Podcast: The Promise of Your First Page
With anne hawley & Rachelle Ramirez
Developmental editors Anne Hawley and Rachelle Ramirez break down what your first page must promise—and how to deliver it for your ideal reader. From raising the right questions to dodging common traps (info dumps, action-for-action’s-sake), you’ll get practical ways to craft an opening that compels page turns and signals the book you actually wrote.
What you’ll learn
Why your first page is a promise—and how to make the right one
How to define and hook your ideal reader (not “everyone”)
When to open with action vs. narration, and why “start in action” is often misapplied
Raising mystery and intrigue without confusing the reader
The truth about “show, don’t tell” on page one
Where the inciting incident belongs (and when it doesn’t)
Avoiding info dumps while still orienting the reader
When to stop polishing page one—and when to return to it
Simple exercises to sharpen your opening (including hand-copying a favorite first page)
How to tailor your opening for agents and genre expectations
Try this
Pull three novels you love. Hand-copy their first pages. Mark where they raise questions, slip in exposition, and introduce desire or problem.
Rewrite your first 300 words to gut-check: Does your first page promise the book you actually wrote?
Mentioned
Ursula K. Le Guin (on word choice and deliberate narration)
Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (compelling “unlikable” protagonist)
“It was a dark and stormy night” (Bulwer-Lytton) as an example of permissible telling
Quote
“Your job as a fiction writer is to raise questions. Why I turn the page is because there’s a question in my mind.”
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transcript
Anne Hawley: Have you ever had that sinking feeling that your story doesn't start off with a bang? If you have, this one's for you. Hello and welcome to the Write Anyway podcast from pages and platforms and the Happily Ever Author Club. I'm Anne Hawley, and in today's episode, my fellow developmental editor, Rachelle Ramirez and I dig into what makes a great first page.
So let's get to it.
Rachelle Ramirez: Hello, Anne. How are you?
Anne Hawley: Hi, Rachelle.
Rachelle Ramirez: I'm happy to talk to you today about a big question that comes up over and over for my clients. And I wanted to hear what your thoughts are on the first page, writing your first page. So what are generally, what are your clients' concerns for their first page when they come to you?
Anne Hawley: My study of this subject began with a client who when I spoke to her. She wanted to know why agents weren't responding to her submissions, which involved, the first few pages or first 50 or whatever agents asked for. And she said I think it's because my first page just isn't hooking 'em.
It's not hooking 'em. How can I make my first page Hookier? And I said, who do you want your first page to appeal to? Who is in your intended audience? And she says, everyone, my book is for everyone. She was expressing a desire to have lots of sales for her book to reach as many readers as it possibly can.
Who doesn't want that? That's perfectly normal and ordinary, but the first thing to understand is that your book isn't going to appeal to everyone. No book appeals to everyone, and therefore trying to write a first page that hooks everyone is wasted effort.
So the bigger question is, who exactly do you want your book and therefore the first page of your book to appeal to and to hook and draw in?
It's your ideal reader. And who is your ideal reader? Basically yourself.
I think we all write because we want to write something like what we have loved reading. We want to write something that we would love reading, and therefore we are looking to hook readers very much like ourselves. So that's the first thing. There's no one formula that's going to hook every kind of reader. What kind of books do you like to read, is what kind of books you're probably writing and therefore how you hook the reader is gonna change depending on what kind of book that you're writing.
For example, let's say you're writing a real plot driven type of story, thriller. Action story, big crime type of story where it's more about the plot than about the character development. Then you're going to want to hook the reader with the promise that this is a plotty story.
You want plot elements in that first page. You want to introduce at least one main plot question about who did it? What's gonna happen? How did they get into this situation? Those types of questions.
If you're writing a more character driven type of story, say a worldview, validation type of story that's more on the internal development side, then you're going to want to raise questions in the reader of who is this person? What do they want, why do they want it?
So those are ways of thinking about, depending on what you're writing, what is your aim in that first page? There is no one formula for that.
Rachelle Ramirez: And what is the role of the first page? What might people be looking for when they're determining whether or not their first page works? What does it need to do?
