chapters

Openings

by Matthew McGuinness on

It’s a fact of modern life that most literature is treated more or less like a throwaway commodity. Of course, people value literary experiences – a great novel can change the way people see the world. But, these days, they make their decision about the value of a novel increasingly quickly.

The publishing industry has been incredibly good at creating opportunities for people to start reading a book on impulse. It requires no investment of money to read a few pages using the preview feature on Amazon, and if you’re a subscriber to Kindle Unlimited, you can read as much as you like without paying anything on top of your monthly subscription. This kind of thing has made us voracious starters of books. But it has also made us ruthless abandoners. As a result, it is more important than ever for authors to grip their reader from the word go.

To grip a reader at the start of a novel you need to think on three levels: first sentence, first paragraph and first chapter. Below I’ve provided tick lists for each level, trying to make them as relevant as possible for all genres of popular fiction.

Sentence

  • The first sentence should launch straight into action that is appropriate for the genre.
  • It should not be dialogue or description.
  • It should have an emotion associated with it that relates to the emotional journey you will be giving the reader – that could be fear for a thriller or loneliness for a romance, for example.

Paragraph

  • The first paragraph should not be about waking up or walking into a room or other such inconsequential transition moments.
  • It should introduce the main character.
  • It should set the tone of voice – this is a big part of what readers get hooked by.
  • It should evoke a problem or challenge that is appropriate for the genre, although it doesn’t have to be the one that’s going to preoccupy the main character long term.
  • If it doesn’t directly relate to the challenge that will preoccupy the main character long term, it could foreshadow it.

Chapter

  • Forget prefaces – they are a way of avoiding starting the story.
  • Forget retrospective episodes as this will misrepresent the novel to potential readers; try to carry out exposition more subtly.
  • By the end of the chapter, your reader should have fallen in love with the main character.
  • The first chapter should at least suggest the nature of the main task or problem that will preoccupy the main character.
  • Try to end on a cliffhanger – in other words, leave questions in the reader’s mind.

    • Afterthought on Killing Floor

    by Matthew McGuinness on

    A couple more insights gleaned from my analysis of Killing Floor by Lee Child.

    1) The chapters nearly always begin where the last one left off. The result is an unbroken flow of action. Is this intended give the reader a more movie-like experience?

    2) The number of scenes in each chapter increases as we approach a dramatic climax. But at the climax itself, there is a single long scene that takes up most of a chapter.

    Jack Reacher

    by Matthew McGuinness on

    The Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child are a phenomenon. They shoot up the bestseller charts like a rat up a drainpipe as soon as they’re released – I always have them on preorder. So what the hell makes them tick?

    Most critics agree that their stellar success is largely down to the highly charismatic hero, Jack Reacher. It’s certainly difficult to imagine a more mouth-watering premise for a character – a retired US military policeman who wanders the world, applying his own rough justice, armed only with a toothbrush. He personifies the kind of freedom and integrity that most of us aspire to, and readers love to spend 400 pages in his company.

    Unsurprisingly, these mega-successful thrillers have spawned an army of excellent imitators: Mark Dawson’s John Milton novels and Stephen Leather’s Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd series are personal favourites of mine. They’ve also found their way to the silver screen – unfortunately with Tom Cruise hopelessly miscast as the giant ex-soldier.

    I’ve read most of the Reacher novels over the years, but recently I decided to go back to the very first in the series, Killing Floor, to try and identify some of the key success factors. I surprised myself by finding a whole load of techniques that I hadn’t noticed the first time I read it – Lee Child really does know how to make you turn the pages. I’ll be sharing the fruits of my analysis in a forthcoming book, but here’s a few insights to be going on with.

    1) The chapters are long. It’s a myth that short chapters make popular books. Really the narrative just moves along in a continuous flow with each chapter picking up where the last left off.

    2) Reacher is an anti-hero. That means his values hover somewhere between the sadistic villains and the whiter-than-white cops who often appear alongside him. That instability and uncertainty is fascinating because he is pulled back and forth between good and evil – like the rest of us.

    3) Reacher treats women with respect. Most readers of thriller fiction are women.