The First Chapter Trap

Let’s just cut to the chase here: the amount of things a first chapter has to do is impossible.

It’s your most crucial point of initial setup. In it, you have to establish your characters, their occupations, motivations and goals, and their relationships to each other, not to mention all of these characters have backstories crucial to understanding said goals and motivations. There’s also a setting that you have to define and describe, both micro — where your character is now — and macro, the larger town or city in which they live. Writing in science fiction and fantasy makes this even more difficult. The society they live in might be in a cyberpunk noir technoaristocracy, or a paganist collective with complex dress codes, rules and taboos. Your protagonist might be using a complicated magical system or cursed weapons or crazy superpowers. There might be aliens, or mutants, or some other kind of inhuman creatures populating this world. There is, possibly, science. All of these aspects are crucial to understanding the plot – which you also have to introduce, of course, since that’s the point of the whole damn thing.

But wait! There’s more!

On top of all of this, you have to write all of this in a way that is “hooky” — fast paced and interesting enough to catch an agent’s eye, and then a publisher’s, and then some schlub browsing Amazon or Barns & Noble.

It’s impossible.

Which is why you’re on rewrite #451. You’ve tried piling all of this information in as smoothly as you can (because rule #1 is no infodumps, and no “as you know” dialogue). You’re trying to do it the right way, introducing all of the crucial plot and character-related concepts and giving them a one or two sentence contextualization in a “this will be important to later” nod to the reader, before moving onto the next thing. But it still feels like trying to shove twenty pounds of information into a five-pound bag. And there’s nothing you can cut! Your reader needs all this information.

Hence: impossible.

And you’re right. It’s impossible. There’s basically no way that you can write a chapter conveying this amount of information in a clear and engaging way.

So don’t even try.

I kid, I kid. But fundamentally, thinking about your first chapter as setup is the wrong way to approach it. It’s not! It’s not setup. It’s just where the story starts. There is plenty of time and space to define your world, the people in it, and the plot. And a key aspect of writing well is simply learning how and when you release information to a reader.

The introduce-an-element-and-give-a-one-to-two-sentence-contextualization-before-moving-on impulse is, theoretically, a good one. You’re right that the reader does need all this information to understand your story. On a craft level, you’re probably hoping that your complex worldbuilding and rich character histories will demonstrate that your book is unique and complex. More than that, with these nods, you feel like you’re promising the reader that there’s a lot of interesting and cool stuff to come, so they should stick with you.

But this impulse is wrong. This type of writing is usually the hallmark of a writer who doesn’t have a lot of confidence in their ability to hook an audience. As intended, all of these little contextualizations can be read as “this story will get interesting, I promise.” But your first chapter’s conflict needs to be interesting in itself without a lot of necessary contextualization, because every element you add draws the reader’s attention away from the most important aspect of this first chapter: getting to know your main character.

I call these other details “context clutter” — if you have a dog or a toddler, context clutter is the reading equivalent of trying to walk somewhere and getting stopped every two steps by an interesting rock or pee spot or flower.

A good first chapter rule of thumb is, you want to give a reader only the amount of information necessary to be able to understand what is happening right now, and that’s it. So really, there’s basically only three things you have to give the reader in the first chapter:

1. Some information about our viewpoint character (age, sex, occupation) and a baseline of their voice, emotional life and personality. Aim to do it without delving into their grimdark history or childhood. If you’re moving back in time, the cutoff is like, two weeks.

2: Your main character’s introductory goal and the obstacle in the way of said goal. Not even the plot-related overarching goal or overarching obstacle. Just, why the story is starting right here, right now, in this specific scene.

3: Enough setting details that the reader can understand where we are on a basic physical level, and what is happening in this moment. If there are other characters in the scene, we should have a fairly simple explanation of who they are in relation to the main character.

