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…

We’re going to do something a little bit different this time around. I know you normally comer here to hear my expert advice and about my experience in publishing in order to make your life feel less pointless, but today you’re going to take center stage and hopefully that will make your life feel less pointless. I’ll be sharing some writing exercises that’ll help get your creative juices flowing. But as an added bonus, any subscriber who posts their writing sample in the comments will receive a free PDF of the first page of Chair, and the commenter I declare the winner will get a signed picture of me wearing an outfit of your choice.

Exercise 1 – Write fan fiction

Lots of writers look down on fan fiction. It’s often considered the Oklahoma of the literary community. But unlike Oklahoma, it’s not just a bleak wasteland where dreams go to die. It’s a vibrant community with a vast range of genres, from Harry Potter erotica to Sonic the Hedgehog erotica to steampunk versions of the Canterbury Tales that are also gay bondage erotica.

So, why write fan fiction? Well, for starters, after reading what other people post, you’ll almost immediately feel less self-conscious about your writing ability. And second, without the stress of having to construct your own characters and settings, you can work on things like tone, dialogue, plot, character arcs, descriptions of orc vaginas, reasons for inter-species breeding and synonyms for engorged.

Exercise 2 – Write down everything you hear in daily life.

A great writer is a great observer of human nature. And there’s no better way to observe people in their natural state than eavesdropping and spying and invading someone’s personal space.

Now, a good way to do this is to visit a coffee shop, sit near a pair of women and write down their conversation verbatim. However, if you live in a crowded city, it might be difficult to find a Starbuck’s with decibel levels that doesn’t screw up even the best wiretapping hardware.

So, I find it’s better to follow around a pair of women shopping. This way, you can observe not just their conversation, but also their movements, the way their clothes hang off their body, and even their smells, provided you get a favorable wind.

Exercise 3- Write a story in 6 words or less fewer.

Ape. Tools. Fire. Man. Bomb. Ape. That’s just an example of how you can condense millions of years of history in just a few words. Popularized by Hemmingway after he came across some sick piece of shit who was trying to profit off their dead child, the six-word story is a fun way to stretch your imagination as a writer. And it’s also a good way to prepare for the insane demands of an editor.

Exercise 4 – Brainstorm in a sensory deprivation setting

It’s no secret that the modern world is filled with distractions. It’s difficult enough for a writer to get any work done, but work, the 24-news cycle, Netflix, Tik Tok porn, custody hearings and children’s recitals make it even harder.

To get your creative juices flowing, you could try a few hour-long sessions in a sensory deprivation tank, where you lie in a sealed bath of Epsom salts. But you don’t need to go to some pricey, Yuppie new age spa to experience sensory deprivation. You can easily find people on Craigslist or the at bus station with dark soundproof sub-basements that even your loudest screams couldn’t penetrate. 

Exercise 5 – Write captions to photos

Inspired by the New Yorker’s always funny caption contest, this is another exercise that hones your skills for brevity. Any sort of photos work. National Geographic has a photo of the day, for example. Personally, to hone my skills at character description, I search random yearbook photos and write obituaries.

Exercise 6 – Write alternative slogans to different kinds of breakfast cereals

They’re always after me lucky charms. They’re great. When a bowl of gravel just won’t do. You want to write a great opening hook for your novel or short story? Start with a slogan. Some of the greatest writers of the last century have been advertisers. “Where’s the beef?” and “Taste the rainbow” are right up there with “Call me, Ishmael” and “All this happened, more or less.” Remember: just like an advertiser you’re trying to trick people into buying a product that they don’t need and probably don’t even want, if they thought about it even for a little bit.

Exercise 7 – Write a conversation without dialogue

That doesn’t devolve into porn. Ninety percent of all communication is non-verbal. My second and definitely favorite wife and I probably only had two or three conversations that lasted more than thirty minutes before we got married.

As a writer, I think you’ll find that simple gestures like shrugging your shoulders, spitting or holding a gun to someone’s head communicate more than words ever could.

Exercise 8 – Retell a well-known story

Similar to fan fiction, here you’re trying to twist a famous story on its head. For example, what if Dracula was a doctor who provided rural Romanian peasants with blood transfusions?

Exercise 9 – Find a newspaper article and type every third word you see

Shit, I don’t know. It might work.

Exercise 10 – You can even try poetry

Sure, it’s the literary equivalent of making your clothes with a loom or making soap with discarded sheep innards, but even this outdated, useless form of expression can benefit you as a writer.

