Jon Samsel

The opening pages of a novel are vitally important. They must grab the reader’s attention quickly and hold it. Many browsers in bookstores turn to the first page or introduction of the book. If they like what they read they may decide to buy it then and there. If they’re bored by what they read, or the material has little interest or promise of being a good read, they will replace the book on the shelf and reach for another one.

Here are some useful questions to ask yourself when planning the introduction for your novel:

• What is the first thing I can open with in my book that will hook the reader’s attention?
• Is there some dramatic or surprise beginning I could use?
• Would a key question get attention?
• How can I make my introduction for this book different and especially appealing?

Study and read carefully the introductions used by other writers for their books. Here are a few classics worth noting:

• It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. - Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)
• Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
• You better not never tell nobody but God. - Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)
• Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. - William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
• All this happened, more or less. - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
• In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
• They shoot the white girl first. - Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)
• The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. - Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)
• He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. - Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
• Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. - Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
• When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. - James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978)

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