How to Become a Better Writer: A Wattpad Guide

TIP #9: Tackling Your First Chapter

For those of you needing a bit of help in this area, here are some tips to keep in mind when writing your first chapter.

- Avoid backlogging your first chapter with tedious backstory or mundane starters such as rolling out of bed and going to take a shower or that such stuff. You really need to get into the heart of the matter (plot), almost as if you are picking up the story in the midst of something happening. You can introduce glimpses of how you got to that point in subsequent chapters.

- Avoid having a dialogue-heavy first chapter. That's just an uncreative technique, having an exchange between strangers to carry the introductory chapter because, to the readers, these are just strangers. You have to give readers something to make them want to care about the dialogue, and it should serve purpose. Otherwise, it's just useless babble or filler, and that's boring. If you use dialogue to infuse humor into your story, that serves a purpose.

- Be sure to use descriptive language, showing rather telling, but don't bog this first chapter down w/ it. It requires a healthy balance.

- Due to terribly short attention spans, keep your paragraphs a reasonable length (although I've reserved the right to deviate from this myself—LOL), but please none of that one- or two-sentence paragraph stuff. It will just read disjointed. Make sure your ideas flow.

- Do away with the POV tags (as in John's POV or Lacy's POV) to introduce a new point-of-view. These are amateurish and distracting. Preferably, dedicate the chapter to one POV at a time. And if you must, find a more effective way to depict one or more POVs in the first or subsequent chapters (e.g., using *** to separate POVs within the same chapter may be an alternative). This is not a widely practiced trend in the publishing industry, so leave this at the door!!! Just b/c some famous author has used this technique and has created a trend does not make it a good stylistic choice!

- Use proper grammar and punctuation!!! Remember, you are making a first impression here.