Novel Beginnings

How to start a novel?

I don't have particular ways to start, so I'll just toss up what I look for.

IMO, good openings have:
- A hook relating to the story, leading to the second sentence that continues where the first left off, leading to the third-- leading to the fourth, ect. all the way to the end of the book. Don't just bring something interesting up in the first sentence or paragraph and start on something else.
- Goal and motivation established within the first five pages (work towards that goal within the first page).
- Something interesting about the plot (and possibly world, but can't always do that in suburbia and such).
- An interesting character in an interesting situation.
- Good writing that shows you're a competent writer (but don't try so hard).
- Immerse me into your story.
- Entertain me.

Grab a couple of those points, and I'd read on.

If I had a formula, it would be good writing plus what I hope is an interesting character in an interesting situation. When I want to look at one I think is written perfectly, I look at The Talisman by King and Straub.

The reason you'll never find that list is because waking up could be the best way to start a novel imaginable. Until it's been done 10,000 too many times. I think almost everything people consider bad for a novel's beginning is either (a) just fine, in itself, but overdone to the point it's become cliche; or (b) not that great for the middle or end, either.

eta -- conversely, any interesting sentence of prose (which we aspire to have all of our sentences be) can be a great beginning.

I see this one a lot and it works for me:
Dread. Something bad is about to go down. And I, the reader, must continue reading to find out what.

There are many ways to begin a story. What works will depend partly on the genre or subgenre, and what most readers of that type like or will tolerate. What works for one may not work for another.

An “action-packed page turner” often starts with something like the clichéd “A shot rang out.” A “cozy” detective story often starts more slowly, showcasing the people or the places where the story happens. For that is as important to most cozy readers as who done it and why, maybe even more important. Those of us who are fans of this type of story may reread them time and again; there is no suspense the next times around, no panic about the safety of the main character or someone dear to them.

The same applies to some extent to romance novels. We all know that Lizzie and Darcy are going to get together in the end. The milieu they are in is part of what fascinates us; we are tourists in it. And revisiting their characters is what we most delight in. I’ve been in love with Lizzie for a lifetime. So in a romance new to us what we want to know is: HOW do our MCs get together? WHO are they?

Literary stories have yet another set of expectations. Many who love them are less concerned about character, setting, or plot than the literary style. LitFic often experiments with language and story conventions. Characters may stop and address the reader, share a joke about the fact that the story is an artificial structure and the character non-existent. The plot may dribble off into nothing, or not exist at all as in the play “Waiting for Godot.”

None of this means, of course, that we can’t start our stories in ways more common to other genres. A cozy might start with a murder-most-foul. An action-oriented thriller might start with an atmospheric build up. And so on.

Basically the opening is a promise of things to come. It’s up to us to approach the beginning as creatively as we approach the rest of the story. And make sure we redeem our promise.

Give me a character. I could care less what he/she/it is doing sleep-walking through an herb garden dreaming about looking in a mirror. Whatever it is put the character not the mirror, herb garden ect -- the character first.
My favorite opening line is from Sherilyn Kenyon's Fantasy Lover which is "Girl you need to get laid..." Something like that. It sold me on the book and the author because that one line had character traits from both the speaker and the protagonist. And it set up the conflict.
Character from the get-go.

As long as there's some sort of "change" going on, I'm usually okay with an opening. It's the openings that have the protagonist going through the "usual stuff" for an inordinate amount of time that always turn me off. I like writing and reading stories where the beginnings mark some kind of significant shift in the protagonist's life. Whether it's something clever and subtle or something loud and out there.

Laer Carroll said:

There are many ways to begin a story. What works will depend partly on the genre or subgenre, and what most readers of that type like or will tolerate. What works for one may not work for another....
Basically the opening is a promise of things to come. It’s up to us to approach the beginning as creatively as we approach the rest of the story. And make sure we redeem our promise.

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This.

Despite conventional advice, some excellent pieces of fiction have begun with description. Here, for example, is the opening of John Steinbeck's Cannery Row:

"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,” and he would have meant the same thing.

