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Discipline clichéd or
predictable story beginnings.
Here’s how not to open your novel …
weather
You’ll often hear from industry pros that they don’t want
to see books that begin with weather. They mean long
descriptive passages up front.
You can indicate something about the weather, but
only if you connect it to a viewpoint character and use it
to add to the tone of the scene. Not this:
The wind was chilly that January morning.
Fluffy clouds dotted the sky as the sun’s rays illu-
minated the trees. To the north, the threat of rain
teased the mountains, which stood majestic in their
winter garb.
Instead:
Dalton heard the door slam and knew his wife
had left. He didn’t bother throwing on his robe.
He ran downstairs in his boxers, and out the front
door to head her off.
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An arctic breeze assaulted him on the porch.
He squinted in the morning light, obscured only
a little by the clouds, and saw his wife backing
out the car.
Dalton ran across the frosty grass in his bare
feet and slipped.
dreams
Dreams in fi ction are best left to the middle part of the
story, to indicate strong emotion.
Making the fi rst scene a dream is a kind of cheat. It
gets the reader caught up in a situation that is full of
portent, and then yanks that away with the “and then I
woke up” routine. It’s not much better when the writer
lets you know it’s a dream from the start. (With apologies
to Daphne du Maurier and Rebecca).
Editors tend to view dream openings with suspicion.
I know some wildly successful writers have opened novels
with a dream. After you sell eight gazillion copies, you
can do it too.
“happy people in happy land”
This is my term for the opening chapter that feels like
pure setup. You have the nice family unit, all getting ready
for the day, kissing each other and having breakfast, and
then the husband goes off to work. At the end of chapter
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one, or the beginning of chapter two, the wife gets the
report that the husband has died in a car accident.
Not soon enough.
So what can you do if you absolutely insist on having
a “normal life” opening chapter, after you’ve considered
every other alternative?
You can at least put in a portent at the beginning,
enough to carry the reader along for a few pages.
Dean Koontz opens Tick Tock like this:
Out of a cloudless sky on a windless Novem-
ber day came a sudden shadow that swooped
across the bright aqua Corvette. Tommy Phan
was standing beside the car, in pleasantly warm
autumn sunshine, holding out his hand to ac-
cept the keys from Jim Shine, the salesman, when
the fl eeting shade touched him. He heard a brief
thrumming like frantic wings. Glancing up, he ex-
pected to glimpse a sea gull, but not a single bird
was in sight.
The scene continues as Tommy Phan gets the keys
to the Corvette (which inexplicably chill him) and hap-
pily drives away, talks to his mother on the phone, and
so on with his normal life. But the portentous opening
images and feelings give us a little breath of disturbance
to carry us along.
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