Recipe for Opening a Novel

It seems I’m a glutton for punishment. After a series of rejections, I’m submitting my novel to agents again. Yes, I’m sorry to say that none of the submissions I made in December 2023 bore any fruit. So in February I turned to a writing consultancy and paid for my submission package to be reviewed. The reviewer, an experienced agent, said my covering letter and my synopsis were fine, but my first chapter wasn’t a good starting point for the book. In fact, she recommended that my second chapter become the opening of the book. This feedback was both helpful and confusing. My second chapter had in fact been the opening of the book until a year ago. My full manuscript was then reviewed by a published novelist who recommended inserting a new action-oriented opening chapter to spice up the story. So I reflected on these two bits of contradictory advice and began editing again.

I did some reading on what an opening chapter has to achieve. In short it needs to introduce the protagonist, their narrative style, the setting and the nature of the story. But most of all, it needs to keep the reader reading. This is usually done by introducing some sort of challenge that the protagonist has to respond to. In other words, it sets up the question – what happens next?

My action-oriented first chapter was very good on challenge, narrative style and setting, but much less so on introducing the protagonist. Then I had an insight. Why should the reader care about what’s happening to the protagonist when they don’t know who they are? So I decided to make my second chapter the opening of the book. It was much better at introducing the protagonist and their world. I also tightened up the story so that the first challenge arrives sooner (on page 2) and is then followed up by another challenge. I think these revisions have improved the opening of the novel a great deal. But, I suppose the proof of the pudding is in the responses I now get from agents.