How to Write a Killer First Chapter

Techniques to entice and snare

Your opening chapter is delicate. It must lure and caress just as much as it choke-holds and commands.

The reader is new. They’ve cracked open the cover, read the blurb, probably sniffed the pages. They’re ready to begin on the journey you’ve designed for them. But they know nothing. Nothing, I tell you. They are babes in this violent and complicated world your characters are about to step into.

How do you best finesse them from a blank slate into understanding the problem and character enough that they feel expertly guided and like they’re learning things in the right order? Frankly, it’s pretty difficult to do this on the first pass. You think you understand your story, until you’ve written it. By the time you get to The End, the story will have become its own entity and have strayed in multiple ways from what you planned.

The first chapter almost always needs to be adjusted because, back when you first wrote it, it was the opening of an entirely different story. Only when you let the end inform the beginning does a narrative come full circle.

That means, stressing over your first chapter before it’s written is not what’s going to help you. Expecting to come back and rewrite it after you’ve written the last, will. You’ll have such a better handle on who your main character is (or was, before they went through the transformation), the world will be more filled out, and the tone will be clearer.

That said, there are of course techniques to structuring your first chapter to best hook-line-and-sinker the reader. They are as follows…