Attack — The point in the story’s chronology at which the telling begins. A dramaturgical term; distinct from the opening pages, which are the text that results from the choice.
Contract (narrative) — An obligation the opening pages create in the reader, which the remainder of the book must honour. Used in this chapter as a diagnostic category rather than a formal-critical claim.
Contextual frame — Emmott’s term for the reader’s running mental record of who is present in a scene and where, maintained across sentences. Failure to bind characters to frames produces the unanchored opening (§8.8).
Exposition — Information about antecedents necessary to understand the present action. A category of content, not a location in the text.
Free indirect style — Narration in the third person whose diction and judgement are contaminated by the character’s, without quotation marks or attributive tags.
Gambit (opening) — A recognisable strategy for beginning, with characteristic costs and benefits. Twelve are tabulated at §6.5.
Hairline crack — The smallest deviation from routine sufficient to answer “why now”. §6.6.
Hermeneutic code — Barthes’s term for the narrative mechanism of posing an enigma and delaying its resolution.
Hook — The arresting first line or paragraph. One instrument within the opening’s task, not a synonym for it.
In medias res — Beginning inside action already under way, deferring antecedents. From Horace’s Ars Poetica.
Incipit — The opening words of a text, considered as a citable unit.
Multiplicity — The practice of making one unit of text discharge several narrative functions simultaneously. §5.
Normalisation — Establishing a world’s rules by delivering them as subordinate information inside a sentence about something else, unremarked by the viewpoint character. §4.2.
Novum — Suvin’s term for the validated novelty distinguishing a science-fictional world from the empirical one.
Orientation — The reader’s acquisition of a stable frame: who, where, when, and what counts as normal. A reader state, which exposition may or may not produce.
Paratext — Genette’s term for the apparatus surrounding a text — title, cover, jacket copy, epigraph, preface — that conditions its reception without belonging to the narrative.
Primacy effect — The disproportionate influence of early information on the interpretation of later information. Asch (1946); Perry (1979).
Privileged position — Rabinowitz’s term for locations in a text — titles, first and last sentences, chapter boundaries — that readers automatically treat as significant.
Pull-forward question — The enigma or expectation that carries a reader from the opening to the next page and beyond.
Rules of notice — Rabinowitz’s tacit conventions determining which textual elements readers treat as significant.
Situation model — In discourse psychology, the reader’s mental representation of the state of affairs a text describes, tracked across dimensions of protagonist, space, time, causality and intentionality.
Threshold problem — This chapter’s term for the structural asymmetry by which the opening pages must generate reader trust without any accumulated investment to draw on. §1.1.
Transportation — Gerrig’s, and Green and Brock’s, term for the absorbed state of narrative engagement; a threshold phenomenon with a start-up cost.
Zero-context problem — The condition under which the opening pages operate: all contracts must be opened using only their own resources. §3.7.