"In the morning when the sardine fleet has made a catch, the purse-seiners waddle heavily into the bay blowing their whistles. The deep-laden boats pull in against the coast where the canneries dip their tails into the bay. The figure is advisedly chosen, for if the canneries dipped their mouths into the bay the canned sardines which emerge from the other end would be metaphorically, at least, even more horrifying. Then cannery whistles scream and all over the town men and women scramble into their clothes and come running down to the Row to go to work. Then shining cars bring the upper classes down: superintendents, accountants, owners who disappear into offices...."

Granted, few of us can write anything approaching that. My point is that you don't have to start with an MC in conflict or any of the other "approved" situations. A number of fine novels start with a description of a town, a street, a farm, a house or even just a room, sometimes extending for a page or two. You have to be damned good to bring it off, but it's worth mentioning.

The opening to Daniel Woodrell's TOMATO RED is a full paragraph run-on sentence. It's a long paragraph. And it reaches out and grabs you by both ears to pull you in. I had to sit back and read it over and over again because it was so MUCH. I can almost say it from memory.

Think of the confidence needed to write a huge run-on sentence and know it would do exactly what you wanted.

Nymtoc said:

This.

"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,” and he would have meant the same thing.

"In the morning when the sardine fleet has made a catch, the purse-seiners waddle heavily into the bay blowing their whistles. The deep-laden boats pull in against the coast where the canneries dip their tails into the bay. The figure is advisedly chosen, for if the canneries dipped their mouths into the bay the canned sardines which emerge from the other end would be metaphorically, at least, even more horrifying. Then cannery whistles scream and all over the town men and women scramble into their clothes and come running down to the Row to go to work. Then shining cars bring the upper classes down: superintendents, accountants, owners who disappear into offices...."

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Steinbeck. That man was pure genius. Dang. Thanks for posting this, Nymtoc.

OP, someone mentioned starting with your MC in conflict and they're correct. If anything ever gets boring (and you must assume your reader is bored to tears before they pick up your book), start a fight, have an explosion, a thermonuclear meltdown, a supernova, anything to jar the reader. People read fiction to be entertained. Nothing does it like a good old-fashioned conflagration.

diem_seven said:

OP, someone mentioned starting with your MC in conflict and they're correct. If anything ever gets boring (and you must assume your reader is bored to tears before they pick up your book), start a fight, have an explosion, a thermonuclear meltdown, a supernova, anything to jar the reader. People read fiction to be entertained. Nothing does it like a good old-fashioned conflagration.

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Few writing-advice buzzwords have become more hackneyed and misunderstood than "conflict". I much prefer the term "tension". You don't need to blow something up, or have a fight to kick things off. You do need to give the reader a sense of story-tension, a promise of character(s) facing difficulties, required to make difficult choices, dangerous decisions. The thing that doesn't work is aimless, flaccid prose that merely fills page-space.

caw

A character, in action, doing what they do

My own examples (I write fantasy soo..._)

A bounty hunter tracks someone tricky, who crops up later in story

The fallout from a pirate heist, from the POV of the guy charged with finding him(while the heest is the inciting incident it is never shown)

Two highwaymen, who do not wish to be highwaymen, hold someone up and find something a bit bigger than anticipated

A barmaid having a bad night.

Start with your character doing their thing. This thing they are doing may or may not be The Big Plot, but it should lead into that. Importantly, it should make a question in the reader's head. You may answer it at the end of the chapter (to be replaced by a bigger question) or at the end of the book. But the question (will they live? Will X do Y? Will he get towether with her?) gets the reader to read on. Maybe your book is One Big Question. Maybe it is a series of Small Questions.

Questions are why people read on. What happens to him? How does she get out of that? Will he really...? Jeez, will he...oh what? Why did he do that? When you answer that question, you close an episode, and if that isn't the end of the book, you need a new question

Questions. All about questions.

blacbird said:

Few writing-advice buzzwords have become more hackneyed and misunderstood than "conflict". I much prefer the term "tension". You don't need to blow something up, or have a fight to kick things off.

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I couldn't agree more. The ticking bomb is more interesting than the actual explosion.

For me, it completely depends. The genre, the writing, the character…it just has to be interesting in some way. As Laer said, a promise.

