6 Tips for Creating a Great Opening Page

In a world where your book must compete with millions of other titles – never mind streaming services, social media, video games and a hundred other distractions – you can’t afford to lose a reader on the first page of your story. Here are some great tips to ensure your reader engages with your story on that very first page (for the full article, click the linked title):

• Don’t underestimate first page’s importance 
When buying a book – whether online or at a bookstore – most people check out the cover, read the back cover blurb, and then open to the first page. Kudos to you for getting the reader that far, but you’re still not home free. If the reader doesn’t like your first page for whatever reason – can’t connect with the character, doesn’t like the writing style, spots a typo – you can forget the book sale.

• How to write your story’s opening line
Among the most important words in your story are the ones that begin it. Those words should get the reader to ask, “What’s going on here?” so he turns the page. Your opening lines – also known as the grabber or narrative hook – usually hook the reader by establishing the story’s conflict and mood.

• Always start your story in the middle
An old but essential writing adage is “Start your story in the middle.” That is, rather than give background information about how the story’s main conflict came to be, instead start it by dropping the reader right into the hornet’s nest.

• Hint at protagonist’s internal motivations
Merely presenting a protagonist who will solve the story’s main problem the isn’t enough. Instead, you need to give reasons why the protagonist would even want to do so.

• Don’t fully commit protagonist in opening scene
Typically when a story starts, there is an out-of-whack event, an upsetting of the status quo that the main character must deal with. How the main character addresses this event forms the bulk of the story’s plot. Sometimes, though, the main character is reluctant to act. That is, he is not fully committed to resolving the issue.

• Establish story’s point of view in opening lines 
Every story has an angle or perspective from which it is told. You establish this perspective, called point of view, in a story’s opening lines. Which point of view you select deeply affects the way the story can be told.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

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