in (unless it’s a children’s story, for which this is a common opening strategy)
- A dream sequence
- Purple prose or strings of adjectives, adverbs, metaphors
- Sex or gore (even if you’re writing porn, don’t begin with the graphic sex)
- Mid-conversation dialogue, before we know the characters or the context
A good rule of thumb is, don’t start with nothing happening ‘on stage’. If there’s no conflict, no action, no interaction with other characters, we are not hooked.
[1] Michael J Totten
[2] Marcus Geduld
[3] Jane Friedman
Bounds Green Book Writers 