Analyzing My Opening Chapters

Scroll down to find a link to chapter one of The Winter Guest by W.C. Ryan.

The opening chapters of your novel are crucial for any author, but particularly if you are hoping to be published for the first time. For an aspiring author, those first few chapters are your calling card to the publishing industry; they need to grab the attention of publishers and agents and fire their imagination. If they don’t succeed in doing that, the publisher or agent may not read on. If they do succeed, you may be well on your way to your goal of having your novel published.

So how do you write that perfect opening? Sadly, there is no one size fits all magic formula that can be applied to every novel with a cast-iron guarantee of success. However, there are definitely certain things that I think about when approaching the crucial opening pages, as well as tasks that I want to achieve early on in the novel, which may be useful for you to think about as well.

In order to explain a little bit about how I go about things, I’m going to discuss the first few chapters of my latest novel, The Winter Guest. You can find a link to the chapters at the bottom of this article.

Engaging the reader

Firstly, and most importantly, I want to engage my reader early and encourage them to read on. I like my opening pages to feature an event, a character or a quality of prose and storytelling that encourage the reader to read on.

In The Winter Guest, I start with an ambush and three deaths. The ambush takes place at the gates to Kilcolgan, a rundown Irish country house. The important death is that of Maud Prendeville, the daughter of Lord Kilcolgan. Maud is not killed in the initial shooting but is killed by an unidentified person soon afterwards, before help arrives. The event itself is quite dramatic but I also wanted to get the reader involved in the story so I posed a series of questions about the killing which could only be answered by their reading on. Who is the murderer? What are they searching for in the car? What is it they find in Maud’s evening bag? Does she recognise the killer and is that why she is killed? Once the reader is asking questions, they are engaging with the story.

Not all of the opening chapter deals with the ambush, however. I do a lot of world building in those first nine pages. Quite a lot of time is spent giving the reader a sense of Kilcolgan House, the stretch of coast on which it stands and the Prendeville family who own it. I also give a very quick introduction to the Irish War of Independence, of which the ambush forms a fictional part, and the history behind it. I hint at a ghostly presence in the woods, which is relevant to the story, and tell the reader a little bit about Maud Prendeville. The novel revolves around the investigation into Maud’s murder so she is a very important character, even if she dies before she manages to say a single word. To this end, I made a conscious effort to encourage the reader to care about her, without labouring the point.

All of this is new information to the reader and I needed to think carefully about how to deliver it without it seeming too heavy handed. The eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed that I used omniscient narration for the first chapter, whereas the rest of the novel is told exclusively from the point of view of Tom Harkin, who is the central character. Omniscient narration allowed me to shift focus easily from the house, to the ambushers, to the couple who live in the gate house and finally to the killer. It allowed me to give a slightly mythic flavour to the opening and to cover four hundred years of history in less than nine pages, while not allowing this information to get in the way of the action. It’s not an approach that will work for every book but I considered my options and chose it as the one that would work best for The Winter Guest. That mythic quality to the omniscient narration also allowed me to be a little more flamboyant in my writing style, which again works well for the story, but might not work well for, for example, a more contemporary novel. As it happens, this is the first time I have used omniscient narration to start a novel, and may well be the last.

When looking at your own story, try a few different approaches and see what works best. It's unlikely to be a waste of time.

Establishing The Atmosphere

As with setting, if the atmosphere is a key element of your novel then the earlier you establish it, the better. The Winter Guest is, on one level, a ghost story – although it’s never entirely clear whether the ghosts exist mainly in Harkin’s mind, still recovering from the trauma of the First World War, or in reality. With this in mind, I wanted a supernatural feel to the novel and I set out to achieve this from very early on.

In the first chapter, I use the fog and the omniscient narration to try to give a slightly other worldly aspect to the storytelling. In Chapter 2, Harkin feels his way through the fogbound streets of Dublin, attempting to avoid a police patrol and being assisted by a mysterious ghostly presence. Again, he is not certain what is real and what is not. The following chapter is a memory from Harkin’s time in the trenches, which feels real although I signal, by using italics, that it isn’t part of the main story. Putting them all together, I tried to paint a picture for the reader of a vaguely supernatural version of 1920s Ireland, and more particularly, Harkin’s slightly distorted perspective on it.