Anne Lamott says she writes as much as she can see through a one-inch picture frame to dig into rich details without over-writing; this is my attempt to define something similar. I call these details “within arm’s reach of the main character.” Some examples: what’s in their hands, under their feet, what they’re wearing, what they’re feeling, who they’re talking to, what they want right now. If they’re doing a job, what that job is — even if they’re on the Station Dalfour in the Subatomic Dimension of the Hyperion Flagship Space, the character’s job probably pretty closely remembers doctor or cook or janitor, and that’s all I need to know. Avoid blowing the scope of this first chapter up beyond the room that the character is in. At this point, I, the reader, don’t need to know societal-level macro anything. I don’t need to know historical anything. This isn’t a house party where you’re obligated to immediately introduce your new friend to everyone else in attendance. You don’t have to signal to readers what will be important or where the story is going. They haven’t settled in yet. Let your reader take off their shoes and scope out the scene and grab a drink.

In this hypothetical urban fantasy thriller, our protagonist, Diego, is in New Orleans. He’s a demon hunter on the run from the Protectorate, an ancient secret society that he ran afoul of months ago while trying to close up a particularly nasty case that left everyone but him dead. He’s been lying low since, but can’t stop himself from helping clean up the city, even though he knows every demon he kills will bring the Protectorate closer to finding him. Diego kills with Gabriel’s Blade, which was given to him as a child after a demon attack left his parents dead and the angel dying, who passed with a single cryptic word, “Unseal.” With each demon he smites, Diego tries to find out more information about what the word references, and solve the mystery of his parents’ deaths.

As the story starts, Diego is riding a crowded New Orleans trolley car. He’s identified a demon sitting just a few seats down from him and is trying to figure out a way to lure the demon away from the populated areas, both so his smiting will go unnoticed and so there won’t be any collateral damage. Even as he’s planning this, something about this demon strikes him as strange, though he can’t quite put his finger on it.

When I first started writing, my natural impulse would be to try and cram all these details into the first chapter. There would be signs on the trolley car indicating a coming convention to tell the reader we’re in NOLA. Gabriel’s Blade would tingle on Diego’s back to let him know that there’s a demon close by. He would briefly describe the magical blade and his own profession. He would spot the demon, and the demon would be described. He would scour the faces of the surrounding passengers, looking for anyone who might seem like plain-clothes Protectorate. A brief explanation that he was being hunted by the Protectorate would follow -- who they were, their methods, the case that went wrong months ago. This would naturally segue into him thinking about his dead parents and the hundreds of demons he’d smote and how this would be one that would hopefully bring him closer to solving that mystery, not to mention Gabriel’s dying word. Especially since there’s something strange about this demon. He’d strategize how to get the demon off the trolley.

Notice how much of this is just the character just standing around thinking about stuff? Even if there are just a few sentences dedicated to each of these aspects, the sheer amount of information I’m trying to convey means this is inevitably going to be an extended rumination, full of details that my readers aren’t going to remember two pages from now because they’re not grounded enough to connect these details meaningfully to my main character. By the time I loop back around to physical space – him standing in the trolley car – my readers are probably lost and wondering where exactly we are. If they haven’t quit already.

Another danger of first chapters like this lies in the conflict. Because it’s describing so much macro conflict, it’s easy to forget that there needs to be an immediate character goal so we have some hooky stakes and tension. Not to mention all of this macro conflict is abstract, long term and vague: Cryptic angel! Protectorate! Dead parents! There’s precious little here that the character can really wrap their hands around, so the immediate goal (if I actually put one in) can feel small and ineffectual. And because so much space is dedicated to the events surrounding the character, we don’t actually have much wordcount towards establishing the character themselves.

In reality, here’s what the first chapter should cover:

Diego is riding a crowded trolley car because he’s got a toothache and has a dentist appointment. He gets punched in the mouth a lot in his job, which is demon hunter. Speaking of, he’s identified a demon sitting just a few seats down from him. So now he’s trying to figure out a way to lure the demon away from the populated areas, both so his smiting will go unnoticed and so there won’t be any collateral damage, and also hopefully bang this out fast enough he can still make his appointment. Even as he’s planning this, something about this demon strikes him as strange, though he can’t quite put his finger on it.

That’s it! That’s all we need. We’ve got a setting: trolley. We’ve got a goal: get to the dentist. We’ve got a potential obstacle: demon. We’ve got a new goal: smite demon and still make it to the dentist. We’ve got a new obstacle: people in the way. We know who Diego is and what he does for a living and why he’s got the goals he does, and what’s standing in the way.

