What a First Chapter Should Do:

1. Make the Reader Feel Something.
You want to evoke an emotion. It can be a negative emotion. It can be a positive emotion. But an emotion is almost always going to be associated with a human character. If your main character is not human, you are going to have to work awfully hard to make the reader feel an attachment to the character. Try to show the character as human as possible in the first chapter. You want the reader/editor/agent to really want to find out what happens in the next chapter. And reminder here: impressing the reader/agent/editor with your big words or pretty language isn’t an emotion that is likely to make them want to keep reading, all on its own.

2. Introduce a Character who either desperately wants something or desperately needs/fears something.
This is one of the main reasons that a prolog can be a problem. Even if you have a prolog character who is desperate, if you change povs in the next chapter, you may lose your reader. Ideally, you want to keep the same protagonist from chapter one to chapter two and show this character doing something to get what s/he wants or needs. An active character is always better than a passive one. But the reminder here is: don’t let worldbuilding overwhelm your character, especially in the first chapter. No matter how much you might want to tell the reader about all your cool stuff, if you don’t have a strong character attachment in the first chapter, you are likely doing something wrong.

3. Be Unique.
Sometimes this means having a unique voice, but it can be many other things. If you are doing a paranormal romance (which I’m still seeing at a lot of workshops), make sure your set-up is unique and that your dilemma is unique. If it feels like the same-old, same-old, my eyes glaze over. Don’t tell me that there is an evil bad guy and your mg protagonist has to save his father and then the world from this evil. Don’t tell me that your two main characters have been in love for centuries, but keep losing track of each other and have to find each other in a new incarnation. Don’t tell me that a vampire hunter and a vampire fall in love.

4. Show Conflict.
You don’t need to introduce the main conflict of the whole novel in your first few pages. In fact, you probably don’t want to because it takes too much set-up to explain the stakes and the worldbuilding. But you do need conflict in your first few pages. Conflict shows us about characters and it moves things forward. It makes things feel real and important. It makes characters feel real. So if you have characters who agree with each other or who don’t argue in the first chapter, who are passive or not talkative, reconsider.

5. Is Clearly Written so that the reader knows what is going on.
This cannot be overstated as an important part of a novel. I know so many writers who are so concerned with proving that they can write as well as the greats in their field—or better—that they forget that a story needs to be understood to be valued. Just make sure that you aren’t honing your words to the point that they lose all meaning. We need to know who people are, where they are, and what they are doing. It seems simple, but it can be very hard to achieve.