Where to Start Your Story (Exactly)

There are basically two ways you can start a story. You can have all guns blazing action or you can establish the ordinary world of the character before things change.

Both approaches have their pros and cons and a lot of it depends on various factors to do with your story and what you consider to be right for you as a writer. But the problem comes when you show your first chapter to someone else and they don’t react in the way you’d hoped, making you lose confidence in what you had thought to be quite a good scene that set things up nicely.

Questions arise such as maybe the other approach would be better for this story, for this genre, for you as a writer. But the truth is these are the wrong questions. So if the start of your story isn’t attracting the kind of response you want, what are the questions you should be asking yourself?

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Best Hyperbole Ever!

Two men each have a box. Both are selling tickets for a peek inside their box. Both make extravagant claims about how impressed you’ll be with what you’ll see. But neither is willing to tell you what they've got in there.

Roll up, roll up. The stupendous, astonishing, one in a lifetime, miracle in a box. Get your ticket here. Be the first to see what’s in the Box o’ Dreams.

Now, if I tell you that one man has got something pretty amazing in his box, and the other has half a dog turd, how can you tell which is the box worth buying a ticket for?

The answer is you can’t. It’s just as easy to make hyperbolic promises about something rubbish as it something awesome if you don’t have to back up your claims. So, if you happen to actually have something really cool in your box, how do you let people know you’re the real deal?

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The Little Hook

Most people when they think of a hook in a story think of the Hollywood, high-concept version, something like:

Martha Harry was the best spy in the business, but what no one knew, not even her bosses at the CIA, was that Martha was a vampire.

Which is fine if you’re writing a high-concept story of that kind, but hooking the reader at the start of a story is more to do with phrasing and learning how to pose a question without a question mark.

Martha Harry, or ‘Buckets’ as she was known to anyone who had been at school with her, lived in a two bedroom apartment in Manhattan.

There is now a question that will appear in the mind of anyone who reads that  opening: why was she called 'Buckets'? It doesn't need to be a question that the whole book is about answering, it just keeps the reader on the other end of the line, an especially useful technique at the start of a book.

If I were to rephrase it as:

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Chapter One: The Friends of Eddie Coyle

The latest genre in my series of Chapter 1 Analyses is crime fiction. The Friends of Eddie Coyle was written in 1972 by George V. Higgins, an experienced lawyer. It was his first published novel (although he had 14 failed attempts under his beltt—hope for us all) and it was made into a film soon after starring Robert Mitchum in the title role.

I looked at a number of crime fiction books for this post as I would have preferred something more recent, but most followed fairly standard approaches, many of which we have already discussed in this series. However, this book, considered a classic and much admired by people like Elmore Leonard and Dennis Lehane, had a first chapter that really made an impact on me. Here are the opening lines:

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Book Autopsy 2: A Love Story

In my last post I analysed the first chapter of Ira Levin's A Kiss Before Dying, but to be honest this was something of a soft target. As a thriller it naturally follows most of the 'rules' of contemporary literature popular with creative writing teachers and how-to books. Starting off with a hook, keeping pace high, using action to move the plot, these are all fairly standard for the genre.

My dissection of the first chapter still revealed some interesting things, but I think it would be even more intriguing to take the same approach with a book from a completely different genre: Romance.

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Chapter One Analysis

I'm going to take the first chapter of a successful novel and break it down to see how the author hooks the reader, what information he feels is necessary at this point of the story, how he approaches things like POV, character and voice.

The book I've chosen is A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin (Rosemary's Baby, Stepford Wives). A 237 page, tightly written suspense thriller, it is a commercial novel but with many unconventional touches, extremely well plotted with some very clever twists and turns. It was his first novel, which is also one of the reasons I chose it. Chapter One is just over four pages long.

There will be the spoilers. 

Chapter 1 starts with these lines:

His plans had been running so beautifully, so goddamned beautifully, and now she was going to smash them all. Hate erupted and flooded through him, gripping his face with jaw-aching pressure. That was all right though; the lights were out.

On the surface this gives a very clear indication of his mood.  In fact it tells the reader directly that 'he' is angry and blames 'she'. The writing is visual and the last line gives a nice sense that he's hiding his feelings, but in many ways this would seem to be a overly 'telling' start. But as we'll see, it isn't. 

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