In this installment of my 87-part series, we’re going to look at how to begin our novel. And nothing will grab your reader more than an absolutely perfect first chapter. Well, except name recognition. And a good marketing campaign by a Big Six Publisher or affiliated subsidiary. And an aesthetically-pleasing and professionally-designed cover that costs at least four figures. Positive reviews from some of the biggest newspapers and literary magazines are key, and endorsement quotes from all the main authors in your genre is essential. A catchy tagline certainly couldn’t hurt and if you really want to wow your reader…

I often tell authors that the biggest mistake a new author can make is to not write a perfect first chapter. Over nine percent of the time, that’s the reason editors will turn down a manuscript. But, you might be asking, what do we mean by the perfect first chapter? Something like Flowers for Algernon? Pale Fire? Macbeth? Sure, those are all great examples, but any type of book can have a perfect first chapter. A chapter should contain the following things:

A hook for an opening line. Think Moby Dick’s “Call me, Ishmael” or Tek War’s “He didn’t know he was about to come back to life.” In a future installment, we’ll look more closely at how to construct the perfect opening line. Beyond the opening hook, however, a first chapter should: introduce the main character, establish your tone and voice, include some dramatic action, like a death, an explosion or an abortion, be subtle, evoke a mystery but never confuse the reader, and set up a conflict but not the main conflict, which will instead arise 12.64 percent into the novel.

Today we’ll look at four tricks that can help us accomplish these goals.

Step One: Start in media res.

With ever-decreasing attention spans caused by Tik Tok and 15 second porn gifs, the readers of today need their dopamine fix fast. Recent studies show that readers decide whether or not to read your book after the first three words. So if you’re not whipping out all your literary might and dangling it in front of your reader’s face from the outset, that’s just one more novel for the orphanage bookshelves.

That’s why I suggest you start in the middle of your scene. Skip long introductions, skip backstories, skip exposition, skip character description, skip names, skip adverbs, skip nouns, skip punctuation. Start your book with a gunshot to the head. Start your book with cannibalism. Start your book with a nonsensical string of expletives.

Step Two: Don’t frontload the backstory.

Be sparing with your reveals. It’s probably not good to painstakingly detail every year of your character’s life from birth to their present age. Don’t make the same mistake I did and write a hard-boiled crime thriller where the lead detective doesn’t reach puberty until page 46.

Maybe pick one or two key moments from your character’s past that relate to the events unfolding in your first chapter. If your character is eating a sandwich, maybe then would be the time to talk about their high school job as a school cafeteria bully. If your character is in the middle of a high-speed car chase, maybe you should talk about the advice their high school driving instructor gave them. If your character is an American high school teacher, talk about their regret over failing to have prevented all those school shootings.

Step Three: Opinion, opinion, opinion, opinion.

There’s nothing more important than voice. If the current media climate has taught me anything, it’s that people naturally follow loudmouths who incessantly provide their unsolicited and uninformed opinions. Follow suit and standout in an overcrowded literary marketplace by being as loud, brazen and obnoxious as possible.

Or, look for contrasts and unexpected viewpoints. Maybe your radical Islamic terrorist wants to retire and open a bakery on the West Side. Maybe your homosexual wedding planner makes a plan to kill himself. Or how about this opener, from my 2009 bestselling drama, Storming The Gates of Heaven: “All my life I hated immigrants… until I realized I was one.”

Step Four: Make the first domino fall.

As I used to tell my students attending my workshop at the learning annex: “You don’t have to bring the storm in the first chapter, but the storm should be visible on the horizon.” After all the applause, I also explain that prize fighters don’t throw haymakers in the first round and starship captains don’t divert all power from the shields to the phasers for the warning shot.

While conflict is the driving force of all fiction, you need to take your time here. What if James Agee’s A Death in the Family had given us A Death in the Family in the first chapter? Where would we go from there?

So, for example, instead of starting with a bank robbery, start with a bank security officer watching an employee orientation video. Instead of the death of a father, start with the near-death experience of a beloved uncle. Instead of dumping a bunch of information on your reader, be sparing with the details and don’t even finish the sentence that you are writing so that…