That First Chapter
Asilomar Beach — March 2, 2025
“Your first chapter is not a straight horizontal line. It’s a jagged driveway leading up a dark mountainside — and the shadows are full of danger.” – Chuck Wendig
There’s only one first paragraph, one first page, one first chapter of your novel. It’s the biggest factor in whether people will buy your book, whether they will keep reading once they get started, and whether an agent will want to help you publish it in the first place.
Many great novels start in the middle of a scene; they throw you right into it. But action isn’t everything. You need to make sure the reader cares about what’s going on. That’s where depth of character comes in. The scene will have more impact if it illuminates a character’s personality, goals, and conflicts and also if it’s grounded in a particular place. And don’t tell your readers. Show them.
Chuck Wendig characterizes a first chapter as a “microcosm of the macrocosm” with its own rise and fall, its own conflict. Get to the end and the reader will say — I’m in. That first chapter is not just an onramp to the rest of the book. Think of it as a thing with its own complicated shape, Wendig suggests in his blog “25 Things to Know about Writing the First Chapter of your Novel.”
