How to make your story open unputdownable

What does the modern "once upon a time" look like?

Photo by Remy_Loz on Unsplash

Okay, so a couple weeks ago, I wrote a post about everything I’d tell you if you were an author about to query your novel. I’m so thankful to everyone who read and found it in any way helpful, but I wanted to dive deeper into one of the points I made, about your first five pages.

If you’ve done all these things and really think your book is ready, then rewrite the first five to ten pages.

I’m serious. Give them a BIG edit. Make them absolutely shine. These pages are the key into getting full requests from agents. Make them exciting! End with readers wanting more. Tighten tighten tighten. Move up your catalyst so it appears in these pages. Give agents something they absolutely can’t say no to. A few pages that would have you, in a book store, feeling like you absolutely can’t put it down. If you don’t have that, don’t send it out yet.

So the commenters had mixed feelings about this advice, which I absolutely love, and if you ever disagree with anything I say, this is an open forum about craft and fiction and storytelling, and I welcome thoughts! But anyway, someone made the point that they wished we could still have slow starts in novels, that in today’s market, it’s all about tightening and diving in and basically all that I said above.

Which I thought was such a great thought and I do think, to a point, has some truth. Especially in certain genres, like the one I write in, it’s all about getting to the good stuff early. But I also wanted to dive deeper here because I still think there is a place for all sorts of openings. Some are going to be quieter, plot-wise. Some will be a slow burn. Some will be all character, little in the way of plot. Some will be setting-forward.

But y’all, they all have to be strong.

They have to be that very silly word that gets tossed about in publishing but is really useful here: Unputdownable.

This is the je-ne-sais-quoi. This is, as my mom would say, charisma (“I’d watch him read the phone book”). This is voice. This is sparkle.

You need it to get an agent. You need it to get published. You need it, most importantly, to grab your readers’ attention. And it’s useful beyond book-writing. When you’re telling an anecdote at a party. When you’re leading a staff meeting. Start strong.

But how?

What makes some openings so incredible? Is it just sheer brilliance? Genius? God-given skill? I don’t think so. It’s all about getting to the good stuff quickly. The problem with opening is, it often takes us as writers a few chapters to get to that stuff, whether it’s plot points or really finding a character’s voice. And no matter how much we polish the beginning, it’s still not hit its groove yet.

So what I’m saying is, start already in the groove.

There are several ways to do it, and I want to unpack a few here, presented in no particular order (with examples!).

Begin with more questions than answers:

124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims.

—Toni Morrison, Beloved

What is 124? What does it even mean? It’s a house, we’ll come to realize, after just a sentence or two, but that answer opens only more questions. How can a house be spiteful? What happened there? And what does Morrison mean that Sethe and her daughter were victims?

It’s okay, even brilliant, as seen here, to confuse readers a bit, as long as you spend the rest of the opening answering those questions, while introducing others.

Go from universal to specific.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

“My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?”

—Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Austen will forever be known for this opening line, and you don’t even have to have read Pride and Prejudice (although why wouldn’t you? your loss!) to have heard it. But while the aphoristic first line has been endlessly studied and unpacked, I think what she does after is what really puts P&P into classic unputdownable territory. It’s pretty simple but so economically done: A single rich man is gonna want a wife; the people in the neighborhood know this; here is a mother talking about a rich guy who just moved in.

It doesn’t particularly matter what comes next. It doesn’t matter that we’ll take a few pages before Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet lay eyes on each other. It doesn’t matter that they hate each other at first. We know, straight off the bat, that Austen is both hilarious and here to tell us a story about what happens when a rich guy moves to town and a mother is desperate to see one of her five daughters married to him. We’re all in.

Get voice-y.

Sorry to trouble you was how the note began, which is such a great opener. Please, trouble me! Trouble me! I’ve been waiting my whole life to be troubled by a note like this.

—Miranda July, All Fours

I read this line at my local bookstore and promptly bought the book. Please, trouble me! The main character in this hilarious musing on mid-life and menopause is needy and earnest and wild and completely inappropriate at times and, love her or hate her, we get exactly who she is with these sentences. A lady who wants to be troubled, who is desperate for something to happen to her. And this is a story where something, many things, happen. All Fours is a perfect example of a slow-to-start plot, too. The big thing that happens in the first of the book is a road trip (or, more accurately, a road trip that doesn’t quite materialize). We take some time to get there, but since we know exactly who this character is and can feel her wanting straightaway, we’ve got the patience to keep going until bigger things happen.

Wrap up your biggest plot point in a helluva first sentence.

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

—Donna Tartt, The Secret History

As long as I live and read I will never get over this first sentence. For the few uninitiated, the Secret History follows a group of classics students who decide to murder one of their own as a kind of philosophical experiment (ala Rope, one of my favorite Hitchcock movies). It’s a total slow burn, and we get a looooooot of lead-up to Bunny’s actual death once the book starts, but again, we’re patient, because we know what’s coming: A body in the snow. A friend dead. A group who is in a seriously tight spot.

Start with a little irony—set up the opposite of what’s to come.

Well, the sun was shining. They felt that boded well—people turn any old thing into an omen. It was all just to say no clouds were to be seen. The sun where the sun always was. The sun persistent and indifferent.

—Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind

This perfect novel follows a bougie family who rents an AirBNB, only to have the owners show back up after a natural or man-made disaster cuts off all power. The book is famously vague in what the disaster actually is, but this opener—sun shining, that boded well—is so damn optimistic, when foiled with the word “omen,” it frankly gives you the creeps. I was hooked from the first page.

Start with a prologue that sets up your theme:

Cora's mother always used to say children were whipped up by the wind, that even the quiet ones would come in after playtime made wild by it. Cora feels it in herself now, that restlessness. Outside, gusts lever at the fir trees behind the house and burst down the side passage to hurl themselves at the gate. Inside, too, worries skitter and eddy. Because tomorrow—if morning comes, if the storm stops raging—Cora will register the name of her son. Or perhaps, and this is her real concern, she'll formalize who he will become.

—Florence Knapp, The Names

Prologues get a bad rap, and I honestly don’t know why. Some people think they’re cheating, I guess? And yes, in some cases, I suppose they are a Band-Aid for a book that doesn’t have much in the way of a start, but I think when done well, they are absolutely delicious. Knapp’s prologue here is absolute perfection. The Names is like a multi-verse of a novel, where we get to live the main character’s life three times, when he’s given three different names by his mother. The idea is that the name can make who you are, and Knapp lays it out so very clearly here. We know exactly what we’re going to get.

Start with a prologue that sets up your big event or mystery (which you’ll spend the rest of the book unpacking)

Five pavement-dwellers lie dead at the side of Delhi’s Inner Ring Road.

It sounds like the start of a sick joke.

If it is, no one told them.

They die where they slept.

Almost.

Their bodies have been dragged ten meters by the speeding Mercedes that jumped the curb and cut them down.

—Deepti Kapoor, Age of Vice

I adore this novel, and you should absolutely read it. It is SWEEPING. There is a lot going on, a lot to follow, but it’s do-able, because among all the characters, all the situations, we are given a central, simple mystery, one that also embodies the theme of wealth and excess vs. poverty and exploitation, from the very first page. A Mercedes killed five homeless people. And then, that subtle, blink-and-you-miss-it Almost. Someone didn’t just kill them. Someone moved them and then drove away.

Heartbreaking, pulse-pounding. Absolutely brilliant.

Start with high stakes and a down-and-out character.

It hit me hard as the motel came into view through snowflakes thick and white: This was my last chance.

Okay, this is from my latest, The Last Room on the Left. I wanted to include it just to show you that you can have a strong start without being an absolute literary genius ;)

This book follows Kerry, whose life is absolutely falling apart and has one chance (or so she thinks!) to put it back together. So that’s where we start, plus a hint of setting (motel, snowflakes, winter).

Similarly, give us a main character who is maybe not down-and-out but deeply unhappy with their current situation:

Jacob Finch Bonner, the once promising author of the "New & Noteworthy" (The New York Times Book Review) novel The Invention of Wonder, let himself into the office he'd been assigned on the second floor of Richard Peng Hall, set his beat-up leather satchel on the barren desk, and looked around in something akin to despair. The office, his fourth home in Richard Peng Hall in as many years, was no great improvement on the earlier three, but at least it overlooked a vaguely collegiate walkway under trees from the window behind the desk, rather than the parking lot of years two and three or the dumpster of year one (when, ironically, he'd been much closer to the height of his literary fame, such as it was, and might conceivably have hoped for something nicer). The only thing in the room that signaled anything of an actual literary nature, that signaled anything of any warmth at all, was the beat-up satchel Jake used to transport his laptop and, on this particular day, the writing samples of his soon-to-arrive students, and this Jake had been carrying around for years. He'd acquired it at a flea market shortly before his first novel's publication with a certain writerly self-consciousness: acclaimed young novelist still carries the old leather bag he used throughout his years of struggle! Any residual hope of becoming that person now was long gone. And even if it wasn't there was no way to justify the expense of a new bag. Not any longer.

—Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

JHK can do no wrong IMHO, and The Plot is probably my favorite of hers. While the plot (lowercase) of The Plot is zany and twisty and super fun, I love how it starts with a quick character study here. We know this guy. We’ve seen him on the subway, in the coffee shop. A man who thinks he should be far more famous than he is. We all love to hate him, and the book is about to let us do just that.

Let us in to your character’s darkest thoughts or feelings.

Kristen trotted to the patio’s edge and crouched, long arm outstretched. Her fingers groped along a vine, lifting leaves, exposing the tender stalks beneath. I pictured her tipping over and tumbling off, there and then not there, the afterimage of her silhouette still hanging in my vision. I don’t know why. For a wild moment, I pictured pushing her.

—Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

Bartz is queen of the creepy prologue, which she does exceedingly well, so it’s interesting that in her breakaway success, We Were Never Here, there isn’t one! This book gets into a bonkers, delectable plot straightaway, so she doesn’t need one, but to hook us from sentence one, she lets our dear sweet main character briefly imagine pushing her friend of a cliff. Hello, intrusive thoughts! There’s something so creepy (WTF is wrong with this woman?) and also so relatable? (God, I hate when my brain does weird things), and it lures us right in.

Okay, so there you have it. I could go ON AND ON, and maybe I will in another post, but this is just a sampling of beginnings of all sorts that have that wonderful allure and sparkle.

What are your favorite book openings? Let me know in the comments!

Happy reading, writing and story-starting!

Leah