How to Start a Novel, From the First Line to the End of Chapter One

How to start a novel, in short: open on a particular character in a particular situation, in a voice worth following, with something already wrong or about to change, so the first page raises a question the reader wants answered. Everything else in a good first chapter (the setting, the backstory, the rules of the world) can arrive later, once the reader cares.

This page covers the opening of the book itself: the first line, the first page and the first chapter. The famous first lines below were checked in the texts, and the advice is quoted from the writers who gave it, including Elmore Leonard, Kurt Vonnegut and the literary agent Noah Lukeman. If you are looking for the whole process of writing a book, from idea to finished draft, that is how to write a novel.

What Should the First Chapter of a Novel Do?

A first chapter has four jobs, and the best openings do several at once.

1. Introduce someone to follow. Usually the main character, doing something, with a want the reader can see.
2. Set the voice. The reader learns on the first page how this book talks: dry, warm, frightened, funny.
3. Put something in motion. A problem, a change, a question. The story is already under way, or about to be.
4. Make a promise. The opening tells the reader what kind of book this is. A murder mystery that opens like a romance has broken its promise by chapter three.

Kurt Vonnegut's first rule of creative writing is the reason all four matter. In the introduction to Bagombo Snuff Box (1999): "Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted." A reader opening your book is that stranger, and so is an agent. Noah Lukeman, a literary agent, puts it bluntly in The First Five Pages (2000): "Agents and editors don't read manuscripts to enjoy them; they read solely with the goal of getting through the pile". The opening is where they decide whether to keep going.

How Do You Write a Good First Line?

A good first line makes the reader want the second one. It does that in one of a few ways, and the classics show each of them.

Two of these break popular rules. Orwell opens with the weather, and Kafka opens with a man waking up. Both work because the weather and the waking are not the point: the thirteenth stroke of the clock and the transformation are. A rule about openings is usually a warning about the lazy version of something, not a ban.

The first line doesn't have to be quotable. Most good novels open on a plain sentence that puts a person somewhere, doing something. Write a serviceable one now and come back to it when the book is finished, because only then do you know what it has to promise.

Where Should a Novel Start?

As late as you can, while still letting the reader understand what is happening. Vonnegut's fifth rule is "Start as close to the end as possible." He was writing about short stories, but the principle holds for novels: begin near the change, not years before it.

In practice, that usually means one of three starting points.

• Just before the change. A scene of the character's normal life, with a problem already in it, and the event that upsets everything close behind. Where that event falls is the question of the inciting incident, which needs to come early in the book, though not always on page one.
• On the change itself. The book opens on the day everything goes wrong, as Metamorphosis does.
• In the middle of things. The story is already well under way, and what came before is told later. This is opening in medias res, Horace's advice from the Ars Poetica, and it brings its own problem of how to handle the backstory.

Vonnegut's eighth rule pulls the other way, and it is worth knowing too: "Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense." A late start is not a licence to confuse. The reader can be kept waiting for answers, but not for the basic facts of who, where and what is going on.

What Should You Avoid in the Opening of a Novel?

These are the openings agents and teachers warn about most. Each one can be made to work, but each fails more often than it succeeds.

• Weather, with nobody in it. Elmore Leonard's first rule, from his 10 Rules of Writing: "Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people." Read the whole rule: his target is atmosphere without a person, and he names exceptions.
• Waking up. An alarm, a stretch, a look in the mirror. It is the moment before the story starts. Kafka gets away with it because the character wakes up transformed.
• A dream. Opening on a dream the reader takes for real, then revealing it, spends the reader's trust on page one.
• Backstory first. Pages of history before anything happens. The reader has no reason yet to care about the past of a person they have just met. Showing rather than telling the character's situation is usually the fix.
• A prologue doing chapter one's job. Leonard's second rule is "Avoid prologues", and he explains that "A prologue in a novel is backstory". A prologue can earn its place, but not as a way to delay the real start.
• Too many names. Six characters introduced in the first two pages, none of them distinct. Start with one or two.
• A stranger in an action scene. A chase or a fight with someone the reader knows nothing about is noise, not tension. The reader needs to know who to worry about.

Who Wrote "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night"?

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, as the first words of his novel Paul Clifford (1830). It has become the standard example of how not to start a novel, and the full sentence explains why. The Project Gutenberg text reads:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

That is nearly sixty words of weather before a person appears, with the setting tucked into brackets halfway through. Leonard's first rule describes it exactly.

Three things about the line are often got wrong.

