Open Door Critiques [CLOSED]

🚪 First Impressions

Put on your reading glasses and lab coats. We're going to be doing some analyzing today.

We've got three main courses before us:

The First Sentence  |  The First Paragraphs  |  The First Chapter

Think of these as the equivalent of:

Hook  |  Line  |  Sinker

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FIRST SENTENCE

Here are some examples of famous first sentences from novels, or just some of my own personal favourites:

1) It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

2) It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

3) The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. —William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

4) There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. —C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

5) There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife. —Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book (2008)

Juicy juicy stuff. Now let's get to boiling these sentences down. What's a commonality you see threading throughout all of these sentences? There's a number of things, but only one thing is of any real importance. And that's:

Intrigue.

That's it. Nothing complicated.

Jane Austen makes a humorous claim that intrigues us, because from that sentence alone, we're wondering what sorts of mischief she'll bring us on. Orwell's clocks are striking thirteen, and that's clearly impossible, so we're clearly intrigued. C.S. Lewis intrigues us by making us wonder how this boy almost deserved whatever happened to him, and of course, Neil Gaiman grabs us with an image of a knife in the dark. What is that knife going to do?

This, and only this, is what you should worry about when it comes to your first sentences. 

[HOOK] your readers by:
• stating something out of place (clocks striking thirteen)
• implying something bad is going to happen (the knife in the dark)
• getting your readers to ask a question (why, how, is that true?)
• simply writing something beautiful (sky like a dead channel, wow!)

FIRST PARAGRAPHS

[LINE] your readers in by:
• building upon the first sentence

That's pretty much all there is to it. You've brought out the beautiful rug, and now it's time to roll it out. Expound, describe, proceed. Move the plot forward. Peel back the curtains and let your readers in on more and more of your world. 

FIRST CHAPTER

Three big things should be answered by the end of your first chapter:
1) The setting, or where everything is taking place.
2) Who the key players are, namely the protagonist. 
3) What is wrong with the setting, the situation, or the MC; or simply, the opposition.

So The Three W's: where, who, wrong.

Take for example the first Harry Potter book. In the very first chapter we learn the setting (Privet Drive), we meet the Dursleys and Dumbledore and baby Harry. And finally, we learn that Harry survived something terrible from a mysterious and evil You-Know-Who.

As you can see, all three questions have been answered. 

If we look at The Hunger Games, the results are the same. In the very first chapter, we're dropped into the Districts and their situations. We meet Katniss, her family, and Gale. And finally, we learn about the dreaded Hunger Games, and on top of that, Katniss' sister is next on the chopping block.

Cool, right? Even though these two novels are of completely different genres, tenses, and age groups, the underlying skeleton is exactly the same.

So, finally, this brings us to the final point.

[SINK] your readers into your world by:
• painting a crisp picture of where we are
• getting us well acquainted with the key characters
• making us care by showing us the stakes