It is a truth universally acknowledged that an author in want of a publishing contract must have a book with a killer beginning. Sometimes your first chapter is the only chance you’ll get to persuade a reader (or agent or editor) to choose your book—or put it aside, never to be picked up again.
No fair! you might be thinking to yourself. My book starts out slow, but just wait until page 23… Sorry—too little, too late. In the age of instant gratification at our fingertips at every moment of every day, that first impression is going to make or break the success of your story, and you have to make it count.
So how does one craft an un-put-downable opener? Unfortunately, if there was a tried and true formula, we’d all be gazillionaires hanging out with J.K. Rowling on our matching yachts. But having no hard and set rules also gives you the freedom to do a little exploring. Play around with your manuscript. See where it takes you. In the meantime, here are some tips to help jumpstart those creative juices.
Start with a BANG, not a whimper. Sometimes as authors, we have the tendency to want to coddle our exciting moments and keep them a secret until some arbitrary moment down the road (pg. 23! Just wait until you get there!) where we decide to finally make our novels exciting. The problem being that most people have put down the book by then because nothing is happening.
Instead, start your book at the cusp of the point When Everything Is About To Change. For example, look at The Hunger Games. The story does not begin with Katniss as a baby and then detail her life going to school, becoming friends with Gale, learning how to tie her shoes, etc. We join Katniss on the day of the reaping, the day that the world as she knows it is about to change forever.
The above advice does not mean that you have to literally start every first chapter with a gun, murder, swordfight, etc. Different genres will have different “BANGs” that are appropriate to that style. If you’re writing a superhero book, your character might wake up levitating above her bed. If it’s a thriller, someone might go missing. A romance? Someone new shows up on the first day of school. And so forth, and so forth. Which leads to . . .
Be genre appropriate. Having a strong grasp of your genre will help the reader have a strong grasp of it, too. There’s nothing more frustrating than starting a book and thinking it’s a romance, based on the style and tone, only to get twenty-three pages into it and have the couple be murdered by a dude with a chainsaw ‘cause it’s actually a horror.
The only time this works is if it is done intentionally and deliberately by the author and if that shift takes place very early on as a twist to engage the reader (see section below). But if you’re writing about Clark Kent and spend the first three chapters talking about a fishing trip with his father and then in chapter four have him out-of-the-blue realize that he can fly, we have a problem.
If your book is a mystery, we need to know that in the first chapter. Even if the over-arching crime that needs to be solved isn’t introduced in those first couple of pages, you need to give clues right from the beginning that this is the kind of story we’re going to be reading. I.e. Your main character is a detective, or there’s a strange crime spree going on in the town, or there’s something dark and lurky in your MC’s past. If you start out with your main character singing in the shower and then spending a day in the park playing with a puppy and nothing even remotely ominous or mysterious happens, you aren’t writing a mystery. You’re writing a potentially very dull novel about a person who sings and plays with puppies.
M. Night Shyamalan your readers. Okay, Mr. Shyamalan may have gotten a lot of flak in recent years for relying too heavily on his twist endings (see The Sixth Sense, The Village, Unbreakable, Signs, etc.) but that doesn’t negate the fact that luring the reader into a sense of complacency that they’re reading one thing and then twisting it around so that they realize it’s something else entirely is an almost guaranteed way to keep those pages turning (as long as this is done intentionally and skillfully, not by default or by lazy writing, as mentioned above). If you can successfully manage it at the end of your first chapter, your agent/editor/reader isn’t going to be able to resist picking up the entire book.
However, proceed with caution on this one. Readers of today are pretty darn savvy and can spot some of those tried and true “slight of hands” a mile away. So unless you have an incredibly fresh take on “The villain is actually my father/mother!”, “That person who supposedly died in mysterious circumstances is still alive!”, “He’s actually a vampire!”, etc., or have come up with something mind-bogglingly new and exciting, probably best to steer clear of this one altogether.
Character is King. I’ve read a handful of manuscripts/books that I almost passed on because the character was so bland that I had no interest in him/her and, ergo, no interest in the story. In most of these instances, the opening chapters started out with pretty exciting BANGs—people on the run! Time travel! A quest to discover lost worlds!—but I just couldn’t muster up any excitement because I didn’t care about the person with whom I would be going on the journey.
Luckily, I will generally give a book about 100 pages before I put it aside altogether; and in the instances of these aforementioned books, I’m glad I did. As the stories progressed, the characters became more and more engaging, and I became genuinely excited to see what happened to them next. What a pity that the stories didn’t start out as strong, because I can almost guarantee that those writers have lost potential readers/publishers/agents/etc. for that very same reason despite having very good books.
The truth of the matter is that none of the advice above is really going to matter all that much if you don’t have a character that people *care about, right from the get-go. Someone who they want to keep reading about. Someone whose story they have to know. And nothing—not even opening your book with a literal explosion or the discovery that it was Earth all along!—will make up for that lack.
(*Keeping in mind that when I say a character you care about, that doesn’t necessarily mean someone you like. Lady Macbeth is no pillar of morality, but man do I want to know what she’s going to get up to next. Ditto that for most of the characters in Game of Thrones, the leads in Wuthering Heights, Scarlett O’Hara . . . the list could go on and on)
Think of it like meeting someone at a party. If I introduce myself and the other person starts rattling off a laundry list or talking about their collection of postal stamps, I’m probably going to find a reason to excuse myself from that conversation, pronto—unless it’s Tony Stark, who’s so charismatic I’d listen to him talk about anything.
But if I’m meeting a perfect stranger for the first time and she’s incredibly witty and charming as she scathingly but affectionately describes her neighbors; or he reveals that he’s won hundreds of thousands of dollars on Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, but he’s really only there to use the phone-a-friend option to find his long-lost love; or he 
suddenly stops mid-sentence, fixes me with a cold stare, and asks if I’ve ever known the power of holding a throbbing human heart in my hand—for better or worse, I’m sticking with that conversation.
In short, write the kind of beginning that makes certain your reader will NEED to know how it ends. Make a good impression, right from the get-go, because in this super-competitive market, it may be the only one you get.
Xchyler Publishing content editor Elizabeth Gilliland has wrapped Vivatera by Candace J. Thomas, just released April 19, 2013. Next up: The Rose of the Alchemist by Li Frost, slated for release later in 2013.