In the Beginning
By Kathleen McCleary | February 12, 2025 |
I’ve spent the past two months—that’s not an exaggeration—working on three pages of my novel. I’m in the revision stage, and the pages I’m wrestling with are the first three pages of the book and even though I know these characters inside out and know the plot and know all the elements that go into making the opening compelling and smart, I still haven’t nailed it.
We all know that opening lines and paragraphs and pages are critical, the thing that hooks your readers into wanting to know what happens next and into caring about what happens next. The opening is what sells your book to readers, to agents, and to editors and publishers—not too much pressure, right? The frustrating thing is that I’ve done this before. Heck, I sold my third novel on the basis of the first three pages alone before I’d even written the book. Why is it so hard now?
It’s hard because nailing the opening is a really hard thing to do. (If it was easy, every manuscript would get read and every book would get sold, right?) Somehow you have to introduce a character or characters, give the reader a reason to care about that character, start in the middle of some kind of action, make the action something that matters, make sure there are stakes, consequences if things go wrong. Oh, and you have to raise the reader’s curiosity about what comes next. In roughly 750 words or so. Overwhelmed yet? Yeah, me too.
There’s no magic formula, and if I knew it I wouldn’t be writing this column. But I have written and published three books, and I can offer what I’ve learned from my own experience. Here are three things I know:
You have to give the reader a reason to care
I just finished reading Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods. It’s a great book, and it has a great opening:
“The bed is empty.
“Louise, the counselor—twenty-three, short-limbed, rasp-voiced, jolly—stands barefoot on the warm rough planks of the cabin called Balsam and processes the absence of a body in the lower bunk by the door.”
The opening sentence grabs attention because it raises a lot of questions—whose bed? Why is it surprising that it’s empty? But the next paragraph pulls you in because that’s when you realize that person observing the empty bed is a camp counselor who is probably in very deep doo-doo because one of her campers is missing, and already we’re starting to care about this counselor because she’s young and jolly and likeable. She’s human.
Contradict expectations
I had a lot of success in shopping my first novel around, to agents and then with publishers. It’s far from perfect, but it had a good opening paragraph:
“The house was yellow, a clapboard Cape Cod with a white picket fence and a big bay window on one side and Ellen loved it with all her heart. She loved the way the wind from the gorge stirred the trees to constant motion outside the windows, the cozy arc of the dormers in the girls’ bedroom, the cherry red mantel with the cleanly carved dentil molding over the fireplace in the living room. She had conceived children in that house, suffered a miscarriage in that house, brought her babies home there, argued with her husband there, made love, rejoiced, despaired, sipped tea, and gossiped and sobbed and counseled and blessed her friends there, walked the halls with sick children there, and scrubbed the worn brick of the kitchen floor there at least a thousand times on her hands and knees. And it was because of all this history with the house, all the parts of her life unfolding there day after day for so many years, that Ellen decided to burn it down.”
The paragraph is lyrical and paints a nice domestic picture, but the last six words are an abrupt left turn from everything that’s come before. That’s what hooks the reader.
Follow through
You have to EARN your opening. The thing about a great opening to a story is that then you actually have to tell a great story, one that lives up to the promise of the beginning. Don’t make promises you can’t or don’t keep in the rest of the book.
How do you handle writing the opening to a story? What’s worked best for you? What are some of your favorite openings ever? Why?
Kathleen McCleary is the author of three novels—House and Home, A Simple Thing, and Leaving Haven—and has worked as a bookseller, bartender, and barista (all great jobs for gathering material for fiction). A Simple Thing (HarperCollins 2012) was nominated for the Library of Virginia Literary Awards. She was a journalist for many years before turning to fiction, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, and USA Weekend, as well as HGTV.com, where she was a regular columnist. She taught writing as an adjunct professor at American University in Washington, D.C., and teaches creative writing to kids ages 8-18 as an instructor with Writopia Labs, a non-profit. She also offers college essay coaching (https://thenobleapp.com), because she believes that life is stressful enough and telling stories of any kind should be exciting and fun. When she’s not writing or coaching writing, she looks for any excuse to get out into the woods or mountains or onto a lake. She lives in northern Virginia with her husband and two daughters and Jinx the cat.
[coffee]
This is a huge topic, Kathleen, there is far more to say about it than can be said in comments, but I will say this: the opening of The God of the Woods does not cause us to care. Not exactly. That’s not the approach it is taking. Its strategy, rather, is to intrigue us.
The difference matters. The intent of an intrigue opening is, as you say of your own opening, is to “hook” us. Catch our attention. Tickle our curiosity. A crossword clue does the same thing: it presents a puzzle, a little mystery for us to work out. That’s fine but it is a crooked finger to the mind, not an appeal to the heart.
