5 (More) First Chapter Mistakes Destined to Alienate Agents, Publishers, and Your Readers
By: Gregory A. Austin
Tags: Writing, Fiction, Publishing, Skills, Ideas

5 (More) First Chapter Mistakes Destined to Alienate Agents, Publishers, and Your Readers

Photo by Bruce Christianson on Unsplash

A few months ago, I wrote about five pitfalls to avoid making in the early chapters of your novel.

Fiction writing tends to have millions of guidelines yet very few “rules.” However, agents, publishers, and even readers tend to evaluate the early parts of a book with a higher level of scrutiny. As a stalwart writer, you never want to look at industry professionals or potential fans as one-and-done collaborators. The easiest route to success lies in creating long-term relationships.

The mistakes, tropes, and other questionable choices I highlighted in the previous article are no greater or less than the examples listed below. Because, let’s face it, a lot can go wrong during the many stages of writing your manuscript. With that being said, please keep in mind that you need not to avoid these choices completely. If used in a clever or innovative way, any novel beginning has the ability to shine. All you need to do is proceed with caution.

Now, here are the next five pitfalls to step, jump, or swing over.

Introducing the protagonist too late

The protagonist is your story’s lifeblood. You’ve spent weeks, months, or even years obsessing over how to make them equal parts realistic, relatable, and memorable. Most great stories are dependent on these living, breathing souls that exist within their pages.

Why even consider ruining the impact of a strong, fleshed out protagonist by introducing them too late in the narrative?

This is one of the reasons many literary professionals are wary of prologues. While prologues can sometimes be good at framing the story’s universe or providing the reader with important information for later use, they often don’t feature the protagonist. The longer a reader is deprived of a story’s main character, the harder it’ll be for them to bond with them when the time comes.

Douglas Adam’s 1987 novel, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, is a rare exception to this rule. In this humorous jaunt, the titular protagonist doesn’t appear until more than halfway through the book. Adams, however, was an established and beloved author at the time. Plus, the book was a reworking of a Doctor Who episode that never got filmed. Therefore, if the BBC had decided to produce his script, the Doctor would’ve been the protagonist instead of Dirk Gently.

Flashbacks

Photo by Илья Мельниченко on Unsplash

Every story should begin at the correct moment. A handful of authors instinctively know when to start a story, down to the precise nanosecond. For the rest of us, it sometimes takes considerable trial and error to find the ideal jumping off point.

Seldom does a story track a protagonist from the moment of their birth. Most narratives begin close to a defining moment either in the life of the main character or to the plot in general. If you need to reference an important moment in a character’s past, a flashback can be an invaluable tool. However, if you find yourself using too many flashbacks, there’s a good chance your story doesn’t begin in the right place.

Even though they’re powerful, it’s often a bad idea to begin a story with a flashback. First off, if you begin in the past, your narrative won’t truly begin until the flashback ends. Starting before the “present” of your tale has the potential to disorient your readers and prevent them from becoming grounded in your world.

You already have your work cut out for you in the early chapters in convincing an audience to fall in love with your characters, setting, theme, and overall style. Why complicate that with a misleading timeline? If you absolutely must establish a past event, take a few pages to introduce and ground the primary timeline and then venture into a flashback.

Unnecessary “in medias res”

In medias res is a Latin phrase that roughly translates as, “in the midst of things.” Many of you are likely familiar with this literary device, but even if you’ve never heard the expression, chances are you’ve seen it in practice.

Hollywood loves in medias res. So many modern movies start in the middle or toward the end of a story only to go back in time to fill in what happened before that point. While it can be an entertaining and lively device when executed correctly, it’s also criminally overused.

As previously mentioned, you always want to know when your story should start. If there is something to gain from dropping your audience into the boiling point — to give them a place in time to build their way back to — by all means, take advantage of this form of non-linear storytelling. But if leading with a fully developed scene — and potential spoiler — doesn’t add anything, it might be best to work toward this scene naturally by starting from the beginning.

Data dumping

Your world is unique. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing fantasy, sci-fi, an insane piece of genre fiction, or something contemporary. You’ve created a world that has its own rules, behavior, and feel. Because of this, you instinctively want to explain all those idiosyncrasies to your reader to fully immerse them in your universe.

While understandable — and often unavoidable — this is a rare instance where your instincts are wrong. True, your reader will need to know the specifics of your world to fully understand and appreciate the story, but how you reveal the information is just as important as the information itself.

A good standard is to give the reader as much information as they need in the moment and nothing more. It’s completely natural to want to equip your audience with everything they’ll need to navigate your tale from beginning to end. However, readers often become overwhelmed and even grow bored when given too much exposition.

At the beginning of a story, a reader only needs the broad strokes to get a feel for what’s to come. It’s more enjoyable for them to get drips of information page after page, and it also builds intrigue. You have to trust your reader to construct the puzzle on their own. So long as you put the work in during the drafting and editing stages, you will never have to spoon feed anything to your readers.

Dreams

There’s nothing more aggravating than getting to the end of something in which you’ve invested time and emotion, only to learn that “it was all a dream.” This cop out of an ending became extremely popular after the release of the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz. The end of this movie negated a rich fantasy world, writing it off as an innocent farm girl’s dream. This is especially disconcerting since the novel it was based on did not include this dream ending. As far as author Frank L. Baum was concerned, Oz was a real.

The decision to make the change came from MGM because the studio wanted to keep the story grounded. That’s right; they didn’t want a mystical journey filled with witches, flying monkeys, and inanimate objects coming to life to be perceived as unrealistic.

Anyway, this wasn’t the first, nor would it be the last, time movies influenced publishing. Stories bookended by strange dreams and unreliable narrators have gone in and out of popularity over the past seventy years. On the surface, this device comes across as an interesting twist; however, in most cases it leaves the reader unfulfilled and less likely to trust you as an author in the future.

Since dreams are such an underwhelming way to end a story, it’s even more of a betrayal to begin a story with a dream. It’s your job to get your readers invested in your world; therefore, it’s never a good idea to throw them off kilter with a misleading start.

Conclusion

To reiterate, the above examples are time-tested guidelines of what to avoid, but they are not rules. If you’re established or if you believe you can utilize one of these devices and somehow do something fresh and innovative with it, then you owe it to the publishing world and yourself to give it a try.

Otherwise, simply knowing these common pitfalls and learning why they can be detrimental is a solid step toward creating a strong beginning.