Anne Hawley: It's a promise. It needs to promise the reader what the book is going to be about, what their reading experience is going to be. It should signal what kind of book they have in their hands beyond just what might have been printed on the back cover, the blurb, book reviews, that the potential reader may have read. You, the reader are standing in the bookstore and you've heard something about this book. So you take it off the shelf and you open it up and you read. What do you read? The first page, right? And you as the reader are going to determine from that, whether you're gonna turn that page, buy that book, check that book outta the library, keep reading.
So it had better promise the experience that is coming in the next 250 or 300 pages , and not promise something that isn't there. One of the problems that I see in client work is they're so intent on providing a action-based opening line. That first line has gotta be really like, wow, drop me right into the action.
And if it's not primarily an action story, what are you doing? Promise me that this is going to be an action story, then deliver a very plot driven action story. But if you as a writer are afraid of giving a little narration, a little setup, some background, a little voice of the narrator some description of the setting, something like that-- if you're afraid of that because somewhere you heard that every scene has to begin right in the action, rethink that.
Because that's not true. And I think if people who are worrying about their first page or have a manuscript that they're working through to try and get that first page really tight, go and look at books that you have recently loved. Don't go back too far in time, but stick with fairly recent times, say the last 20 years. And you will notice that very few really popular novels start right in the middle of an action scene.
there are exceptions, of course, and that's certainly your prerogative, but you will notice that they're usually giving a little narration, a little scene setting, draw you in slowly , narrow down to the point of view of your point of view, character, that type of thing. So go and look at what other writers have done.
Rachelle Ramirez: And what about what I think of as the opposite of that, which is " oh, but I need to have all this on the first page so the reader knows these things so that then I can start my story."
Anne Hawley: Yeah. Those are the things that the writer needed to know to start their story, not that the reader needs to know to read it.
This is something I harp on a lot. Your job as a fiction writer is to raise questions. Why I turn the page is 'cause there's a question in my mind and I'm waiting to see what the answer might be.
So the sense that I can't start this story until the reader has all this background or understands a whole bunch about the characters and their world and the setting is answering questions that the reader hasn't even thought to ask yet. Now, there are some exceptions. Typically in fantasy set in the world that the author has created themselves, you can have a little bit of orienting the reader to the world: that it's in outer space or that it's in a desert or a world of islands in the ocean. You can set that up so that's not in the way of the reader understanding why the character that you introduce in the next paragraph is on a boat going between two islands, or on a spaceship.
But you don't need to explain the whole history, geography, science in the opening. You can dole that out if it's important to the story later on. Because if you give that on your first page, what you're promising is like, what? A technical manual? That's probably not what you're writing.
Rachelle Ramirez: and what about the idea that I've heard a lot of people say is that the, oh, the inciting incident of the story needs to be on the first page.
Anne Hawley: I would say that in something like a thriller, maybe a murder mystery, it needs to be in the first chapter. Does it need to be on the first page? No, not at all. It can be, I'm not saying it can't be, but what is being incited by this incident? If I as the reader don't know why this sword fight is happening, puts you the author in the position of having to just backtrack from, he stabbed the, with his sword to explain how the fight got started and what it's about.
So you're gonna have to give that anyway and you might as well give it in order to keep the reader engaged. Let me forget myself and not be in my head, confused. You don't wanna confuse your reader.
Rachelle Ramirez: So there's a difference between raising mystery and intrigue and a question and actually confusing the reader. You're walking a line there.
Anne Hawley: You're walking a line there. And again, this goes back to who's your reader,? Let's say you are writing something that would be considered a literary novel with something of a mystery plot.
Not necessarily a crime, but there's a question being raised and the whole story is gonna revolve around this one central question. You want me as the reader to wonder, to get a feeling what that central question is, you certainly don't want to answer it anytime soon. As soon as you answer the question, it's like my interest drops.
Rachelle Ramirez: Right.
Anne Hawley: And then it becomes a little bit of an effort for me to, okay, keep going. Okay. Now we're switching point of view or something. So you better have raised a couple of questions in your opening page that are still relevant on the second page and the third page and the second chapter. And I'm gonna wonder all the way halfway through the book.
Rachelle Ramirez: Are there any other suggestions that you have for if someone wants to improve their first page, that what are some of the things that they can do?
