The working definition
The opening pages are the first stretch of the main narrative: Chapter One, or whatever comes immediately after a prologue. They must work as a real scene, in which a character wants something and meets resistance, and at the same time give the reader her first experience of the book’s voice, world, genre and stakes, before any of these has earned the benefit of the doubt. Three phrases in the definition carry its weight. Main narrative means that the opening begins where the book’s primary line of time begins; epigraphs, maps, lists of characters and prologues come before it and change the conditions under which it is read without being part of it. At the same time names the difficulty, which is not that any one obligation is hard but that all of them fall due together, in a small space. And before any has earned the benefit of the doubt is the zero-context condition: the reader has no investment to draw on, no frame into which new information can be filed, and no evidence yet that reading on will be rewarded.
How long is the opening?
No page count follows from principle, and any number is a convention. Three spans are in use, and they answer different questions.
| Span | Typical extent | The question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| First line or paragraph | 1 to 100 words | Does it arrest the reader? |
| First page or two | about 250 to 700 words | Are the obligations opened? |
| First chapter or scene | about 1,500 to 4,000 words | Are they honoured, and is the book’s engine started? |
This chapter treats the middle span as primary, because it is the span over which every obligation must at least be begun, and because it is roughly what an agent’s first look, a bookshop browse or an online preview samples. The working rule is that the obligations are opened within two pages and honoured within the first chapter. Opening an obligation means giving the reader enough to form an expectation; honouring it means confirming that the expectation was right.
The hook is a tool, not the job
The hook is the arresting first line or paragraph, and confusing it with the opening produces a recognisable draft: a first sentence that seizes attention and three pages that do nothing else. A hook buys attention, which lasts a paragraph; what carries a reader to page twenty is trust, which the rest of the opening must earn. Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) begins This is the saddest story I have ever heard, and the sentence hooks, but it also sets up a narrator speaking in retrospect, an emotional register, a claim to authority and, in the word heard where lived would be expected, the doubt about his reliability on which the novel turns. Strong first sentences hook as a by-product of that other work. The reverse failure, an opening so anxious to hook that it front-loads an event the book cannot sustain, is the borrowed hook in Failure Patterns.
Adjacent terms
Several neighbouring words are used as if they meant the opening. The incipit, a term from bibliography, is the opening words of a text, a narrower unit useful when a first line is treated as a citable object. The attack, a term from dramaturgy (the craft of building plays), is the point in the story’s chronology at which the telling begins, and it decides what the opening pages show. Exposition is information about what came before, the backstory, the world and the situation needed to understand the present action; it is a kind of content spread through a book, not a place in it. Orientation is the reader’s state of having a stable frame, knowing who, where, when and what is normal, which exposition may or may not produce. A cold open, a term from television, begins inside a scene already running and defers all framing; it is one way of beginning in the middle, not a synonym for it. And paratext, Gérard Genette’s word for everything around a text that conditions its reading, covers the title, the cover, the jacket copy and the rest.
What this chapter leaves to others
The prologue, a separated unit in another time, voice or vantage, belongs to The Prologue (Chapter 10), whose standard is stricter because the reader must be persuaded that the detour was needed. The openings of later chapters, where the reader arrives already oriented, belong to The Chapter Break (Chapter 6), and the ending, the opening’s formal inverse, to The Ending (Chapter 16). Who carries the viewpoint, and when it changes, belongs to The Viewpoint Shift (Chapter 13); books built from several timelines to Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture (Chapter 8); and the opening of a later volume in a series to Series and Genre (Chapter 17).
See also: the Reference definitions, with the adjacent terms in a table.