How to start-off your novel on the perfect note

Bookish Devil
Nov 1 · 6 min read

A small tip for writers to start off their novel on an impressive note to hook the readers

Photo Credits Pixabay

When a writer reads an article about writing, he/she would definitely check the credentials of the person who posted it in the first place. Tips and Tricks coming from a well-known/established persona in the writing field are touted to be trust-worthy and practical when compared to what the relatively less experienced writers like me preach. I might not be a good writer, but I’m a good reader. I’ve read more than 500 books in the past 5 years and over the course of time, I’ve gleaned a thing or two about the art.

There are some books that impress you right from the start and then there are some which take its own time bloom. Unfortunately, readers of today aren’t patient enough to sit and watch the story blossom into something beautiful.

When they are at a book store or scouring through heaps of books online, they select a book based on how the first few chapters are written. If it doesn’t suit their liking, they simply skip and proceed to pick out another one.

So, what exactly are the readers looking for when they open a book? A reader myself, I look for the following aspects in a book that has a direct influence on my decision to either buy or skip that book.

  1. Chapter Length
  2. Prose
  3. Text Size, Spacing, and style
  4. Story Conflict

Now let us dig deep and discuss how each of the above-mentioned points influences or impresses the person who is leafing through the book.

  1. Chapter Length:

If you think chapter-length has nothing to do with a person’s interest to read the book, then you’re wrong.

According to a study by Microsoft, the average human being now has an attention span of eight seconds. This is a sharp decrease from the average attention span of 12 seconds in the year 2000. More shocking, perhaps, is the fact that research from Jampp found that human attention span decreases by a whopping 88 percent every year.

A mere 8 seconds of attention span. Just let that sink in.

So what does this mean to writers?

Simple, If you cannot start off your book on a compelling note, chances are that your work will go unread by the millions of readers out there.

People can never do an activity continuously for hours no matter how much the nature of it appeals to them. Humans are just humans. Not machines to process so much data and churn out the desired results day in day out.

Likewise, no matter how much you love reading, there would come a point in time where you’d get tired of going through 100s of pages, processing so much information without any breaks to let off steam.

In my opinion, the ideal length of a chapter should be anything between 3–8 pages but not more than that. Psychologically, readers get this small sense of achievement when they hit milestones(a new chapter) that are peppered along the path of their reading journey. Flipping over a page and finding that we have reached the end of it instills us with a positive feeling of progress. Small, but powerful enough to motivate us into reading the subsequent chapters.

If a chapter is too long, one might lose attention midway and personally, there were many instances in which I had to re-read an entire page again just because my mind was elsewhere while I was skimming through it.

So, when a person opens your book and finds the first chapter to be 20 pages long, he/she would definitely feel daunted and might assume that the book would turn out to be a ‘hard’, ‘time-consuming’, ‘difficult’ read.

2. Prose:

Let me tell you this first, your prose need not be eye-catching or beautiful. It must be simple enough for people of all ages to understand and glean what you’re trying to convey. If you want to show off your vocabulary prowess by writing content that compels people to have a thesaurus with them all the time, it means you’re just digging your own grave.

To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.

Aristotle

People read books to unwind after a long day’s work. Don’t impart more stress in them by writing in a seemingly complex manner. It doesn’t matter how you weave cloth, but if it doesn’t serve its intended purpose, it’s going to lie to waste.

3. Text Size, Spacing, and Style:

Good text size, adequate spacing between words, appropriate paragraph breaks, etc are some of the basic aspects that are often overseen while typing/editing a novel.

More often, authors hire freelance editors to do this job for them or it’s the publishers who take care of these. But if you are looking to self publish, then you have to consult with an editor to know the basics of typesetting.

Never try to publish your book without making sure that the book adheres to the common standards in the print industry.

Check out the following links for more information about the standards of book size, typography, etc,

Reedsy|Wiki

4. Story Conflict:

Conflicts, Drama, Antagonism.

Who doesn’t love these elements in a novel?

Assuming that your book has all the possible elements of entertainment if you don’t know how to showcase the potential of your book to the readers in the first few pages, you’re bound to fail. For people don’t have the time to read 4,5 chapters to get into the book and notice it’s beauty.

That’s why it is essential to start off your novel by introducing a conflict in the life of your protagonist. I recently saw a tweet made by Robert Cargill and he has perfectly put down a critical point that writers should keep in mind while writing the initial chapters.

Wanna hook a reader right into your story? Introduce your protagantist in a situation in which they make a small, but interesting choice. It doesn’t have to affect the story in any way, but seeing them do something a little different by choice makes them interesting.

C.Robert Cargill

Those first few chapters must show a glimpse of what your book has to offer. Avoid spending too much time elaborating on the character’s back story or about the setting/verse. Instead, start with a conflict or action and then slowly weave the other material into the story here and there.

The beginning of H.G.Well’s ‘The Invisible Man’ illustrates this point well.

The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand.

Doesn’t that elicit some sort of curiosity in you? Your mind would be brimming with questions about this stranger.

Who is he? Why is he having a black portmanteau in his hand? Where is he coming from? Did he kill someone?

The readers should be greeted with something of this sort for them to actually take your book seriously. Start off in an intriguing note and get them curious.

Bottom-line: *

When you read tips like the ones I’ve written above, it’s not necessary that you should adopt each and every one of them while writing your novel. These are just generic tips. They aren’t the norms or standards based on which you have to write the story. You can take home the points which appeal to you and simply ignore the ones which don’t make sense.

Every single person is unique and different. So are the content they write. So it’s very unfair to judge what’s wrong and what’s inappropriate about the content. But it’s never wrong to read tips like these and contemplate the possible tweaks you can make to your book for it to turn out to be a hit.

Bookish Devil

Written by

an Individual who is striving to create something from nothing. A little ‘clap’ here will help me go a long way in life.

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