Grace Greenway and Kari Storin.
If you use these same methods in your own writing, there are a few basic guidelines to follow.
A brief opening
Every writer is different. Some tend to open with an anecdote at the beginning (or the end) of their stories. It is often the first line that drives the reader along.
A short opening will help your reader understand why the story is being told. A good example would be:
Cynthia and I woke up in the desert from a thunderstorm. Our car lay empty and broken in its garage.
What are your first thoughts when you’re reading this? Are they, “what the heck happened?” And if so, what was your initial reaction?
“Wow, this is cool!” And then you’re off into a story.
A longer opening should be more dramatic than that. Here are six great intro chapters.
The first is this one for the book of the same name by Michael Connelly.
One morning, on an idyllic summer Saturday, six kids woke up from the beach in a remote island, having never met before. One of those kids was one of the island’s very first residents, and a strange, mysterious thing had happened to her…
That girl’s life changed forever… She was a boy and her identity remained invisible… The other five kids were her roommates, or neighbors sometimes…”they were never home the night Diana died” she wrote.
From there, the intro chapters go in circles. How long do it take for us to empathize with the point being made? Can we read their reaction? Are we able to find the sense of relief our characters have about being a weird new kid in town?
I don’t have a lot of time to make intro chapters. I mostly prefer to start with a short narrative section about the setting. Here is the start to the book The Boy in the Purple Hoodie by Charles W. Munke and David E. L. Sutter.
…They did not know their names, even themselves. Not until they had had their first meal of the day….
This is the story of eight-year-old J.T., his best friend D.B., and their friendship on a suburban farm in the American South.
They eat, but they also discuss how to prepare “pot