5 Tips to Hook Readers From Chapter One
If the salesperson’s edict is to “always be closing,” the writer’s first mandate is to nail the opening. When it works, it feels like alchemy. Inevitable, a product that is more than the sum of its parts. When it doesn’t, we feel it as a creeping sense of distrust in the authorial prime mover who ushers us along.
(The Stranglehold of Gratitude.)
This directive pertains no matter how many books we’ve written. Each time, we must negotiate the inexorable demands of the opening anew—whether we’re in the dark trenches of querying, out on submission, or releasing a fifth book into the world. Get the opening right and readers will stick around. Get it wrong, and they’ll jump ship before we even set sail.
While there is no simple formula for writing, there are principles that I’ve found useful along the way. Below are five strategies I employed when writing my psychological thriller, The Department.
1. Create stakes that matter.
You’ve heard it before; you’ll hear it again. If your opening lacks stakes, readers will be slow to get onboard. As human beings, we are hardwired to want things. We came out of the womb wanting. We understand the urgency of desire because we live by the dictates of desire. Show us what matters to your character (along with what they stand to lose if they don’t achieve it), and we become invested.
It bears mentioning that a character’s external want is different from their internal need. Often what they actually need is not the achievement of their immediate want, but something much deeper and more primordial. The beating heart of your story will be that tension between their wants and their needs, which will change, deepen, and evolve over the course of the novel. But at the outset, we must feel them striving for something, even if it’s as simple as a bathroom on a barren stretch of highway.
In my own novel, The Department, Neil Weber, is a philosophy professor for whom life has not gone the way he’d hoped. His wife has left him, his work has stalled, and he’s up for tenure, which is looking bleak. But the true stakes go deeper than job security. They are rooted in the sinking sense that he is irrelevant and replaceable, that he lacks agency in his own life. The novel turns on the question of whether Neil can pull himself out of the mire of his own inadequacy and shape his world in a more authentic way.
2. Arouse our curiosity.
Writing is a seduction. Our job as storytellers is to get readers to lean in, pay attention, skip their bedtimes because they must find out what happens next. The surest way I know how to do this is to spark curiosity. Treat the opening like a flirtation. A dance. Drop clues without revealing your hand. Hint at backstory without explaining it too quickly. Make the reader feel like they have shown up to a story already in motion and must work, just a little, to keep up.
One caveat is not to overwhelm the reader with too much mystery right out the gate. Narrative questions must be answered to make room for new ones. As readers, we need to feel like we’re making progress, piecing things together, figuring things out. Trust your readers to be up to the task. Don’t bury them under a mountain of unanswered questions because they’ll stop caring.
In The Department, the overarching mystery is the disappearance of a college girl. But other curiosities arise along the way. In the opening scene, Neil and his department head dance around a subject that the reader only partially understands. A few pages later, that curiosity is satisfied, creating space for a new mystery to take shape. The tension between secrets and reveals sets the cadence for your novel.
3. Banish unnecessary exposition.
Bulky, cumbersome, overwrought exposition may be the most detrimental to an opening. Of course, world building is essential in any novel. The reader needs to understand the environment they are entering, even if the setting is familiar. The writer must make crucial decisions about what aspects of that world to include and what to discard.
What does the reader need to know to make this world intelligible? Ultimately, this is my litmus test for what stays and what goes. I can always find ways to weave in backstory later. If pacing is of concern to you, keep your opening tight, your action high, and your exposition on a need-to-know basis.
In early drafts of The Department, my opening was bloated with long passages of philosophy, which I found personally fascinating, but they ultimately created drag on the momentum. Upon revision, I decided that they slowed the pace too much for my liking. Some of them found their way into later scenes, but many remain on the cutting room floor, where they belong.
4. Give us characters we can root for.
I want to draw a distinction between likable characters and characters we can root for. To be clear, your characters do not need to be likable. But if we are to stick with them for 350-some-odd pages, we need to feel invested in their journeys. Stakes play a role in this. But so, too, does interiority.
Let us see how your character makes sense of the world, how they feel about what’s happening around them. If we understand their internal rationale, we will rally behind them, even if we don’t agree with their decisions or behaviors.
In The Department, Neil, an ethicist, discovers that a prevailing theory about our unethical tendencies might have been wrong. His work has been based on this theory, and its erosion has left him adrift. He acknowledges that this is good news for humanity (yay, we’re not as unethical as we may have seemed!), but it’s shit news for him personally, for his work and his writing. We might not condone Neil’s response, but because he spells it out for us through deep interiority, we understand why he feels the way he does and can momentarily suspend our moral judgment.
5. Leave us hanging, just a bit.
Whether or not you’re writing a thriller, the end of your first chapter should feel thrilling. It doesn’t have to be dramatic. But it does have to sink its hooks into us. Introduce a mystery. Pose a question. Up the tension. Raise the stakes. Leave us feeling like our work here is not done.
At the end of my first chapter, we’ve learned that a college girl is missing. Neil, who is not connected to her in any overt way, signals to a future in which she will occupy his every waking thought. We don’t know how things will arrive at this point, but he is making a promise to the reader, and we carry on because we need to know why.
Now that we’ve come to the end of this list, it occurs to me that we’re not so different from salespeople after all. Writers, too, are in the business of selling—our ideas, stories, characters–in hopes that readers will love, embrace, and feel invested in them like we do. Your opening chapter has a lot of work to do toward achieving this end. When we nail the opening, readers will reward us by flipping pages, eager to lose themselves in the novelistic worlds we create.
Check out Jacqueline Faber’s The Department here:
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