• It isn't Snoopy's. Charles Schulz's Snoopy borrowed it. The Charles M. Schulz Museum says "Snoopy began his writing career in July 1965" with the line "originally penned by English novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton".
• It isn't only a joke. Madeleine L'Engle opened A Wrinkle in Time (1962) with the same words, and a person arrives in the next sentence: "In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry". The weather is a mood around a character, which is the version Leonard allows.
• The contest didn't start in 1982. The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, for the worst opening sentence of an imaginary novel, is often dated to 1982. Its founder, Scott Rice, wrote in July 2025, announcing that it had ended: "When I initiated the competition in 1983, inviting entrants to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels".

A Worked Example

Nell is a locksmith in a small coastal town. She is called to open a safe in a house where the owner has just died. Inside the safe is a photograph of Nell, aged six, that she has never seen.

Here are two openings for the same first scene.

Opening A: "It was raining in Harwick, the grey kind of rain that never quite stops. The sea was the colour of slate, and the gulls had given up."

Opening B: "The safe had been dead longer than its owner, and Nell had it open in four minutes."

Opening A is weather, and nobody is in it. It may be well written, but the reader learns nothing about who the book is about or what is happening. It is the opening Leonard warns against.

Opening B puts a person in a situation in the first sentence: a skill (she's quick), a voice (dry, a little grim), a death, and a door about to open. The rain can still appear, as Nell's reaction to it on the walk up to the house. The photograph should come by the end of the first scene. That is the question the book will answer, and the first chapter should end with Nell deciding to find out who kept it.

How Do You Start a Novel in Deckle?

Deckle is a novel-writing app, and its Outliner is a board of cards, one for every document in the book, each with a synopsis. Its Split Editor puts two documents side by side. Together they make it easy to draft two openings and choose between them on the page, not in your head.

1. Open the Outliner on the Draft and add two scenes with Add › Scene. Call them "Opening A" and "Opening B".
2. In each synopsis, write what that version of the opening does: "The weather first, then Nell" and "Nell opens the safe".
3. Open each card and write its first paragraph.
4. Click the Split Editor icon in the icon rail on the left. A second pane opens. Click into it, then click the other opening in the Binder, and the two versions sit side by side. Both panes are editable.
5. Read them against each other. Which one has a person in the first line? Which one raises a question? Which one sounds like the rest of the book?
6. Keep the winner. Drag its card to the front of the board by its grip (Drag to reorder, in the card's top right corner), and right-click the other in the Binder and choose Move to Trash. The Trash keeps it if you change your mind.

The Split Editor is also the way to check an opening against the last chapter, once the book is drafted, to see whether the first page makes the promise the ending keeps. If the opening turns out to start too early, the scenes can be reordered on the Outliner without retyping a word.

Common Mistakes

• Polishing the first page before the book exists. The opening is easier to write once you know the ending. Draft a plain one and move on.
• Starting too early. If chapter two is where the story starts, cut chapter one and fold anything essential into what follows. Margaret Atwood's advice, in the Guardian's writers' rules (2010), for a writer who is stuck: "Change the opening page."
• Mistaking action for tension. A fight on page one is not a hook if the reader doesn't know who to care about.
• Explaining everything. The reader needs to follow what is happening, not the whole history. Save the rest.
• A false promise. An opening in a different genre, tone or point of view from the rest of the book misleads the reader. If the first chapter is in a different point of view from the rest, it needs a reason.
• Treating the rules as laws. Orwell opened with weather, and Kafka with a man waking up. Vonnegut, after giving his eight rules, said Flannery O'Connor "broke practically every one of my rules but the first."

Sources

Retrieved 26 October 2026.

• Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box (Putnam, 1999), introduction, "Creative Writing 101", rules 1, 5 and 8, read through Open Library's search inside (archive.org).
• Noah Lukeman, The First Five Pages (Fireside, 2000), read through Open Library's search inside (archive.org).
• Elmore Leonard, Margaret Atwood and others, Ten rules for writing fiction, The Guardian, 20 February 2010; Leonard's rules first appeared in The New York Times, 16 July 2001, and as Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing (William Morrow, 2007).
• Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830), chapter 1 (Project Gutenberg).
• Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851), chapter 1 (Project Gutenberg).
• Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813), chapter 1 (Project Gutenberg).
• Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, translated by Constance Garnett, Part 1, chapter 1 (Project Gutenberg).
• Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis, translated by David Wyllie, part I (Project Gutenberg).
• Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850), chapter 1 (Project Gutenberg).
• George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Part 1, chapter 1 (Project Gutenberg Australia).
• Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (1962), chapter 1, read through Open Library's search inside (archive.org).
• It Was a Dark and Stormy Night, Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center.
• Scott Rice, announcement of the end of the contest, July 2025, The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.