Anne Hawley: There are three main areas. We just covered one: you raise questions. Raise questions and don't immediately answer them.
And by raising questions I just mean put something out there that creates a question in the reader's mind. I'm not talking about putting a question on the page with an actual question mark after it, but that raise questions in the reader's mind. Again, your ideal reader's mind.
The second one is to create mystery or intrigue, and you do that by dropping little specific details that make me as the reader go, why this and not that? Why did the narrator mention the, I don't know, the weather, for example? Is that gonna be important? Is the storm coming? That creates intrigue. Why does the character on the page say this particular thing that makes me wonder, are they morally deficient? Are they insane? Are they in love? Make me wonder about that character, and that raises mystery and intrigue.
And the third thing is closely related to that. You wanna make me care about the character. I don't have to love the character. I may have to just wonder about them, which goes back to mystery or intrigue, but I will only wonder about them if they come across as having a problem, a desire, some sort of issue that I, again, as your intended reader, can relate to and care about.
Rachelle Ramirez: So does your protagonist or your character on the first page need to be likable?
Anne Hawley: No, absolutely not. They can be the most detestable person in the world. Personally speaking for myself as Annee Hawley, it's not my favorite kind of book to read about a despicable protagonist. I like to like my characters.
I'm kind of a lightweight, I like things to be nice, but for the writer and their ideal reader who does want to write about a Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl character, then go for it. I'm not supposed to like her. I'm just supposed to be like really interested in what made her so terrible.
And that can work for you. So no. Likability, absolutely not a requirement. It's only a requirement if you're writing the kind of story for the kind of reader who wants to read about a likable character. There's no universal here.
Rachelle Ramirez: And what about the idea of show Don't tell? How much exposition and how much showing, and how much telling should a first page have not have? What are your thoughts there?
Anne Hawley: I hate that rule. People misconstrue that so badly and say you should never use any exposition. I'm sorry. You can't tell a story without exposition. There has to be some, otherwise, you're writing a screenplay. And the director of photography and the actors are gonna do the exposition for you.
But you're writing a novel, presumably, and so you need some narrative, you need some narrator saying something. At a minimum, it was a dark and stormy night. I mean, that's a famous example of, Bulwer-Lytton's over the top writing. It's actually a perfectly good opening line. And you can tell some things. That's what the narrator is for, to tell the reader something.
The problem comes in, again, going back to your question about, well, the reader won't understand if I don't set up this whole scenario and explain this whole backstory. That's where the telling, not showing becomes a problem, but that's a problem because you're trying to start your story in the wrong place. You need to start the story much later than that, and then uncover those things as the story goes on, if the reader truly needs to know them. It's that big chunk of this info dump that, here's all that you must understand before you can possibly go forward with my important story.
That's just not being nice to the reader, and that's what I think really people are talking about with that show don't tell rule. You have to do some telling. You just do. And again, I will say, go look at your favorite books, and by and large, you're gonna find that there's a narrator there. The author has given some room for things to be set up, set forth, told before or in between moments of action.
As an editor, what do
Rachelle Ramirez: you think about writers really focusing on that first page? My experience has been that a lot of writers are so focused on the first page that they're not getting the rest of their story written. They might do the first page, first scene, or first chapter over and over again, and they don't have a first draft.
When do you decide what your first page is? How do you know? Yeah. When do you go back and edit the first page?
Anne Hawley: As I say, the first page is the promise of what the whole book is going to deliver, and you probably won't really know what you're promising until you've written the whole thing.
So you may have an idea of an opening moment. Your story may have come to you as a spark of, oh, I can just, right there, there's these two characters and they're in this situation. And then the whole story emerges from that. And that's fine. You can keep that.
But how you craft that first page is not gonna be clear, for most of us, most of the time, until you've written the whole thing. And then you circle back and you say, okay, what questions do I wanna raise on this first page? What mysteries will I later be answering or solving? What character change is going to happen before the end?
You're gonna signal all that and you might not know that right at first. And another point about that is we've all read novels, professionally published novels, where clearly the author really worked that first scene of his in the first three or four chapters, maybe, that was their submission piece. And the publisher didn't really do much editing for them after that. And so the rest of the novel kind of peters out or goes flat because they overworked the beginning without it really reflecting a thoughtful rest of the story. You see that critique all the time. Go on Good reads.