Introducing The Central Character

It isn’t essential to have the central character present in the very first chapter but, if they aren’t, they probably should arrive soon afterwards. Tom Harkin arrives in Chapter 2 and I put the reader inside Harkin’s head and place him in danger, as putting your central character under pressure is often the most effective way of showing their personality.

I use present tense in The Winter Guest which I think gives an immediacy that works particularly well with supernatural and psychological thrillers and also helps the reader engage with Harkin as they experience the action alongside him. I normally use past tense but I thought for this novel, present worked a little better. You will notice I don’t spend a lot of time “telling” the reader about Harkin’s personality and background in Chapter 2. Instead I want the reader to share his experience in the chapter by way of an introduction.

I follow Chapter 2 with a memory of Harkin’s from the trenches of World War One and then a meeting with Vincent Bourke, an important subsidiary character. In the fog scene, I tried to give a sense of Harkin’s internal state. In the trench scene, I’m offering an insight into the trauma he has recently experienced. The scene with Vincent Bourke is where we get a sense of Harkin’s external personality, through his interaction with another character. Through these three scenes, I’m trying to build up a sense of him in the reader’s mind. If, alternatively, I started with several pages about Harkin’s childhood, appearance and a summary of his personality, I would run the risk of boring the reader. By making him engage with the world around him and with other characters, I get to the same place in a more effective and engaging way.

Introducing The Objective

I’m not sure it is absolutely essential to tell the reader in the first few chapters what the central character’s objective over the course of the story is going to be, but it’s something I like to do. I feel it tightens up the narrative if the reader has a sense of where the story is going, and it also helps me to decide what is important for me to tell the story clearly and what isn’t.

The ambush chapter makes it clear to any reader who has read a crime novel before that Harkin’s objective, as the investigator, is to solve Maud’s murder. However I make it clear in the following chapters that Harkin’s mental state is precarious and that this will be both an obstacle to him achieving his objective and an objective in itself. His vulnerability will hopefully help engage the reader and if Harkin manages to address his mental state over the course of the novel, that will be a satisfying aspect to the story.

Where to begin your story?

The obvious place to start your novel is at the beginning of your story’s timeline and that’s what I do in The Winter Guest. However, fiction allows us to play around with the sequence of storytelling and first chapters can be placed at the beginning, the middle or the end of the main story’s timeline – as well as long before the main story starts, and long after it ends. The start may even come from a parallel storyline, or from a subplot. What is key is that those opening pages have something happening in them that hooks the reader’s attention. I could, for example, have started with a scene from when Maud and Harkin were lovers before the First World War, or I cold have started with Harkin standing beside Maud’s grave as she is interred several days after her murder. I could even have started with Harkin as an old man, visiting Kilcolgan House many years after the events in the story have taken place. More importantly than where the opening scene fits in the timeline, I want it to be dramatic and appealing  to the reader.

Final Thoughts

As mentioned, I want to engage the reader early on in my novels. One aspect of this is that I want the first chapters to read smoothly. I avoid, as much as possible, information dumps about the characters or the setting, as these can often bump the reader out of the story. Where possible, I deliver information through action and the narrating character’s observation. I show rather than tell, in other words. I want the story to flow, particularly early on, with the reader being swept along with that flow.

I also think of the opening chapters as a montage of images rather than a continuous sequence. In The Winter Guest, the first three chapters are not obviously connected until the fourth ties them together. I think there is a danger, with more linear storytelling, that you end up including too much detail and slow the opening chapters down more than is necessary. The first three chapters of The Winter Guest give lots of information to the reader but also, hopefully, are entertaining to read. I don’t need to have the police discovering the ambush site or the family’s reaction to Maud’s death, which a more linear storytelling style might suggest. That can all come later.

I suppose the general point is that I try to write as a reader. A novel is a conversation between you as a writer and whoever is reading your novel. You need to attract and hold their attention so it’s sensible to be aware of them when you are writing. Ask yourself how you can entertain and engage them best. If you manage to take them into the fictional world that you create and keep them there, then you have probably done your job well.

W. C. RYAN is also known as William Ryan, author of The Constant Soldier and the Korolev series of historical crime novels. His books have been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the CWA's Steel, Historical and New Blood Daggers, the Irish Fiction Award and the Theakston's Crime Novel of the Year. He has been published in 18 countries. Visit his website and follow him on Twitter.