From Golding’s Conch Shell to Frost’s Two Paths to Goyer’s Batman’s Mother’s Name, symbolism is an essential component in all forms of fiction. Symbols give authors a way to convey complex ideas and beliefs while providing the reader a rich, sensory experience that’s open to interpretation. Without them, stupid people would have even more trouble convincing the book club they actually understood the text. We’ll look at ways to incorporate symbols in your writing on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Symbolism has been around for as long as humans have told stories. You can even see them in cave paintings tens of thousands of years old in southern France, where you’ll find women depicted fornicating with oxen, likely symbolizing the chieftain “bull” who was allowed to make cuckolds of the weaker men in the tribe.

Symbolism can elevate your writing, adding layers of complexity and letting you say more with less. A blood stain can hint at an entire life of guilt. A dilapidated house like Sutpen’s Hundred in Faulkner’s Absolom Absolom can serve as a potent symbol of a character’s state of moral ruin. And while you might not be able to think of great ideas like blood or a house, the great thing about symbols is they can really be anything. 

Before we get into the advice, it will be helpful to look at some evocative symbols from famous works of fiction. We’ll look at four types: colors, objects, places and characters. The color green is a recurring symbol in The Great Gatsby, meant to symbolize the other characters’ envy for hero Jay Gatsby’s financial and moral superiority. For objects, we have the invisibility cloak in Harry Potter, which symbolizes every teenage boy’s desire to sneak into the girls’ locker room. In the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien clearly designed the hellish nightmarescape that is Morodor to be a symbol for Luton. And though you might not have picked up on it, the animals in Animal Farm are symbols of different political ideologies.

So how can we use this in our own writing? What kinds of symbols do we use and why? Is everything a symbol for something else? Let’s simplify things and look at four ways we can use symbols effectively.

Step One: Use symbols to show emotion, instead of telling

Aside from lurking around their house at one in the morning, this is an editor’s next biggest pet peeve. And while if you’re like me and verbalize intimate feelings during book signings and first dates, your fiction will be more interesting if you can hint at emotional states through symbols. Instead of having your character say “I’m so full of grief right now because my dad died,” you can have the character describe a broken baseball bat they find when cleaning the garage. Instead of your sexually repressed adolescent boy talking about girls or watching porn, be subtle and have him slide a tube of tennis balls into a rain gutter.

Step Two: Use symbols to establish recurring themes

Let’s say your story is about a character’s search for freedom. The specifics don’t matter. Perhaps they’re a slave in bondage, perhaps they live in a repressive household, perhaps the government is trying to repress your character’s ability to own a weapon that can take out of room of fifty terrorists. Throughout the book, hint at the theme of freedom with images and extraneous events: a bird flying out of a cage, tits escaping the confines of a bra, cereal escaping the confines of a sealed package.

Step Three: Use symbols to hint at darker ideas

Throughout history symbolism has also been necessary way to skirt censorship and overcome cultural taboos. Artists have had to resort to using bananas and stalagmites and oil derricks to symbolize sexual desire. But even in the relatively open-minded present-day, editors are reticent to publish 30-page scenes of hardcore anal penetration or graphic, detailed descriptions of what it sounds like when you run over a horse with a tank.

So, instead of writing a sex scene, which often makes readers uncomfortable, hint at it by describing the jelly doughnuts your couple eats the morning after. Instead of literal depictions of the horrors of battle, what about a tense scene between two soldiers’ wives back home mud wrestling?

Step Four: Leave your work open to interpretation

This is the best part of using symbols. Having trouble writing a satisfying conclusion to your book? Just make up something about a sunset or a strange dream.  Or make your character walk toward a bright light that could be heaven, a nuclear explosion, or a titty bar outside Pittsburgh.

Fiction is not a science like physics or taxidermy: there is no right or wrong. Luckily, readers don’t know that, and an open-ending drives engagement as they flock to social media to shove their interpretation down other’s throats.  

I used this to great effect in my 2019 Western Lone Mountain. The protagonist Colt Action, a late-19^th century Texas Ranger, makes it his life mission to massacre the Comanches after they failed to save his son from a snakebite. The novel ends with Colt burying his pistol in his yard.

Has he renounced his violent ways? Or does he now prefer the intimacy of knives? Or is he leaving helpful clues for future archeologists? Or maybe hoping the lead somehow improves the health of his tomato garden? And to be honest, I don’t have an answer. Each of those theories I just found on my fan page could be right. That’s the beautiful thing about it.

