The Opening Chapter

We’ve all seen the myriad of posts from bloggers and agents concerning the opening chapter of our manuscripts — cut the first twenty-five pages, start with conflict, no prologues, no tropes, no cliches…

If, like me, you’re ready to tear your hair out, then read on, because I’m about to cut the noise, and break the opening chapter into bite-size pieces…and hopefully shed some light on the ambiguous statements above. No more waffle, let’s just dive right in.

1. The Opening Line.

If you Google ‘the opening line’, the internet will bring you to a barage of sites touting the ‘best’ book openers in the history of books eveeerrrrr! Some will bring you the infamous ‘Pride and Prejudice’ opener, some ‘The Lord of the Rings’, but no matter how different the examples, or the gaping publishing time-gap between these books, all of them have one thing in common:

They force the…