The downside of intrigue openings is that their effect is short lived. Very short. Care on the other hand comes from something different, an engagement of emotion. That effect is deeper and lasts longer. It’s an effect that is less reliably produced by what is “happening” on the page, what we can “see”, that is, and more reliably produced by the engagement of the novel’s narrative voice and what that voice is “talking” to us about.
I’m not saying one approach is better or one approach is wrong, just that there is a difference and if you want to trigger curiosity, go one way…but you’d better be very good at keeping the reader-brain curiosity circuitry lit up. If you want care, on the other hand, the narrator’s voice needs to start talking and saying something to us that pulls us into a way of feeling.
Personally, I think the care approach is more durable, but it depends on the type of story you’re telling and the effect you want to have.
One last thing: In your opening the “hook” drops only at the end of a very long descriptive paragraph. You’re asking the reader to wait a (relatively) long time to become curious. Liz Moore’s opening tickles our curiosity right away. Just observing, for what its worth.
Well now, hold on. I just read your long opening paragraph again, Kathleen, and it’s not a long description, what something looks like, but a recitation of some life experiences that happened in a house. That’s different.
Does it work? Does it trigger the reader heart before walloping the reader brain? For me, opening with an image (“The house was yellow,,,”) sends a brain signal, whereas the end of the sentence (“…and Ellen loved it with all her heart.”) sends a heart signal.
I’m going to get technical. The primary effect of your opening is curiosity. The end of the first sentence invites us to care, though, and in the same way as Ellen, but about what? A house that is yellow and a white picket fence. Okay. But…really? I’m more of an urban loft guy. Ellen’s soft spot for Cape Cod style houses and cutesy white picket fences doesn’t grab my heart.
What I mean is that I can feel the trick coming. The author is setting up something here. I’m suspicious, but high is fine, but the hook hasn’t landed yet. The preparation runs for the rest of a long paragraph.
I can get pretty picky, can’t I! But I hope also diagnostic. My point is to point out curiosity versus care strategies and to think about their operation. Anyway, thanks for indulging me.
This is definitely a care opening. Do not discount the sentences about conceiving children, miscarrying, making love, scrubbing the kitchen floor. These lines brilliantly connect the reader with the character’s emotional life in that house. This opening is not a trick, in my book; it works honestly. It is not about “cutesy white picket fences” at all. It is about a woman who loves a place, who loves a family, and yet somehow wants to destroy it. This is a flash of lightning above the human condition. A reader — at least a sympathetic one — would experience this opening for its emotional truth and not have time to be distracted by arcane technical details. My two cents worth.
Thanks for your thought-provoking comments here. You’re right, this is a HUGE topic, impossible to cover in a single essay, or even in several essays. You make an important distinction between leading the reader to care, as in feel emotionally invested, versus intriguing the reader, or arousing curiosity. The best openings do both, I think. For me, Liz Moore’s description of the camp counselor DID cause me to feel emotionally engaged—maybe because I’m a mom of young adult daughters and instantly related to the idea of one of my daughters being in the position of working as a counselor and finding one of their charges missing. Obviously that will hit different readers differently. But I love exploring the many nuances of exactly how to nail these critical opening pages. Thank you!
I really appreciated your note about intrigue vs. caring. As a mystery/suspense writer, it’s easy to get swept up in dropping clues and intrigue into the story–without thinking about emotional weight. I loved your description of “a crooked finger to the mind, not an appeal to the heart.” That quote’s going by the writing table!
And Kathleen McCleary, thank you for such elegant food-for-thought on openings. I agree that “The bed is empty” is a gripping start–it snagged me–and I’m with you on fearing for the young camp counselor.
I wonder, though, if the opening would have resonated more if the next sentence had offered an emotional reaction, before we learned that the character was short-limbed and rasp-voiced. Or maybe it’s just a long sentence with a lot for readers to process… One thing’s for sure–we all have different reading tastes!
Thanks you both for the inspiration. I’m going to look at my opening pages (again).
Thanks, Christine! Glad you found some food for thought (and Don’s meaty quote). What I love about Writer Unboxed is not just the community, but the discussions like this thread today that take the column I wrote into even more interesting and useful territory. Best of luck with your writing. I was inspired to go back to my opening pages and try again today.
Hello Kathleen. If you set out to post on a topic of universal relevance to all writers, you succeeded. I’m coming off my seventh novel, published last November, and I am finding it very difficult to manage the opening for something new. The problem? Too many possibilities, too many choices.
Do I start upbeat and then plunge into chaos, or start down and climb up?
How about POV? I’ve never done anything in first person, maybe it’s time I did. Except every time I’ve tried it, I found being limited to one character’s experience and commentary constricting. Limiting. That’s why I haven’t used it. In the new novel, I limit myself to one character’s close third-person POV, but I am still much more free than with first person. But maybe first-person limitations would lead to intriguing results.
How about setting? After forty years in the same house, Barbara and I have made a move, late in the game, to the other side of the state. Outside our windows now, wild turkeys and deer roam and nose the ground, instead of our longtime neighbor’s day-care center for her grandchildren, always up and running by eight.
