First Three Chapters

Choose Your Own Adventure

What do you like best about your favorite books? A few start with an immortal first line (Pride and Prejudice, A Tale of Two Cities) and others have that immortal line in the first few pages (Great Gatsby). Plenty of them don't have any great lines at all but are fun reads anyway, because we like and care about the characters. Think about what starts books like yours.

A few tips:

• If you're building a market analysis to send as part of your submission package, then check out the first three chapters of those books.
  
  
• Make checklists. (Set up main action? Check! Introduce cast of characters? Check! Introduce dark side of main characte due to hidden torment? Check!)
  
  
• Your first chapters set the stage for the main action, but you're also trying to impress a reader who doesn't know you or your skill--or your big surprise conclusion! Foreshadowing can help draw a reader toward this conclusion. It can be as simple as "If only I had known then what I know now..."
  
  
• Don't drive yourself mad listening to advice. Even if your book is totally lacking in all of the above, if you're sure that your first three chapters are the perfect way to set up your book, it probably is. For example, remember how dull the Girl With a Dragon Tattoo was for the first third? Remember how good it got? Remember how the author pulled that beginning into the last third of the book for an amazing, fascinating conclusion?
  

I need examples!

Check out the first three chapters of this book for a great example of how to do it right:

One for the Money, by Janet Evanovich (Mass-market mystery)

Evanovich does it so right that by end of the very first chapter we know and like the main character. We've met her off-and-on love interest. We've met her family and we know her locale, her attitude, and her situation. Wow! No wonder Janet Evanovich has been so hugely successful with this series. Not only are her books funny and fun, they're expertly written, set in a great fictionalized Trenton, NJ, and star a hapless, brave, and adorable heroine. If you haven't read it, borrow it. Someone you know has been reading about Stephanie Plum for the past 20 years.



I need examples!

Check out the first three chapters of this book for a great example of how to do it right: 

And Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris (Literary fiction)

"We were fractious and overpaid," begins Ferris. What a line. You can't help wanting to read more: the strange yet cunning plural narration, the evocative vocabulary, and the built-in fascination of anyone being overpaid.The first chapter is wildly overlong (at 51 pages) but in it, Ferris sets the stage for his novel, describes and introduces his cast and their conflicts, establishes the status quo and the conflicts. By the time that the third chapter is complete, we're entirely involved in this failing company and its staff. Flip to the last paragraph of chapter three. I dare you to stop reading--even if you didn't read the first three chapters, you're going to want to jump right into chapter 4.