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Writing tips
Your Opening Chapter Will Win or Lose Readers
No Second Chance to Make a Good First Impression
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As an aspiring novelist, how long will you go on reading this article to decide if it has any value to you? A sentence or two? A paragraph? Good! You make my point.
This is painfully true for the 300- or 400-page book you have thrown your life into. Will your prospective reader (or agent or publisher) bother to read beyond the first chapter… perhaps even the first page?
You could try a humorous little foreword that says: Hey, I know the first three chapters are numbingly dull, but please take a quick look at page 73… you will soon see I can write exciting stuff. It gets even better after that.
Jane Austen and Charles Dickens could get away with a rambling, philosophical start but their audience had little else to do except read until the candle burnt down. They had not been conditioned to a ten-second attention span. There was no competition from Youtube, texts and Netflix.
Despite the prevailing notion that the average reader today will give a book fifty pages before abandoning it, I believe it would be rather risky to open with the equivalent of “It was the…
