querying part 3: the opening pages
what to do and what not to do in your opening pages
In this final part of my series about querying, I’ll tackle how to craft the opening pages of your story (the part that causes me the most suffering). Though agents will ask for different amounts of sample pages, I believe the approach to starting your story in a way that compels the reader to read on is the same.
My two previous posts about querying:
(Disclaimer: As always, this is not meant to be prescriptive. Many wonderful books break the “rules” and are all the better for it. This is merely what I think can be applied to most works of commercial fiction, but really I’m just one person on the internet.)
part one: what makes a reader want to read on?
Stripping away genre and personal preference, what draws me into a story is the desire to find out what happens next.
There isn’t an exact formula to follow. Different books will require a different proportion of plot, stakes, emotionality, and atmosphere. However, generally speaking, here’s what needs to be established in your opening pages:
1: a character we’re invested in
We don’t have to know everything about them! In fact, dumping backstory upfront is usually information overload, since the reader has to already care about a character to want their full backstory.
We just need to know what they want in this moment and be invested in whether they’ll succeed. This investment could arise from the character’s predicament being relatable, from empathizing with them, from life-or-death stakes, from a goal so intriguing we can’t turn away, or even from despising them and hoping they fail.
2: the current situation
It’s hard to care if confusion is the reigning emotion. We need to be oriented swiftly with and current situation to gain the context to care about what happens next:
What’s the setting? What’s happening externally in the surrounding world? What’s happening internally in the character’s own desires and worries? Why are these happenings (external and internal) important?
3: what’s at risk
Aside from knowing what’s happening in the moment, the opening should carry immediate stakes—but they don’t need to be momentous to draw a reader in. All that’s needed at a story’s beginning is a gap between reality and what the character wants, and obstacles that create difficulty in bridging that gap.
part two: does a story “have” to start with action?
There’s a lot of talk about how the industry wants stories that begin with “action” and I’ve definitely noticed a trend in recently published YA fantasy of beginning in the middle of fast-paced action, and I’m not a fan.
While big stakes! big action! feel exciting, they can crumble under their own importance, because the story has yet to establish why the reader should care.
Even if context for why these events are important is delivered, if it’s crammed in a big dump of backstory, I still haven’t spent enough time with the characters to be emotionally invested.
However, beginning with “action” doesn’t necessarily mean big stakes!
The story doesn’t have to start with the main character’s life imploding—but it should start with tension and momentum, with a sense of the character headed somewhere physically or emotionally. Without this momentum, it can be difficult to create stakes, since stakes arise when a character’s want and the obstacles in their way are on a collision course, and this collision requires at least one party to be in movement.
Here are some books that don’t begin with big action! but nonetheless begin with action that’s setting up for a bigger scene:
The Hunger Games: Instead of starting at the Reaping, we start with Katniss waking and hunting, and learn the difficulty and importance of her staying alive.
Legendborn: Instead of starting with a monster attacking Bree off the bat, we begin at a bonfire, with tension simmering because Bree shouldn’t be there.
Gideon the Ninth: Instead of starting with Gideon and Harrow’s fight, we have Gideon beginning her (attempted) escape from the Ninth House.
part three: what not to do
1: don’t start with the mundane
While I do mean it’s probably not a good idea to open by describing a boring, everyday street or a sequence that’s been done a thousand times before, what I actually mean is:
Don’t begin by relaying a regular day in your character’s life, no matter how intriguing the setting is. Write about the day everything begins to change, the moment where something happens to shake up the status quo.
The tricky thing is this: while you don’t want to start the story too firmly within the status quo, you still have to establish what the status quo is. For instance, an alien dropping from the sky means nothing if we don’t know this hasn’t happened before.
2: don’t withhold necessary information
Although the intention might be to set up a reveal, keeping too much information secret can hold the reader at arm’s length. Without understanding the main character—who they are, what they want, what they’re risking for it—readers won’t be invested.
Two questions to ask yourself:
Are you creating intrigue, or confusion?
Is this information more valuable as a reveal, or as something foundational to establishing context and empathy?
Again, there’s a tricky balance. You don’t want to toss out every backstory tidbit and ruin the mystery or bury the reader under an info dump. My rule of thumb is that the longer information is kept from the reader, the more shocking it must be. It must deliver a revelation that drastically alters our perspective.
3: don’t give away the story’s ultimate goal immediately
Exposing the ultimate goal in the first lines may be tempting, to throw out a big hook to entice the reader, but aside from the technical difficulty of swiftly providing context, it’s difficult to up the ante from that point on.