You'll see all, the first chapter was great, and then it went to hell. Don't be that person.
Rachelle Ramirez: So the idea would be to go ahead, draft your first page, maybe draft three of them if you want, but keep drafting until you get to the end of the story. And then in the editing process, determine probably what your first page and your first chapter's gonna be.
Anne Hawley: Yeah, I think so. Especially your opening scene. And by the way, when we say first page, we're just talking about 300 words, roughly, what might be on a full book page.
I've read professionally published big bestseller novels whose first page clearly represented the author's first idea and they were just in love with the moment, the setting that came to them in that moment of inspiration. And they kept it. And , okay, the novel worked, but the first page could have been better. I'm thinking of some particular ones that got so much hype that they were marketed as bestsellers. So you've heard of it and you pick it up and you say, okay, I'm not quite sure, but because it's a big bestseller, I guess I'll keep going and give it a chance. That's for big name authors or new exciting authors that have been touted in the New York Times or whatever.
For brand new authors, especially if you're self-publishing or indie publishing, you don't have that advantage. So you give yourself the big advantage by making those first 300 words or so, just grabbers.
And they will be grabbers, not necessarily by virtue of high action, although that's a possibility, but because you have intrigued me and drawn me in with questions that you aren't yet answering, a sense of mystery or intrigue that I really am just hungry to fulfill-- i'm curious-- and some degree of empathy for the character and what they seem to be about to go through.
And you won't know all of that yourself as the writer until you finish the story. So it's not at all uncommon for writers to be rewriting their first page right up until it goes off to press.
Rachelle Ramirez: And considering that a lot of times, even if A writer thinks they know what they're writing, and has even say a full outline, that the draft and the book that they end up with may be a very different story.
Anne Hawley: I know of probably just as many writers who have ended up writing a significantly different story than they thought they were setting out to do, as I have met writers who have outlined their story and just stuck with it. Probably more.
Because the creative process of writing, especially a long form thing, like a novel, is discovery. If you have your outline that says, this character must do this here, and your character says, Uhuh, I'm gonna do this over here, and you go, no, you're not, you're losing an opportunity for wonderful creativity and discovery that's worth exploring. So you never know.
Rachelle Ramirez: Yeah. My big takeaway from what you've said here is read the first pages of novels that you loved. Read that first scene or chapter. What did they do? That's probably what you're aiming for, and I think that's an excellent idea for those who are wondering how they can incorporate these ideas into their own work.
Anne Hawley: Let me add one little rider on that, and that is an exercise that I often counsel writers to do is not just get out those three favorite novels and read that first page.
Get out those favorite novels and hand copy the first page or so because it slows your focus way down and you will start to notice specific things. I'm talking slowly because that's how slowly it goes. Specific things that the writer chose to do or not do. As you go look over here at the book and then you write, and wait a minute, I would've sworn the next word would be such and such, but, oh look, Ursula Le Guin chose a different, I wonder why she did that.
Oh, that's an, and then you start to get a feel for how a favorite author creates a compelling opening page.
Rachelle Ramirez: I think that's a great idea. Well, thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I really appreciate it and I hope this helps others with their first page and perhaps to not even worry so much about their first page, which would be great if they're still in the drafting process.
Anne Hawley: But if you have a draft and you are interested in sending it out to agents, it is important to get that opening scene really hooky, because agents are people who glance over lots of manuscripts and you do want to hook them, but even an agent you can't hook who is not interested in the kind of story that you're offering.
So make it as clear and distinctly the kind of story that you're offering and get it to the right kind of agent. You're gonna have a lot better luck than trying to appeal to all people at all times.
Rachelle Ramirez: I think that's great advice. So thank you for meeting with me today. I really appreciate it.
Anne Hawley: Thanks, Rachelle. See you next time.
If you'd like a weekly dose of writing, insight and mindset and marketing tips in your inbox, subscribe to the write anyway newsletter@pagesandplatforms.com slash subscribe. And that's it for this episode of the Write. Anyway, podcast, thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time.