What grabs me the quickest is voice. After that, a character that interests me. If those two things are working, I'm willing to follow a book almost anywhere, as long as it's going somewhere.

But that's just me as a reader. As a writer I find it very difficult to figure out beginnings. Thanks to Brandon for starting this thread! It's good to hear other perspectives.

I recently read Noah Lukeman's book The First Five Pages. I was surprised that so much of the advice is just basic good writing advice, not necessarily specific to the first 5 pages. Very little of it had to do with the content of the pages themselves.

This isn't going to help much, but what makes a good opening is not wanting to gouge my eyes out from utter boredom. If I don't do that, then chances are the opening is fine. As you can probably tell, it's really subjective. What works for me does not work for others. To be honest, I don't remember beginnings of novels, even ones I love.

Interest is by far the most important thing for me. As everyone finds interest in different things, I tend to try and do at least a few things in my first chapter:

Character- why do I care, who are they
Exposition - this is something I try to do in scene, but SF/F generally tends to require some sort of grounding in the world so that the reader can understand what's going on/the stakes
Main problem: either a hint of it, the actual problem, or a sense of trepidation

Obviously, this is just me figuring out how to do it for myself, and not every book (or even most of them sometimes) start like this. I think at the end of the day as long as it's interesting, and as long as I care, I'll keep reading.
,

Give the reader a rope, and make it pulled tight. The reader might not be able to see what's at the other end, but something is, and what it is needs to be discovered.

A limp, dangling rope is like a limp, dangling . . .

Never mind.

caw

Start with a character in a situation. It's amazing to me how many people would rather start with the weather.

I think you should ALWAYS start with the character, as many others have pointed out. Setting makes people snooze. If you can hook 'em with that first sentence, bloody well do it! Failing that, try to hook 'em with three sentences.

You need to intrigue them from the beginning, otherwise they'll put the book back on the proverbial bookshelf.

blacbird said:

Few writing-advice buzzwords have become more hackneyed and misunderstood than "conflict". I much prefer the term "tension". You don't need to blow something up, or have a fight to kick things off. You do need to give the reader a sense of story-tension, a promise of character(s) facing difficulties, required to make difficult choices, dangerous decisions. The thing that doesn't work is aimless, flaccid prose that merely fills page-space.

caw

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Exactly. I've seen plenty of novels and WIPs that throw the reader right into the midst of some action - running from pursuers, falling out of a time machine, in the midst of a gun battle, etc. - before I've had a chance to get oriented in a setting or engaged with the characters or the stakes.

I'd much prefer the slower setting/weather opening if it's well-written and conveys a particular mood than one with too much 'action' going on.

I don't know about other readers, but I'm more likely to toss books with openings that are too fast over ones that are too slow.

As for a good opening, Terry Pratchett's Making Money opens with the MC climbing a brick wall and he's about to fall off. And there are pigeons above

Animad345 said:

I think you should ALWAYS start with the character, as many others have pointed out. Setting makes people snooze. If you can hook 'em with that first sentence, bloody well do it! Failing that, try to hook 'em with three sentences.

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Wilde_at_heart said:

As for a good opening, Terry Pratchett's Making Money opens with the MC climbing a brick wall and he's about to fall off. And there are pigeons above

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I was just about to say that even setting can work -- Pratchett being a prime example. In several of his books he starts with the biggest of all settings, looking at the world from above then gradually zooming in (as does Douglas Adams in Hitch-hikers). It works because of the voice. Same for Who Goes There, by Campbell, which was the basis for The Thing. It starts with a description of an Antarctic base, and is chock full of atmosphere and a sort of creeping anticipation that something bad is about to happen.

You have to be interesting. If that means going with the setting, then be interesting with the setting. ETA: Note, I think you have to be pretty damn good to get away with using setting, myself. But that doesn't mean it's not doable, just that you have to ask yourself honestly, am I that good?

After a few dozen Pratchetts, I started to get irritated with his little preamble about the Disc. Because sometimes he inserted something relevant to the story in hand and sometimes he didn't, which meant you had to read it anyway, even if you knew the standard version off by heart.