How to write beginnings that make readers read on

Chances are, the first piece of writing advice you ever heard concerned the huge importance of beginnings, and in particular of making your opening sentence a real zinger. Check the internet for lists of literature’s Greatest Ever First Lines, and you’ll find the bar set high, from Dodie Smith’s I write this sitting in the kitchen sink to Zora Neale Hurston’s Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. Of course, the advice has merit. Hooking the reader from the top of Page One is a founding principle of accomplished storytelling.

But picture your future reader choosing from all the tempting titles on a bookshop shelf. In truth, it’s rare for readers to open a book and read only one sentence. Consequently, intriguing beginnings need a wider scope. Not just your first line but your first few pages have an equal duty to capture interest, and ensure your potential reader is properly hooked.

So how do you craft a stand-out start to your work? First and foremost, be your own critic. Make a frank and honest appraisal with a cold reading. Stop tinkering and re-writing, and don’t even glance at your first pages for at least two weeks. You’ll come back to your work far more detached, almost with the eyes of a stranger. 

Read your beginning at a normal reading pace, and when you’re done, consider how you’re feeling. Are you keen to read on? Mildly bored? Did you eagerly devour every word, or did you consider - be honest with yourself – skipping ahead a paragraph or two because, well, you know what’s coming? Were you totally immersed and engaged?
If you’re genuinely pleased with what you’ve written – in your mind’s eye, that bookshop browser is right now taking your book to the cashier to pay for it - then congratulations!

Most writers, though, will find room for improvement. And perhaps, literally, a fresh start.

All stories begin somewhere, but have you begun yours in the right place? In all fiction, there are as-yet undescribed events which precede your narrative, and events which will take place after its final curtain has descended. The writer’s skill lies in choosing the right moment in your characters’ imaginary lives to dive into the tale. So if your hero/heroine starts Chapter One in his/her thirties, you’ve skipped over thirty years of back-story to begin where you’ve chosen to begin.

And that means you have a multitude of other possibilities, all of which might make your beginning bigger, better and more memorable.

Have you perhaps begun with scene-setting? Is it possible your opening is cluttered with Too Much Information? Of course back-story is important, but it’s best very thinly spread, so definitely consider removing any ‘how we got here’ explanation from the beginning and placing it further along in the narrative. 

As a side note, dialogue is often the best device to deliver essential details which unless skilfully done can be very dull (remember Elmore Leonard’s wise advice: Try and leave out the passages that readers skip). If necessary, you might even introduce an interesting new character who can be told of past drama and heartache further down the line, thus freeing your opening to be spiced up with – well, what?

The short answer is, anything you like – you’re the author, after all, and given the opportunity and a little time, your imagination will provide you with something new to plug the gap.

Taking a leaf out of the crime and thriller writers’ playbook, you might try foreshadowing. Call it a prologue, or any other title you like – a date and a place are most usual, but rules are made for breaking, so be as creative as you like. For example, make your prologue a tense scene where a young girl walking alone at night realises she’s being followed, and starts to run. 

Your next scene – your original beginning - can then be the slower-paced police examination of her dead body, with officers discussing how and when she died, building your story’s background through their dialogue. Readers have now met your victim in person and are engaged with her, primed from the earliest pages to want to know how she met her death.  

For a less dark story, you might invent an entirely new episode preceding your current start-point, a dramatic moment which shaped your character into the person they’ve become- anything from a difficult birth to a harrowing death, the end of a relationship or a midnight escape. With this technique, you’ll need to reference the event further on in your story. It might even become a sub-plot, and add depth to the entire book.
And if that’s where the story leads, don’t shy away from it. Be brave, be bold, make changes.

Your new and brilliant beginning will be so worth it.  

Erin Kinsley's latest book is Say Nothing (Headline, £9.99)

Read more about finding the way into the story from novelist Nicola Rayner
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