Instead of having time and space to build up the story, you might end up struggling to catch up on proving things are that dire and the character’s drastic actions are necessary. Therefore, I personally prefer to know the character before knowing the hero’s (or villain’s) journey they will embark on.
part four: what to do
Allow me to ramble a little about my own first chapter struggles to illustrate how it takes some back and forth to land on the best way to start a story:
I rewrote the first chapter of Poppies, my YA fantasy about a girl cursed to die at the age of seventeen, four times.
In the first draft, I began with Hanna feeling hopeless as her seventeenth birthday approaches. She has no plan to fight her fate, only despair, and this made the first chapter stagnant and suffocating.
In the next drafts, I gave her a big plan to change her fate, which blows up and sends her into a deeper spiral. This brought momentum, but Hanna’s plan hinged on a character that originally didn’t show up so early and belongs to a volatile faction. That made the opening chapters confusing because of an excess of players and concepts.
Finally, I settled on giving Hanna a plan that relies on a character who belongs in the world’s religious majority, which served a dual purpose of starting her off as an active character and establishing the world’s mainstream beliefs—the status quo.
Here are my biggest takeaways from this process and from critiquing first chapters):
1: figure out the best time point to start the story
Ideally, the story should begin a little before or a little after things begin to change.
The opening needs to leave enough time and space to settle the reader into the world and characters—without leaving so much time and space that it feels like we’re watching trailers in a theater before the actual movie begins.
A conundrum arises: how to deliver plot and backstory and world-building?
2: slip in information between the lines
After crafting backstory and a rich world, it can be a knee-jerk reaction to portray all of this on page immediately. However, most readers don’t need to know everything upfront, and it can be a struggle to swallow paragraphs of information.
Instead of dedicating sequences to information delivery (a character attending a class or reading a book, etc) backstory and world-building details can be delivered through the character’s interaction with the world around them, because this is when they become important to the character and thus relevant to the reader.
Items in the world can imply a lot about the culture and history and politics: a new monarch on a coin suggests a political upheaval; people gawking at a mechanized car entails a recent tech breakthrough. These implications can be left subtle for the reader to pick up, or lingered on to inject explicit world-building.
And instead of laying out the backstory between two characters, it can be pieced together through snippets. The main character’s ex has a new piercing that wasn’t there—when they last met two years ago. They still like matcha latte—brief flashback: they always went to the same cafe while dating. The ex looks hostile—that means they’re still not over the shitty thing the main character did to cause the breakup.
3: layer in backstory and world-building
Pulling together a tight, impactful first chapter requires a lot of efficiency. Every line must carry its weight, whether it be providing information, pushing the plot forward, or simply making the reader laugh.
To do that, I suggest two things:
Consider what the reader needs to know at every point in the story and provide info on an as-needed basis. Engineer encounters or descriptions to impart context before it becomes relevant or necessary, if needed.
Make sure similar points of information go deeper every time they’re brought up instead of saying the same thing with different wording, so as to progressively deepen reader understanding.
Let’s use Poppies as an example again:
The people living on an island in the sky believe that those from below are dangerous. It’s important context that we need before the love interest (a boy from the Land Below) crash lands his biplane near Hanna’s home, but isn’t immediately relevant. I did my best to trickle in this world-building gradually:
1: Through ceremonial words at a funeral, it’s shown that the islanders believe their island is a safe haven against the Land Below.
2: Hanna enters a room and notices a map that depicts the island and the Land Below, illustrating the geographical relationship. (The map’s presence was engineered for world-building, but it’s weird for Hanna’s attention to linger on a map that features geography she’s familiar with, so I added that the room’s been redecorated to make it reasonable for her to be observing it.)
3: When Hanna is at the edge of the island, she glimpses explosions upon the Land Below and her beliefs of this place come through within her fear.
4: Through ceremonial words at Hanna’s coming of age ceremony, a mythos begins to form. (The Land Below isn’t the emphasis of the ceremony and I didn’t want to overwhelm readers, so there are only a couple of lines dedicated to it.)
5: As Hanna approaches the crashed plane, she thinks of the misdeeds of the Land Below, clarifying the mythos in more direct prose in time for her to wage an internal war between fear (letting the boy die) and sympathy (helping him).
Next: repeat this process with everything else.
Of course, this is all easier said than done.
The first chapters of Poppies were rewritten multiple times and every time I was pulling my hair out because there was so much to show but I didn’t want to be too prosaic or too straightforward and I had to design segments to bring in specific details naturally but didn’t want to slow down the pace and—
It’s so much work, but hopefully this post has been helpful, especially because the opening is well worth the extra time to get it perfect! No matter how good the rest of the story is, agents (who are so swamped with things to read) won’t stick it out to get to the “good part” if they don’t enjoy the beginning enough.
And that’s it for my querying series!