Every year at Retreat West, we start the year with our annual First Chapter competition and this year’s closes in ten days. We always get the majority of entries in the final two days before the deadline, so I wanted to give you some craft tips this week to help you up your chances of winning that meeting with a literary agent to discuss your work.
Before I do, here’s the interview I did with Eli Keren at United Agents, who is this year’s judge and the agent you can win a meeting with to chat about your novel and career as a writer.
Over the years that I have been running this competition, and when I was accepting novel submissions at Retreat West Books, I have read over 3,000 opening chapters and I see the same common issues in them over and over again. So I’m going to start with them.
Common Issue #1 - Switching to backstory as soon as the chapter starts
This is the most common one I see. There’s an introductory paragraph or two where we meet the protagonist in their current day and then we go back in time and stay there for the rest of the chapter. Your opening chapter is where you need to set up the story of the present day and while a character’s backstory is always a crucial element, we don’t always need to see it all. When we do need to see it, weave it in where it has the most impact and connection to what is happening in the story you’re telling about this character now. If the back story feels more important, then maybe the story you’re telling is set in the character’s past.
Common Issue #2 - Not placing us somewhere concrete in time and space
Often I see whole chapters that are purely inner monologue so I have no idea:
who the character is as it’s a first person voice;
where the character is speaking to me from; or
whether the story is in the current day, the past or the future.
The start of the novel is where you need to take your reader by the hand and lead them into the world you’re creating. So if you are using the narrative tool of starting the story purely in inner monologue, make sure you have the narrator weave in the above three things in what they tell us in the opening chapter. It’s disorientating otherwise and many readers won’t read on if they feel like that.
Common Issue #3 - Switching point of view
The third and final most common issue I see is a chapter that introduces absolutely loads of people in the opening chapter and switches point of view between them all. This is commonly known as head-hopping and it’s confusing as you never know which character’s point of view you’re in and, as it’s the opening chapter, you consequently don’t know who you’re supposed to be caring about and investing your attention in. If you do have a novel that is told in multiple points of view, make sure the switch is done in a way that separates out the characters clearly. For example, in a new section, or in another chapter, and don’t do it in the middle of a sentence or paragraph. And really think about who you’re giving a point of view to and why you’re doing it.
Writing Compelling First Chapters
Let’s look at things your first chapter needs to do to create a compelling start to your novel that means readers will definitely be turning the page to find out more when they get to the end of it.
Now I’m going to look at a novel opening to show how it is delivering on the above four elements.
The novel is Trespasses by Louise Kennedy. This is Contemporary/Literary Fiction set during The Troubles in Northern Ireland.
The year is 1975. Cushla Lavery is 24 and works as a primary teacher in a school on the outskirts of Belfast. She also does the odd shift in the family pub, which is frequented by leering and aggressive British soldiers. Here she meets Michael Agnew: handsome, middle-aged, sophisticated, married. Michael is a Protestant barrister who defends young Catholic men who have been unjustly arrested. He invites Cushla to an “Irish language evening” with his bourgeois-bohemian friends, liberals who toy with pro-Republican politics. Cushla and Michael then embark on an affair.
So how is this delivering on the elements it needs to?
We are instantly introduced to our main character Cushla and immersed in her world of helping out in the family pub. We know she is a Catholic and the news on the pub's TV brings instant tension from the outside world with the latest violent incident to have happened.
Our inciting incident is the soldier groping Cushla and this prompting Michael to defend her. This is the first step in the love affair that will follow.
The way Cushla is treated by the soldiers and by her brother connect us to her and make us feel empathy. When the chapter ends with her caring about her outfit and we see that she's interested in Michael we want her to get him, even though we know it can only lead to more trouble.
We want to know if she'll get together with Michael, if she does what that will lead to, and whether there is going to be more trouble for her from the aggressive soldiers.
Although this exercise has looked at a novel in the Contemporary/Literary Fiction genre, these four points apply in all genres. What changes is how and when you introduce each element; the prose style; and the pacing. So for crime/thrillers, rom-coms, and gothic novels, for example, you would have all of these elements in place but the ways in which they are revealed would be different.
In a crime/thriller, we’d be feeling a pretty fast pace and tension from the start and the inciting incident would usually be within the first page or two and then it would be jammed full of questions to keep the reader guessing. In a rom-com, it would be more about setting up the character to connect us strongly to them and the pace would be a bit slower. For a gothic novel, it would be all about atmosphere and character and the the way language is used.
I go into more depth on this in the Mini Novel Course I teach and if you want to have a look at the examples I use to demonstrate all of this, the chapters I look at alongside Trespasses are:
Here To Stay by Mark Edwards. This is a Psychological Thriller.
The Whistling by Rebecca Netley. This is Gothic Suspense.
Getting Rid Of Matthew by Jane Fallon. This is Women's Fiction.
Writing Exercise
Work through your own opening chapter using these four points and make notes of the things that it is delivering on, and the things that it’s not. Then edit to bring in the crucial elements that are missing.
I hope you’ve found this helpful and best of luck with the writing of your novel!
With love
This is incredible advice. I've been writing for decades and this is a fresh way of explaining the elements.
Terrific! I'm sitting down tomorrow to start rewriting my mystery novel, and the opening chapter (formerly chapter 18) will, I think, hit all these beats and add in a thrill. Come out of the gate fast, I say. Thanks for posting this.