Nothing scares people like first chapters, and there’s a good reason for that. From a marketing perspective, it’s the highest-stakes part of your book. If you’re going the traditional publishing route, this is the first – and in many cases, only – glimpse of your work that agents and publishers are going to see. It’s also how you’re going to convince regular people to read your book. If your first chapter isn’t rock solid, that thing’s going right back on the shelf, sometimes before it’s even left the store. It has to convince people that if they keep reading, they’ll like what they see. Especially if you want to make a living off of writing, there’s more pressure on your first chapter than on any other part of your story.
I’ll confess, I actually really like writing first chapters, and I really, really like reading them. There’s a fascinating science to the process of hooking a reader in – telling the reader everything they need to know without telling them quite everything they want to know. There’s generally an astonishing amount of information packed into first chapters, much of which has to be conveyed indirectly to keep the reader truly engaged. I’ve actually found that one of the hardest things for me with first chapters is remembering to include everything I need to include – so much so that I’ve built up a list over the years of all the stuff I like to have a little bit of in a first chapter. This list gets tweaked a little for the needs of each individual book, but it’s a good starting place.
I also want to note that I’m focusing less here on exactly what needs to happen in the first chapter, because a colossal amount of advice is already out there on that topic. This list is more about little details to weave into the way you tell the story that make it feel more interesting, engaging, and fully fleshed-out.
Two hooks
People sometimes think of a hook as a one-liner, but it’s really more abstract than that. A hook is a question you want your reader to ask themselves, and for a solid, effective first chapter, you need two of them: one at the beginning of the chapter, and another one at the end.
The first hook is what gets your reader to start reading, instead of just putting the book down and thinking, “Nah, not for me.” You want to pose this question within the first paragraph, so that someone flipping through books at the store might glance at it and immediately think, “Ooh, what is this?” Typically the first hook is some variant of, “What the heck is happening?” And it really can be just that simple! The key is that whatever confusion, shock, or anticipation you generate with this first hook, you need to resolve by the end of the chapter. That resolution can lead into the second hook or generate further conflict later down the line – in fact, it’s good if it does. But we do need some kind of answer, even if it’s just, “Well, we don’t know what the heck is happening… so now they have to figure it out.”
The second hook is what keeps the reader going after the first chapter. Often, writers will use the inciting incident as the second hook of the first chapter. Whatever you use needs to generate the momentum to propel the reader through the first big chunk of the story – long enough that you get them emotionally invested in it – so the inciting incident, which typically serves this function anyway, is a good choice. But it’s just as common for this hook to serve as the introduction of a secondary conflict, a complication or extension of the original hook, or something else altogether.
The point is to get people reading, and then keep people reading. Too often, authors place too much emphasis on the first of these and not enough on the second. Make sure you’ve considered both.
Critical worldbuilding
This is one of the hardest things on the list – not only because of the way it has to be delivered, but because of the difficulty in determining what’s critical in the first place. You need to include enough information about your setting to orient the reader, but not so much that they feel overwhelmed with minute details they have no reason to care about yet. Although this can be devastating news for people who enjoy heavy worldbuilding, you should probably think about saving that detailed explanation of how your space aliens’ public transportation system works until it actually becomes relevant.
But hey, maybe that is the detail you need to know in chapter one. There are no rules here on specifically what to include, other than that it should help your readers visualize the world around them in the story, physically and tonally. As you drop them into this stranger’s head, you want them to know what they should be seeing through that stranger’s eyes, and how it should feel to stand there.
Another rule of thumb that’s sometimes helpful to keep in mind is the idea of scaling things down. If you’ve got a big, complicated societal system you feel the need to convey immediately, such as a class system, how the economy works, or the fact that there’s a world war going on, scaling that down to the tiniest details you can will make it feel a hundred million times more natural. Everybody’s heard that they shouldn’t infodump, but even spelling things out explicitly will sometimes (not always! But sometimes) turn a reader off. This is especially true if you want to generate a lot of emotional impact with that explanation. If that class system is unfair, that government corrupt, or that war violent and bloody, those are all things you want to make the reader feel, and feel strongly – instinctively, even. Embedding these things in the small details of your scene rather than making them the central focus of dialogue or exposition is often the way to achieve this.
At least one relationship
Reading about one character all by themselves with nobody else to interact with is kind of like playing bumper cars when you’re the only car in the ring. The relationships between characters, positive and negative, are the lifeblood of a story, and it’s much, much easier to hook a reader on a character if you show them interacting with someone else early on. Make sure there’s dialogue in your first chapter – ideally, dialogue between people who will end up being important to the plot. Some readers will even assume that if a character has a spoken line in the first chapter, they must be important, and they’ll get to the end of the book and be pissed that that cashier who said “Have a nice day” in chapter one never turned out to be important.
This is also a good place to start if you’re struggling to decide what scene or scenes should be in your first chapter. If you’re at a loss for where to jump into the story, look for places where you know the characters will have to interact, from confrontations to meet-cutes. This will pull the reader in, efficiently introduce enough of the cast for you to work with right off the bat, and generate conflict and intrigue that drives the story forward. Of course, not every person your protagonist interacts with has to have a major role in the plot, but do try to make sure that at least one or two of them do.
Two things about your main character
By the end of my first chapter, I want the reader to be able to describe the protagonist in two words or short phrases. These can apply to any facet of the character: their personality, place in the world, personal philosophy, backstory, internal conflict, hopes, dreams, needs, wants – whatever. The point is that you know something about them by the end of this chapter – ideally, enough of something that it starts to form a picture of someone three-dimensional.
By the way, if you’re up to the beta reader stage, this is something you should be probing into with them. After the first chapter, have them stop and tell you their impressions of the main or POV character as a person. Ideally, they’ll give you a couple of distinct pieces of information. What you don’t want is for them to come back with something generic and information-less like, “Well, she seems nice,” or, “I haven’t really figured him out yet.” If your reader hasn’t figured out the person whose head you’re plopping them into by the end of the first chapter, you have some work to do.
Foreshadowing, kind of
I’m tempted to say this one is optional, but it’s really not. Based on my extensive, semi-obsessive research, this is what separates good first chapters from great ones. But let me explain what I mean by foreshadowing here, because it may not be what you think.
The main goal of the kind of foreshadowing you’re doing here is to connect the first chapter to later points in the story. You don’t have to hint at any answers or drop any critical clues if you don’t want to, or if it doesn’t suit your story, but you do need to provide something to serve as a tether for what’s coming next. Is anything that happens in this chapter going to turn into a moment your characters harken back to later in the story? Will they use anything they learn here to solve a problem later on? Will they return to this spot or this situation at some point down the road with a different mindset, or a new set of tools?
The point is, the last thing you want to do in a first chapter is build something good and then leave it behind. With all the hype around first chapters, especially as you’re revising and thinking about sending this thing off to agents, editors, beta readers, reviewers, or anyone else, it’s easy to get suckered into thinking of the first chapter as its own little unit. It’s important to remember that you’re writing part of a larger story here, and to keep the rest of that story in mind as you work on this. This is one reason why I advocate for rewriting your first chapter as often as you can during the draft and revision process. If you come back and revisit it early and often, it’ll be easy to weave what happens in the rest of the story into the fabric of those first few lines.
Now, go revise your first chapter.
Yes, again.
Happy writing.