5 Ways To Keep Me Reading Your First Chapter

Camp NaNoWriMo 2014 has officially launched! Whether you’re writing a new novel, tackling a screenplay, or finishing an existing piece of work, Camp is a writing free-for-all. For those of you still on your publishing journey before Camp,  Blair Thornburgh, assistant editor at Quirk Books, explains what makes her stop reading a manuscript:

I was recently at a conference where an editor detailed her method for critiquing a first draft. The complicated process was as follows:

Start reading it.
When it stops being compelling, stop reading it.
When you stop reading it, draw a line on the page and write “This is where I stopped reading”.

Brash. Ballsy. Take-no-prisoners.

But what specifically makes an editor grind to a halt and refuse to go on? Opinions differ, of course, but as far as I’m concerned there are some pretty basic “don’t”s that make me want to close a document while I’m reading a sample chapter:

Flat-out, naked, untempered exposition. 

A first chapter is tricky because there is so much to explain about your characters, setting, stakes, etc., and no elegant way to do it. It’s hard! But as a reader, it’s even harder to choke down a straight-up list of facts. Lists are boring.

Here’s a litmus test: if dialogue, internal monologue, or narrative can be prefaced with “as you know,…” it’s too obvious.

Try mashing the bitter pill of info-dumping into some juicy narrative applesauce: to show a character’s temperament, have the other characters praise (or trash) her. To set the physical scenery, have your narrator fume about the weather. To show the horrors of the decades-long robot-human civil war that’s ravaged your novel’s planet, write about the screams of starving cyborg orphans.

Enough description to fill a travel guidebook. 

Sort of a corollary to the first: waxing poetic about the loveliness of your verdant meadows or the sweatiness of your jungle prison for sentence after sentence will lose my attention fast. Description has the onus of not being dialogue, which is snappy and fast-moving, and not being action, which is bone-crunchingly urgent. 

A good rule of thumb is to hit three senses in three sentences and then get on with it (though, as with all writing rules, this one is made to be bent: you can do a little more or a little less if your prosody demands it).

And if you just have to keep all those descriptions in, filter them through the lens of your character: how does she feel about the halls of her high school, the inside of her boyfriend’s car, the woods behind her house?

Too many above-the-shoulders observation phrases. 

Here’s what I mean: if we’re in a character’s POV (first or third person), you can almost always cut verbs that occur above the shoulders: see, think, feel, smell, notice, and so on.

“The streets of London stank like rotten fish” is much stronger writing than “Will noticed that the streets of London stank like rotten fish.”

Being cagey. 

This is the prizewinning, never-fail, guaranteed way to make me stop reading. Concealing details from the reader just for the sake of manufacturing narrative tension does not work. If your character knows a piece of information, then she would think about it in specific, concrete, detailed terms.

She should not press her hand to her head in a swoon and think, “That was the day that everything changed. That was the day of betrayal.”

She should grit her teeth and think, “That was the day Mom left me at the gas station on Front Street with two dollars in change and a black eye.”

Do you see the difference? Barring Memento-like amnesia stories, it’s weak and cheap to have the forward motion of your novel depend on a character just getting more and more specific about the past she’s known all along. Reveal the truth, or don’t even reveal that there is a truth, but please, never tease me in order to get me to read more.

Wild inconsistencies. 

Novels are just very, very, very long lies. That is to say, you’ve got to get your story straight! If a character goes from being Sarah to Sasha, or suddenly grows six inches, or changes hair color without going near a bottle of dye, I’m going to get fed up and quit. Your reader trusts you to know and show what’s going on, and even the smallest mistake will betray that trust.

This list is far from exhaustive, but it is getting long, so I’d invite you to draw your own line, right here, right now (though not directly on your computer screen).

This is where you stopped reading. Now go write.

Blair Thornburgh is an editorial assistant at Quirk Books by day and a Young Adult novelist by night and by very early morning. She loves Shakespeare, sea chanties, and other things that begin with sibilant fricatives.

Top photo by Flickr user bJORk(D)mAN.