In last week’s blog post, we talked about how the opening of a book needed to include a hook, establish the main character, establish the setting, and establish the conflict. In this week’s blog, we’re going to talk about the potential pitfalls when writing the beginning of a book, how to avoid them, and how to make them work.

Keep in mind that these pitfalls aren’t absolute rules; they are merely things to look at more closely while writing and editing the beginning of your book because they can often be weak, boring, or cause other issues. My hope is that these will make you reexamine ideas for the beginnings of your works and figure out innovative ways to make them exciting, interesting, and smooth.

Starting With Characters Waking Up

The problem: this is usually not an interesting place to start the story. While you do need to establish the “before” for your main characters early in the story, you don’t necessarily want to start with them waking up and getting ready because it might not be when anything interesting is happening. You can incorporate what the character looks like without having them look in the mirror or put on clothes. It often comes off as clunky or that the writer is just warming up. Another sign of a new writer is writing every single time the characters wake up or go to sleep. Time skips are your friend in regards to flow, and 9/10 starting with the character waking up is warm up rather than the right place to start.

How to make it work: have the character wake up for an interesting reason. Olivia Waite’s Murder by Memory has the main character waking up in a brand new body that isn’t hers during a blackout on the space ship she’s on. This sets the scene, introduces some conflict, and punches up the excitement from the first sentence. You could also have an explosion wake them up or something crash. Those would be interesting things that would get your reader engaged immediately. If there’s something very odd about the character, having them get ready could be a way to show this. For example, in Metamorphosis, the main character wakes up and only while getting ready do we realize he has turned into a bug. If you were writing from the perspective of a spy getting ready for a job or an assassin suiting up, those would be interesting getting ready montages, especially if they start normally and quickly become more weird or unexpected.

Starting With A Dream Or Flashback

The problem: these can be incredibly disorienting to your reader. We have no context, no idea what’s going on, who is who, where we are, etc. A lot of newer writers like to start with dreams because they’re a way to add mystery or create a cool image, but readers often get annoyed when they’re suddenly dumped out of the dream and nothing they just read is real. Flashbacks are usually less disorienting than dreams, but they can often be a place where writers info dump or give the reader too much info too soon. It can also be info the reader doesn’t even need, and the story can start somewhere else or the info can be worked in elsewhere.

How to make it work: I think it helps to make it clear at some point that the character realizes it’s a dream to make it less jarring for the reader, so they don’t feel cheated. I still caution against using a dream sequence to start unless the dreams will happen repeatedly throughout the story. Much like a flashback, you still need to make sure that you aren’t using a dream to info dump because your reader won’t remember all the details you cram into there. With flashbacks, the big question is, do your readers need to know this right now? If the flashback is of something that has caused the story, that’s fine. An example of this working is showing an accident that happened months before the story starts, and then the next chapter is the character getting out of the hospital. This works because the accident will be the catalyst for whatever turmoil the character is going through, but we don’t have to sit through months of recovery. Basically, the flashback works because it is the reason for the story. If the flashback isn’t serving a major purpose, skip it.

Starting With Info Dumping

The problem: your readers aren’t going to remember 90% of what you are telling them in the opening chapter, so info dumping is wasted in the opening. Your reader has no idea what’s going on, who is who, where they are, what the conflict is, etc., so it’s very hard for them to figure out what they need to pay attention to and remember. We also see this in fantasy or scifi stories where the writer tries to give the reader an intense amount of world-building right at the beginning. Again, your reader isn’t going to remember 90% of this. They have context for the lore, so they aren’t going to remember most of it, and it’s sort of a waste.

How to make it work: save the world-building and background info for moments where it is needed or can be naturally introduced. Your readers don’t need to know everything all at once, so pepper it in. The best way to do this in the beginning is to show the world through the character’s eyes. If they are always in this world, they won’t be introduced to things they live with every day. Just introduce things naturally. For example, you can have a character open the door to their daughter’s room to wake her up, and we will know it’s their daughter’s room because if they’re appearing to be in a caregiver role and you described the room as a child’s, readers will assume that is their child. If you have a character in a steampunk world get into a vehicle called a steamer, readers will assume it’s like a car. You can always briefly describe the outside of it in passing rather than being like, “I got into my vehicle, a steamer, which I take to work.” That was very pointed, but you get the idea. A better way would be to say, “I pushed past the persistent, gap-toothed newsboy on the corner and cranked my steamer to life. In the quiet of the steamer, I let my head rest against the wheel before pulling away from the curb and heading toward Independence Square where the royal zeppelins hovered in the distance.” We can cram a lot of world-building into a few sentences without being too pointed.

Starting by Introducing a Ton of Characters

The problem: your reader won’t remember everyone you introduce at the beginning. As I mentioned several times so far, your reader won’t remember most of what you tell them at the beginning because they have no context and therefore no way to know what is important yet. If you introduce too many people at once who are important, your readers will struggle to keep them all straight. This is also a problem later in the book in something like a party scene where readers get a whole new crop of characters all at once, but even three or four characters in rapid succession might be hard for readers to contextualize in the opening chapter. A lot of writing advice tells you that you need to hit the ground running, so writers will try to toss everything in at once. Hitting the ground running with action is far better than doing so by muddying the waters.

How to make it work: introduce two important characters at once at most. It’s one thing to mention a character with a minimal amount of context, but it’s another to give a full description early on. You want to make sure that your main character(s) are getting the greatest amount of description and fleshing out early on to make it clear that they are the main characters. With side characters, give enough context early on to figure out their relation to the main character rather than giving us their entire history or a long description. It’s far better to give us their description and backstory in dribs and drabs to make things less confusing. An example of introducing a bunch of characters early on without bogging it down might go something like, “Stephen took a steadying breath before pushing out of the tent. Leroy, Cassandra, Mikail, and the other knights were sitting around the campfire waiting for him, but when he drew closer, Mikail’s light eyes ran over his rumbled grey hair and the bloodied bandage wrapped around his shoulder.” Note how we establish the main character, Stephen, by staying in his head/following him out. We pepper in the names of a few side characters and give the context that they are all knights. From this description, we might also surmise that Mikail is closer to Stephen or of high importance than the others within the narrative.

While these aren’t all the pitfalls you might encounter while writing the opening of your book, I hope these examples were helpful for you in figuring out how to strengthen your story.