The beginning of your story sets reader expectations for your entire book. So, you don’t want it to feel slow or dated or predictable or confusing. But there are marks you have to meet in order to keep readers on board.
Writing an exposition can be a tough balance. A good exposition should ease readers into your world, characters, and writing style without feeling boring. That’s why we’re here to help you pinpoint some goals for the beginning of your novel to help keep you on track:
Show a Normal Day
In order to show growth in your characters over the course of your novel, first you need to show who they were before their world got turned upside down. Providing your readers a baseline that is still a hook for your novel can be complicated, but that’s where the rest of this blog post comes in. First and foremost, you want to show your readers what makes your characters tick.
Set Themes in Motion
Dip your toes in the water early to give your readers plenty of time to contemplate your themes. Much like your characters, your themes should change over the course of your novel in either meaning or intensity. By activating them early on in your novel, you’re creating opportunities to show growth and story continuity.
Get Descriptive
When your readers come to your novel, they don’t know much about the setting or characters or customs of their lives. They might have an idea of the plot or inciting incident based upon the back cover blurb, but there’s very little room to describe sensory details of it all.
Dig deep early to give readers a mood, landscape, and generally similar visual understanding of key aspects of your novel like character descriptions before they’ve filled in the blanks for themselves and are shocked and confused to learn that an important aspect of the character or landscape doesn’t fit into their existing architecture.
Create Low-Level Conflict
There’s a good chance that your exposition is taking place before your inciting incident. So, a lot of conflict is at this level typically isn’t exploring the primary plot of your novel but instead is part of a subplot or an exploration of themes.
It’s also a great way to show a juxtaposition in relationships when the inciting incident fundamentally changes the way two people interact like when enemies have to work together or a parent and child are forced to separate.
Give Characters Genuine Connections
Good relationships. Bad relationships. The majority of the time, it’s our relationships that drive us to make changes in our lives. Even loners can point to at least one person in their life that has an influence on them. Your characters should have that too.
These connections will support, oppose, and ignore the actions your main character is taking throughout your story, and each will mean something different to them. But first, we have to understand how these relationships look on an everyday playing field before their world changes to have something to measure their changes against.
Introduce Your Opponent
You might not be prepared at the exposition to reveal who your big bad antagonist is, but it’s likely your lead character will have conflict with others as well. This can be someone who starts out antagonizing your character and then changes to work alongside them, someone who is friendly at first and grows to oppose them, or just someone who is a low-level threat at all times. Having someone say no to your point of view character will create tension and engage readers right away. So, it’s a quick way to form strong bonds to a narrative.
Getting a strong start doesn’t only count in sports. It sets the tone for a reader’s experience of your novel as well. Make sure you’re following some conventions to ensure you aren’t losing them completely, but you should also find ways to make it uniquely you. Hopefully this list helps you get started or edit your novel.
Feel like you’ve got a good handle on the start of your novel? Come back next month for tips to write a better rising action for your novel.
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