This chapter will focus on the importance of the opening sentence.  The next will deal with the opening paragraph and chapter as a whole.

(I know I said that prologues would be next, but they will come later as this is much more important.)

If your story starts with any form of “hello, my name is” or a character waking up (especially to the sound of an alarm clock on a school day) and you submit it to a publisher or an agent, your manuscript will be rejected out of hand.

Unless your character is an alien double agent who cosplays as Peter the Great or has woken up because somebody is trying to blow their house up – and even then, you’re treading on eggshells.

There are plenty of other terrible ways to start a story, of course, but these are two deplored up and down the country by agents, publishers and readers alike, and across the pond and around the globe in America and Australia.  It probably is in other languages and cultures too, but if you want to appeal to the English-reading/speaking market, then you do have to buy into the standards of that market, because they are the standards that people expect.

One thing that all these agents and readers and publishers say that is resoundingly true, however, is this:

It does not matter how good the rest of the story is.  If chapter one – and the first paragraph of chapter one, and the first sentence of the first paragraph of chapter one – is not compelling, then you might as well not have written the rest of the book.

Chapter one is where people start.  If the interesting stuff and the good writing isn’t happening in chapter one, nobody’s going to care whether or not it happens later.  You’ve just lost 90% of your target audience.  And the reason you can’t use the excuse “but it gets better later” is because there are other stories out there where the readers won’t have to suffer through the boring stuff before it gets interesting.  If you’re not going to make your work competitive, then you’re going to lose.

There is no excuse for a bad beginning.

As Stephen King says, “an opening line should invite the reader to being the story.  It should say: Listen.  Come in here.  You want to know about this.”

TL;DR

Avoid: Complete mundanity; anything that doesn't allow for at least some reading between the lines

Also avoid: Being too long or complicated.  Alarm clocks, waking up in the morning, and character introductions.  If your reader knows your character's hair colour, eye colour, weight, height, best friend, favourite TV show by halfway through the first chapter, and the only interaction s/he has with other people is annoyance, then you're probably doing it wrong.  And avoid trying too hard.

Go for: Something relatively short.  Try to capture one of atmosphere, plot intrigue or characterisation in your opening sentence, or opening two sentences.  It's easiest to go for something that seems ordinary to start off with and then through in a curveball, either subtle or unsubtle.  Statements (e.g. "Science dictated that humans should only have two arms, and Spice Treskan had been born with three) are usually the easiest way to do this.  Either way, from the first sentence, your reader should be able to unpack much more than just the words in your sentence, which is why "my alarm clock was ringing and I was late for school" is never going to be a good opening, because there's nothing the reader can do with that and nothing that encourages the reader to actually read on.

VL;RA/Reasons for the Above

I can’t find a link now (because I’ve been having computer problems and am on a friend’s laptop and can’t access my saved pages), but I remember coming across one agent who said that by page three, most people have decided whether or not they want to read the rest of the story.  In terms of how many words you have, that’s between 1000-1500.  It’s more than you get to convince somebody to read your story from the description or the title, but it’s still not a lot and you cannot afford to waste it.  However long or short your chapter is, you have 1000-1500 words (or under that, if your chapter isn’t that long) to convince your reader that your character is worth reading about, that your story is going to be interesting, and that you write well.

If you don’t quite manage that in 1000-1500 words but the reader gives you the benefit of the doubt, then you have until the end of the chapter.  If your reader is nice and has time and you write decently, or characterise well, even if the first chapter isn’t scintillating (and if you prod them with an a/n, depending on the reader, promising that stuff gets interesting in chapter two), and if the first chapter was short (as in, 1500 words or less), then you might have chapter two to catch their attention, but about 50% of your readership will have dropped off by then anyway (and you have to make sure you deliver on your promise it’ll get interesting in chapter two or you’ll have lost them all.  If you’re very, very lucky, and you have a fabulous description and write decently, then depending on the length of your chapters (as in, if they are short), then you might be able to tempt the reader into chapter three as well.

But basically, if you don’t have anything compelling within the first 2000-4000 words of your story, particularly if you don’t have a gripping description, there is absolutely no reason for your reader to read on.  It doesn’t matter if everything else you write is amazing.  It doesn’t matter if they’ve enjoyed other stories you’ve written.  It has to be treated in isolation.  Think of your first chapter as a door-to-door salesperson.  Are you going to buy from somebody dressed really well who’s really enthusiastic about their product and who sounds like an expert on it and who speaks so eloquently you can’t figure out how to politely refuse them, or are you going to buy from the person who shows up in ripped jeans and a greasy t-shirt who stands there awkwardly and mumbles and gives you a description of their product that you can find on the internet and agrees with you when you say that there are better models?

What needs to happen in your first chapter, then?

Well, in publishing circles, you will hear the word “hook” being thrown around a lot.  The “hook” is the first sentence/first two sentences.  It’s what makes your reader perk up and think “oh?  What’s this about?”  It sets the entire tone for the rest of the story.

Yes, this is your first sentence.  It is the most important sentence in the book.  That is why you do not start with something mundane and dull that doesn’t stand out like your character waking up to the sound of their alarm clock, or your character introducing themselves (or herself, as is usually the case).  That’s not going to grab the attention.  Morning routines are boring and most people are still half asleep as they suffer through them.  They don’t want to suffer through another one in a story.  As for character introductions, the only time a character profile is acceptable is when the character is an enemy and their profile is being shown to the opposite side so that they know what they’re dealing with, or when you are planning the story.  A character introduction is more or less a character profile, and you do not put your planning into the actual story.  This is 1) because it’s an information dump, and nobody likes information dumps, and 2) because it basically screams to the reader, “hey, I can’t characterise for sh*t, so I’m just going to fling information at you and then you can come up with the character yourself, LOLZ!”  And that’s not really something you want to be doing in the first chapter, because if the reader thinks “oh, this author is really bad at characterisation”, that’s already a black mark against your story and a reason not to read on.

Let’s look at some effective first sentences from published books.  Pub quiz time!  Which books are these from?

1) Wind howled through the night, carrying a scent that would change the world.

2) It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

3) I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

4) All children, except one, grow up.

5) There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

6) It was the day my grandmother exploded.

7) It was love at first sight.

8) Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.

9) I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled.

10) Dear Anyone Who Finds This, Do not blame the drugs.

11) It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.

12) Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon, with an 8-ball of coke in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat.

13) Since it’s Sunday and it’s stopped raining, I think I’ll take a bouquet of roses to my grave.

14) It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.

15) It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried out bed of the old North Sea

These are all from pretty well known novels, many of them very well known and even classics.  I haven’t even read all of them on that list, but there is a reason why the vast majority of them will make it onto numerous lists of best first lines in fiction.  Why?  Because they’re interesting.  Even if you know the rest of the story , they make you want to read on.

Now, let’s take a look at them.

Wind howled through the night, carrying a scent that would change the world

This is the opening of the prologue for Eragon.

Why does it make you care?  Because change is coming.  Something big is going to happen.  And that should be exciting.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Okay, hands down my absolute favourite opening line of all time, even though I hated most of the rest of the book.  Why?  Because at first glance, it looks totally normal.  It actually looks dull.  Who cares about the weather and the time?

And then you read it again, and you realise that the clocks were striking thirteen.

Thirteen.

Clocks don’t strike thirteen.  They strike anywhere between one and twelve.  Not thirteen.  Something creepy is going on here.  And that feeling of unease will stick with you throughout the entirety of 1984.

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

Probably my second fav