Imagine a story where a secret agent is asked to find the kidnapped son of an intelligence official. An exciting scenario, right? But halfway into the story, we realize not only does our protagonist need to find the son, he needs to stop him from unintentionally unleashing a secretly-implanted supervirus. Ratchets up the tension, doesn’t it? As you probably guessed, I didn’t just make this up. This is the plot of 2002 classic sci-fi thriller, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever. But I use it only to show how important raising the stakes are to your story.

So, what do we mean when we say “Raise the stakes?” Stakes are something gained or lost in the character’s pursuit of a goal; they are potential consequences. This phrase comes from Dracula, where the raising of the “stake” to kill the head vampire was the climax of the story.

Think of stakes as “If…, then…” statements. If Ahab doesn’t kill Moby Dick, many people won’t have oil to burn their lanterns. If Gatsby doesn’t earn enough money, the poor won’t have anyone to aspire to. Or in my 2011 sci-fi thriller Naptime, if John Crater, after getting injected with an experimental serum, doesn’t get at least eight hours of sleep each night, his heart will stop.

There are three kinds of stakes: external stakes, internal stakes, and post-ternal stakes. Let’s take a glance at each one. External stakes refers to what’s happening in the world around your characters. Perhaps an asteroid the size of Nauru is headed toward the Earth or perhaps your character has a big test on obscure island nations that he needs to pass to graduate high school.

Internal stakes are the emotional impacts of a success or failure. They are what fuels the character to pursue their goals. Revenge is a big one. As is love. In the Count of Monte Cristo, it’s the thought of living in a world where injustice isn’t resolved. In legendary Denver Broncos placekicker Jason Elam’s Monday Night Jihad, it’s giving up the sport you love to stop the terrorists from destroying America.

For the sake of brevity, I’ll just say that post-ternal stakes are the stakes for the reader if they don’t finish the story. Confusion, blue balls, or a dearth of knowledge regarding the dangers of radon are all common post-ternal stakes. If your reader isn’t experiencing anything like this after they stop reading your book, it’s most likely your stakes aren’t high enough.

Here are a few steps you can take to ensure you’re raising the stakes correctly.

Step One: Add a Ticking Clock

A lot of people ask me, John, how can I raise the stakes in my writing. Well, you can always start by adding a ticking clock. Your character doesn’t have to be aware of a time limit but your reader should be. There should be some time frame in which the character needs to achieve their goal. It doesn’t have to be a clock, obviously. You could use an egg timer, a stopwatch, an hourglass, a Chippendales calendar, a sundial, a marine chronometer, or the photon absorption by transitions between the two hyperfine ground states of caesium-133 atoms 

Or find other ways to indicate a time limit. If you’re writing a thriller, trap your characters in a place where, if they don’t leave soon, they’ll never make it out alive. Like Baltimore.

Step Two: Combine internal and external stakes

Create scenarios in which your character has stakes in multiple-levels. In the Lord of the Rings, the external stakes for Frodo is that if he doesn’t destroy the ring, all of Middle Earth will fall into darkness. But on a personal level, if he doesn’t set off on this quest, people will realize how gay he is.

To give another example, if your character is trying to defuse a bomb in an elementary school, maybe focus on the guilt they still feel about all those bombs they made in their young and wild years.  

Step Three: Proportionality matters

Not all books need to escalate to world-ending stakes. It should escalate in proportion with your characters and the goals you’ve set up for them. If it’s a coming of age story set in a small town, you could go with this: If we don’t raise enough money, they’re going to tear down this teen rec center and turn it into a wildlife refuge. In one short story I wrote called “Action News” the stakes were simply whether or not an all-male local news broadcast team would have good ratings.

Step Four: Don’t forget about positive consequences

So far, we’ve focused on negative consequences, what a character risks losing. But we can’t forget why we want our reader to root for our characters. Getting laid is a great option. As readers, your audience is likely undesirable and sexually dormant and therefore rely on books for satisfaction.

Step Five: Create moral no-win scenarios

These are some of the most compelling scenarios in all of fiction. Put your characters in awkward situations where, no matter what they chose, something bad will happen. You could write about a New York City cop who’s torn between maintaining a vibrant, diverse community with lots of great authentic ethnic cuisines and terrorizing minorities like all his experience and training has told him to. Or you could do something like Batman, where he has to decide whether or not keeping the streets of Gotham safe justifies brainwashing and sexually enslaving a young man to help him do it.