Openings that earn page two

The first page of a novel does five things at once. Most drafts only do two. The fix is rarely longer prose, it's better choices about which two pages to start on.

What an opening has to do

  1. Establish a character. Specific enough that we can tell them apart from someone in another book.
  2. Establish a question. Why are we reading? What does this character want / need / fear?
  3. Establish a voice.The opening is the writer's voice contract. Page one is what the rest of the book has to deliver on.
  4. Establish a tone. Comic? Threatening? Wry? Lyrical? Tonal mismatch by chapter two reads as broken-promise.
  5. Establish a world.Even “our” world, the version of it the book is going to inhabit.

The four common fumbles

  • Backstory dump.Opening on the protagonist's history before the inciting event. Cut it. Let the reader meet the character at a moment of choice; the history will land via implication.
  • Weather report.Three paragraphs about the rain. Setting can ground us, but only if it's doing two things at once, atmosphere AND character or atmosphere AND tension.
  • Prologue trap.A 500-word prologue from a POV the reader will never see again. If the prologue isn't carrying load the rest of the book can't, cut it.
  • Wake-and-make-coffee.The protagonist's ordinary morning. We meet them at their most boring. Move the start point, open at the moment something is changing, not the moment it's about to.

The grandmother test

Read your first page out loud to someone who isn't a writer. After the page, ask: “What's this book about?” If they can answer in one sentence and seem curious for the next page, your opening earned its weight. If they pause or shrug, rewrite.

Famous first lines, deconstructed

  • “Call me Ishmael.”, character (a name we'll learn matters), voice (a man speaking directly to us), tone (informal, conspiratorial). Three words.
  • “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” , tone (rhetorical, balanced), question (which is it?), voice (Dickens). Twelve words and the entire book.
  • “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” , character (haunted), tone (gothic), question (what happened at Manderley?), world (English country estate). Eleven words and the reader is committed.