I love openings. I love that feeling of turning the page and being immediately dunked into a new world and new characters. Those first few pages are crucial to whether or not a reader will keep reading. And I think most of us can relate to this.
Many of the writers I talk to have a cut off. If they're not interested by page X, they'll move on to another book. And I'm thinking that to read all the books that I want to, I'm probably going to have to adopt this method as well.
Openings are tricky. For me, it's generally the part of the story that I can fully envision. For whatever reason, beginnings come to me relatively formed. Maybe it's because I know where my characters are starting, or maybe it's because it's the first taste of the world that sparked the story for me. Whatever the reason, I love them.
Here are some of my favourite tips for crafting that opening scene:
Bring in the setting.
One of the things I need to be conscious of in my own writing is having enough description or scene setting. At the beginning, you want just enough to place the reader in your world, but not so much that it bogs the scene down.
I like to start with a high-intensity scene to pull readers in, and I add short descriptors as I go that tell of the setting. It's rarely ever a whole paragraph denoting the location (at the beginning), but pieces tacked onto other sentences. I let my sentences do double-duty.
Start with a goal.
Every character should have some sort of goal, but it's helpful to give one to the MC right off the bat. It's these pieces that the reader will connect with, and the reason they'll want to keep reading.
Did the character complete their goal? How does it impact the rest of the story?
This doesn't have to be their main goal. In fact, often it's something completely different. This goal is the thing that kick-starts their story, and puts them in a position for the Inciting Incident.
In my third manuscript, my MC's starting goal is to make enough money to get her and brother out of town. But then she's offered a big job--read: dangerous--that changes her life, and her goals shifts ever so slightly from getting away to staying alive and protecting her brother. The main portion of her goal (her brother) doesn't change, but the context does.
Find the hook.
(Apparently) I like to start with statements. Something about my world or my story that is inherently true to itself. Statements like these can raise a lot of questions that readers may want answered, and that will keep them reading.
Here are the opening lines from all the manuscripts I've written:
Manuscript 1: They lumbered toward me, oblivious as I lay in wait.
Manuscript 2: There were six guards milling about the house.
Manuscript 3: A woman, dressed in a fitted white lab coat and white heels, clacks up to a podium as paparazzi toss question after question.
Manuscript 4: The voices and clanking of dishes grew louder as Morwyn swam to the dining hall.
Manuscript 5: A young girl waits among the crowd, her parents somewhere far behind her.
Manuscript 6: Airports are all the same. The same vendors selling overpriced wares, the same boring plastic-and-fabric chairs for waiting, the same security that look through the crowd as if everyone were just ghosts, specters.
Manuscript 7: The sails of the Wind Seeker dipped in and out with the breeze as Thyra removed her billowing blouse and trousers.
I don't expect all of these to remain as-is. Through edits, the opening line to Manuscript 1 changed a lot. But I have to admit that opening lines are probably one of my favourite parts of an entire book.
Make the stakes known.
This doesn't need to be stated in the first line, but the reader should definitely know the stakes by the end of the first chapter at the latest. Stakes are what make things interesting. It's immensely more engaging to read about a character who has to compete in a talent show to best their lifelong rival or they have to dance in the rain in their underwear, than to just read about a character in a talent show.
Openings can seem rather daunting, but the thing is, a written opening is already 100% better than an unwritten one. We can work with words on a page. We can rewrite and rearrange until it's exactly the way we want it. But we can't edit a book that's never been written.
The biggest secret to writing openings is just to write anything at all.
Happy writing,
Erin
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