A Guide to Your Opening Pages
What does your first chapter have to do? And NOT do?
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Dear Kate,
Like what feels like half the world right now, I’m getting ready to query (YA sci fi/fantasy). I’ve probably looked at my opening pages ten thousand times, and I think they’re good but…will an agent? I have a writing group and have looked at tons of stuff online, craft books, I’ve reread the openings of my comp titles to see how mine compares, but I’m still not sure if mine is ready. What if there’s something I’m missing? Can you talk about what should go into the first 10 or 20 pages, or rookie mistakes that might turn an agent off? Is there anything I should keep an eye out for that might help me decide if I’m ready to go?
- Opening Jitters
Dear Opening Jitters,
It’s scary to take the plunge and send your work out! You don’t want to send out 50 queries only to realize later that actually, your book should really start at chapter 3. (Not saying this is your book! Just that it happens! More than you might think!)
I’ve written a few things that might be helpful here as you weigh this decision. One is about the importance of actually making yourself take the plunge (when you’re ready) and sending your work out enough to give it a fair shot.
The other is about this idea we can sometimes have that if we just do X thing right, we’ll definitely nail our submissions and get that elusive yes, but if we slip up and do Y thing wrong, we’re doomed. Spoiler: it doesn’t work this way. So while I want to encourage you, Opening Jitters, to be as thorough in as possible in reviewing your work, I also don’t want you to get too stuck on feeling like if you do one little thing “wrong” in your opening pages, your query is sunk.
That being said, there are definitely some things that I think often trip people up in their openings and that are worth having an eagle eye for.
First, the obvious stuff: make sure your manuscript is as clean and polished as you can make it. This doesn’t mean you need it professionally proofread, and it doesn’t mean that a typo on page 3 will make the agent think you’re sloppy. But you want it to be clear that you’ve really taken the time with your work. Make sure you’re following general industry standards: 12 point Times New Roman font, double spaced, 1 inch margins, nothing fancy or cutesy with your fonts or colors or formatting or whatever. This is not the place to stand out. This is the place to show that you’re a professional. Let the work speak for itself.
Beyond that, there’s no real checklist because hey, you can make anything work if you do it well! But some common things are to look for cliches and bits that are wildly overdone: opening with a dream sequence, opening with your character waking up from a dream, opening with your character standing in front of a mirror and describing themselves the way literally no human being in their right mind would ever do. The problem with these things isn’t that there’s some universal rule on what constitutes bad writing. The problem is that they’re usually slow. They don’t tell us a story. I read a lot of opening pages when I’m reviewing query packages, and I’ll be honest: the biggest problem I generally see is that we don’t get to the story soon enough. We get backstory and description and information and writing about the story, but we don’t get the actual storytelling.
Say you were telling a story to a friend. Where would you start? How would you know what details to include (to make the story feel riveting and real) and what details to leave out (because your friend doesn’t need to know every bit of backstory in order to care about what happens next). A novel is longer and more involved than what we get into when gabbing with friends, but the principles are largely the same. If you were talking to an agent about what happens in your book, how much of your opening pages would feel important to that storytelling? If things only really get going 50 pages in, is a reader really going to want to sit through the first 50 pages? Or will they put down your book to pick one up where things happen from the very beginning?
Another common problem I sometimes come across is an AWESOME opening—great first line, great first page, I’m thinking OH MAN THIS IS IT, THIS BOOK IS GOING TO BE SO GOOOOOOOOOOD!!!!!!!!
And then maybe 2, 3, 10, 20 pages in…much of that wind is gone from the sails. We’ve hit a morass of backstory, or a bunch of explaining, or scenes are taking place and so technically something is happening, but again, none of it is telling a story. There’s no character or conflict or choices or situations or a sense of something building. We’re in limbo until the inciting incident comes along. This is important regardless of genre or style. There’s always something that keeps the reader turning the pages, some kind of internal engine to the narrative that I’m calling story here. Are you placing us in a scene right away—a scene in which something is happening and already changing for your character? Or do you start off strong but then get sidetracked on a bunch of detours? (And while we’re at it, if your opening pages rock, do you carry that momentum through for the whole entire book?)
Openings are hard because we need enough setup and explanation to ease the reader into the narrative (if we’re plopped in the middle of a fight scene, for example, do we care about who’s fighting if we don’t even know who they are yet??). And yet too much “I’m getting ready to tell you a story” feels like throat-clearing before the actual book starts. Even if you’re looking at your opening and saying, well, I don’t have that, because my character sees her friends and then they go to dinner and then they talk about that guy they know and then they go home and then they call their mom and then this other thing happens, too—really, really, REALLY ask yourself if that is telling the story your novel has set out to impart, or if you’re still figuring out where you’re trying to go. Sometimes we can polish those opening pages so much that they feel like storytelling—the sentences are funny and poignant and descriptive and lush, and it feels to you, the writer, like we need every one of them! But try to read your work like you’re a reader approaching it for the first time. Is every moment carrying its necessary weight?
Some questions to ask yourself:
Are all of your scenes doing separate work, or could you combine or even cut some things so you aren’t reduplicating efforts?
Do we have a sense of your character’s rich inner, emotional life, along with the external things that are happening on the page?
Are there external things happening on the page?
Where in the narrative do you feel like your story really picks up? Be honest! Find the place, and then work backwards. Is everything from your beginning leading directly to that moment? Is there anything you don’t need? Anything that you should add, instead?
How are you presenting the world your characters inhabit? Does it emerge organically, through their perspectives and experiences? Or do you have an info-dump explaining what we need to know about this universe? This is true for any kind of world building, but especially in SFF. Opening pages can sometimes feel chunky: here is the description of my fictional town’s streets! Here is what my hero looks like! Here is the quirky neighbor who will become important later on but I’m spending two paragraphs on him right now even though it’s slowing everything down! Think about what the reader really needs to know from the beginning, and weave it into the actual action of your narrative so you never stop the momentum of the story to explain things.
Is your writing as strong as it can be on the level of the sentence? Once you have all the pieces of storytelling in place, look for any bits of dead weight you can trim, including small words and phrases that aren’t really adding anything, or places where you could use more dynamic verbs or more active sentence constructions. This doesn’t mean every word needs to be a thesaurus word, or that you should be changing your writing style to fit what you think will sell. Your voice is your voice! This read through is to help make that voice shine through as much as possible. I say on here a lot about how story builds up in layers, over time, and this is one of those places where reading your work multiple times, making small changes each time, can really transform a draft and make the writing shine.
I know I’ve sent work out too soon. But I also know that sending that work out was part of the process, and an important step toward getting me to take my writing seriously. When the rejections rolled in, it gave me a reason to go back and revisit the work with a more critical eye, and a perspective that I didn’t have before. You can stare at your work for years and always find someone else to give you an opinion. But at the end of the day, you won’t know what an agent thinks unless you start sending it out. I encourage you to be thorough and be critical, but also to believe in yourself and the work you’ve put in. Good luck and keep going!
Kate