Dating : How to Hook a Reader on the First Page

2. Genre

You may be thinking, “wait, isn’t this what my cover letter is for?” Even though you need to establish in a query letter to an agent what genre your writing in, your first page is what showcases the specific subgenre of the story. Is this going to be a “magical girls rebelling against nazis” story, or maybe a “sword and sorcery meets queer romance” story? The first page is where you promise the reader they’re going to enjoy your book, because they are into that subgenre.

One way to establish genre is by word choice and using jargon, like in this example:

My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year. That’ll make it almost exactly twelve years. Now I know my being a carer so long isn’t necessarily because they think I’m fantastic at what I do. There are some really good carers who’ve been told to stop after just two or three years. And I can think of one carer at least who went on for all of fourteen years despite being a complete waste of space. So I’m not trying to boast. But then I do nkow for a fact they’ve been pleased with my work, and by and large, I have too. My donors have always tended to do much better than expected. Their recovery times have been impressive, and hardly any of them ahve been classified as “agitated,” even before fourth donation.

(from Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro)

Immediately we know that there are “carers” and “donors” in this world. We don’t yet understand what these terms mean exactly, but we know we’re not dealing with your everyday story set in today’s world.

3. Stakes

This is perhaps the hardest to achieve of the four fundamentals of the first page promise. It’s the one that writers constantly struggle with hitting head-on.

Ali Herring has a fantastic diagram on her website describing stakes and plot arc. The stakes are essentially why the story matters to your character at this very moment. They demonstrate why the story opens where it does (often in medias res). Another way of looking at stakes is by plot: There are larger, over-arching plots that relate to the bigger world, there are external stakes (the actions and things happening to the character), and then there are interior personal stakes(the internal struggles) and exterior personal stakes (the character’s relationship with others).

Sometimes a story starts where it does because it’s the beginning of a landslide, the place where it all began. But sometimes the story follows a character looking back on their life. Either way, the reader needs to know a hint at the stakes of the situation.

My life fell apart when I was sixteen. Papa died. He had such a strong heart, yet he died. Was it the heat and smoke from his blacksmithing shop? It’s true that nothing could take him from his work, his art. He loved to make the metal bend, to obey him. But his work only seemed to strengthen him; he was so happy in his shop. So what was it that killed him? To this day I can’t be sure. I hope it had nothing to do with me or what I did back then.

(From Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor)

Nnedi Okorafor’s story is set in post-apocalyptic Africa, and the heart of the tale is the main character’s struggle to achieve her destiny. The plot begins right here, on the first page.

I will also say that stakes can change based on the type of story you’re telling. Short stories have more wiggle room than novels. Sometimes stakes are small and soft, sometimes they come blazing onto the page in gunfights and explosions. It just depends on the story.

4. One Burning Question

The last thing your first page needs is a question — a mystery. This is the thing that ensures your reader wants to keep reading.

We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball nets were still in place, though the nets were gone. A balcony ran around the room, for the spectators, and I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls, felt-skirted as I knew from pictures, later in miniskirts, then pants, then in one earring, spiky green-streaked hair. Dances would have been held there; the music lingered, a palimpsest of unheard sound, style upon style, an undercurrent of drums, a forlorn wail, garlands made of tissue-paper flowers, cardboard devils, a revolving ball of mirrors, powdering the dancers with a snow of light.

There was old sex in the room and loneliness, and expectation of something without a shape or name. I remember that yearning for something that was always about to happen and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then, in the small of the back, or out back, in the parking lot, or in the television room with the sound turned down and only the pictures flickering over lifting flesh.

(From The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood)

Writers struggle with this because they want to bring up lots of questions at first, to keep the readers intrigued. But really, you only need one burning question to keep a reader engaged. In the above passage, the one question the reader wants to know is why are women being kept in this gym? And the answer is pretty explosive.

If you include these four fundamentals in your first page, you’ll be making a promise to your reader. The promise says “this is the kind of book you’re getting into.” There can be surprises along the way, but you have to live up to the greatness of that first page.

And that’s where all the fun comes in as a writer.