And so forth. But your post offers aid and comfort, and useful examples from your own writing. Thank you very much.
Hi, Barry. I’m glad you found some comfort and relevance in the column, and so appreciate how well you capture the questions that plague all of us at the start of a new project, no matter how much experience we have under our belts. I hope that the fact that you’ve now switched settings in your own life will provide you with some creative fodder for your fiction. Thanks for your comment, and best of luck on starting that eighth book!
Beginnings are hard–they have so much to accomplish. The first example, though short and snappy, didn’t make me care. But your own example, did, even though I’m not a big fan of descriptive openings. But after a few sentences you summarize a life–the joys and sorrows–and that’s what made me care. And the last line is a zinger!
Some of the openings that have stayed with me are from Charlotte’s Web by EB White; Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate diCamillo; One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp and so many more. Thank you for your examples.
Thank you, Vijaya, for the kind words about my paragraph. And thank you also for citing some terrific examples of powerful openings. I went back to Winn-Dixie and it’s terrific: “My name is India Opal Buloni, and last summer, my daddy, the preacher, sent me to the store for a box of macaroni-and-cheese, some white rice and two tomatoes, and I came back with a dog.” That opening serves to 1) establish the voice of the narrator 2) get the action rolling 3) provide context (she’s young, probably lives in the south because she refers to her father as “daddy,” may be motherless since she’s doing the grocery shopping, and likely isn’t well-off given what her father has her buy). That’s A LOT to accomplish with one sentence. Great example!
Great post, Kathleen…and you know that I have read all your novels. And I do remember that beginning. Currently, I can list about four openings for my own WIP…and in some ways it is hindering me. I cannot decide what is working. Maybe today’s post, your comments and Don’s will help. Writing is plastic, which can be good and bad, but I believed we all finally discover what works.
Beth, I love that you have read all my novels and so appreciate you! I can relate to having multiple openings (I think I wrote a fifth or sixth version of the first three pages today) AND I believe that fine-tuning that opening is one of the cornerstones to writing a great book. It’s worth the heartache and the effort and the repeated attempts. I hope you found something useful here today that helps. Best of luck! I can’t wait to read it.
For the first two novels in my mainstream trilogy, I decided which of my three main characters would get the opening scene, when and where it would be that would be intriguing, and threw the reader right into their head.
I don’t have a narrator, so it is only what the character would be witnessing/doing, in deep close third pov – but by the end of the scene the reader should be comfortable seeing the story from that character’s viewpoint, even though parts of the story are not completely clear yet.
If a scene satisfies, the reader will reach for the next – and we’re off!
Hello, Alicia. Thanks for your comment. I love your “If a scene satisfies, the reader will reach for the next.” That’s a good writing mantra to remember. I, too, write from close third-person and love that voice. I’ll be interested to hear how you’re handling the opening in the third book in your trilogy. Happy writing!
Since you asked, here is the Prothalamion (like a tiny prologue) for Pride’s Children: LIMBO. It purports to be a fragment of a New Yorker article, other fragments of which have headed the first two volumes:
———-
DEPT. OF CELEBRITIES
OCTOBER 23, 2006, cont’d
MIXED-UP MARRIAGE?
Schadenfreude: knickers in a twist—publicly?
By D. Liebja Hunter
…There is remarkably little gossip about the love story of the century: how a disabled older writer came between the rising Irish actor of his generation and the reigning Hollywood princess who is the mother of his twin daughters.
The one direct observer who might have been able to comment, listed as ‘Assistant to Mr. O’Connell’ in the credits of Elson Storr’s Opium – and a potential source of many other intriguing bits such as the breakup of the Storr-Shaughnessy ten-year childless marriage – Narendra Tagore (scion of one of India’s multi-generational acting families and a distant relative of Literature Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore) said, when contacted for this article, that although he remembered that Dr. Ashe was on set for a number of weeks, and that he had met and dined with Ms. Doyle, he could not recall much interaction between the trio, who had known each other since the set of Incident at Bunker Hill. He remarked only, “Everyone worked many long hours.”
Ms. Doyle, Tagore commented, had been deep in conversation several times with director Elson Storr on set. She continued on to the Czech Republic to film the eponymous Lewis Carroll biopic Dodgson, which Mr. O’Connell joined several months later as lead – another film set about which tight-lipped Czech production company executives would not comment, citing privacy concerns…
The New Yorker
———-
The New Yorker article is a review of the complete trilogy by a reporter who seems to have gotten a whole lot of bits wrong (which the reader will know), as we often don’t get ‘the real story’ of such fascinating shenanigans because the principals themselves have the sense to keep quiet. It was written AFTER the end of the third volume.
This is followed by a first scene from the pov of the third main character, as each of the previous volumes had its first scene from one of the other main characters. Balance. And a lot of fun to figure out and write.