This is what I like to call an “on ramp” conflict. It’s small, and can be accomplished within the confines of this chapter. The immediacy and simplicity of the goal means it’s something that the reader can immediately understand and get on board with. I can also dedicate a lot more attention towards establishing my character.

If I try to make this initial scene about the crux of the novel — the mystery surrounding his family’s death — then yes, I need a huge amount of context for the reader to understand what’s happening. But with an on ramp conflict, I can ease readers in and trickle out information on an as-needed basis. And on ramp conflicts are extremely common! Agatha Christie mysteries are almost always start with a hive of hot neighborhood goss to introduce you to the characters and setting before someone eats it, and those initial conflicts just get folded into the larger story.

But they don’t have to be. My favorite example of this is Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. We spend quite a bit of time at the beginning of the movie watching Jones in a temple that never appears again, getting an artifact that doesn’t matter. This conflict exists so we can learn about his job and his character before the real quest and the real baddies show up, and that’s all.

Context clutter is fundamentally a lot of asked-and-answered information firehosed at the reader. Beyond providing a basic “What is this guy’s name and what is he doing right now,” you, the author, should give the reader the opportunity to ask questions before you answer them. The second, pared-down Diego scenario leaves a lot of space for questions and intrigue. How did this guy get into demon hunting? How exactly does he demon hunt? Are there more demon hunters? What is strange about this demon? Is he going to make it to the dentist?

The more the reader understands a character in the present, the more they will be curious about their past/surroundings/etc and want to learn more, which draws them through the book. But knowing a character’s backstory right away doesn’t usually do the opposite – knowing Diego’s parents were murdered doesn’t necessarily make me more curious about the character. I’m far more interested in this guy who wants to slap out a smiting on the way to a root canal. What makes that guy tick?

If I briefly mention other elements -- the tingly blade, for example, or the fact that we’re in NOLA, I will do it only as a way to help me establish his voice or the immediate space surrounding him. I’m not trying to give real information about these aspects right now. That can wait.

Please internalize this: almost everything you want to stuff into your first chapter can wait.

Rest assured that all of your worldbuilding is not for naught. It is interesting. Learning more about the world of your book is part of what will draw readers through. But not if you’ve already asked-and-answered all available questions before your readers have the chance to even get going.

What you should aim to do in your first chapter is creating intrigue, and intrigue is created by getting the reader to wonder, and then promising the reader that all those things they’re wondering will be answered. Eventually.

Here’s where I mention that there are also a lot of first chapters that start at the far opposite end of the spectrum, with far too little information. Often, these chapters don’t tell us who the main character is (sometimes not even a name), or where we are, or what the character is doing except in the vaguest terms, or their relationship to the people they’re with; of course, this also means the reader also has no idea what this character’s goals or obstacles are. These chapters tend to be extremely sparse on emotional details and tend to spend their wordcount on set dressing, like descriptions of a character physically moving through a space while describing it -- in scenes where this is action-based, it’s usually describing a lot of the character’s actions like running or sweating and reactions like ducking and dodging (mistaking a character’s physical experience of tension and movement for the real thing).

“Creating questions” is not the same thing as throwing a reader in blind. If you’re not giving the reader anything to latch onto, you’re just throwing a flash grenade on a page and leaving them confused and disoriented, and those are much less compelling emotions than intrigue. This type of story start is also a hallmark of a lack of authorial confidence, but in the other direction, as if the author is saying “if I give you too much, you won’t be interested, so you’ll get details only when you’re too far in to turn back.” In reality, most readers just aren’t going to get very far in.

And my advice is the same! There are really only a few things that are must-haves in a first chapter. Make sure you have them.

Obligatory throat clearing: there are tons of examples out there of books successfully pulling off info-heavy openings, or flash bang openings. There are readers that like “thrown in the deep end/confusing action scene” beginnings. This advice is also geared toward genre, specifically adventure-style rather than lit-style. There’s a reason this place is called the Pulp Pit and not the Literature Piturature.

So, you know, do whatever you want. I’m not the writing police. But if you’re struggling with your first chapter, if you’re sending out a bunch of queries and getting no bites, then removing your context clutter — or making sure you actually do have the necessary context — might be what’s needed to get your readers on board.