There's an old adage about first impressions:
"Don't screw them up."
People can forgive a great deal once they have someone to look forward to, but by the same token, life is short: people won't linger long in pastures that aren't lush and plentiful, they'll keep moving.
Now imagine your book is that pasture. How can you best get the cows to come and eat it?
...Okay, so it's not a perfect analogy. Think of it instead like flowers and bees. You need these bees to survive, so you can keep making more flowers. But bees are fickle and know nothing of what lies inside, only what they see as they flutter past.
Which brings us back to first impressions.
As you write a work, even a short work, you continue to evolve. You go, you learn, you iron out all the details and brilliant points of the characters, the plot and the setting. You dig for gold in your climactic conflict, your happy ending, your final line, and then sweep through to edit away any typographical hiccups before throwing it off to the presses. Which would be great.
If people read backwards.
But any agent, any publisher and any reader is going to start with the first line on the first page. If they're not sold by the end of that leading paragraph, it doesn't matter that you've invented entirely new sub-genres of brilliant fiction with legendary characters that will change the very shape of society, it's going right back on the shelf.
The first three chapters is an arbitrary but useful estimate to exactly how far the average person can be expected to read before giving up entirely. Historically, this hasn't been a good judge of fiction. Consider The Fellowship of the Ring, the most miserably bland first-hundred-pages in popular literature.
These days, the average reader doesn't have all weekend to stomach a dozen three-page elven poems just to get to the good stuff. You need to have them hooked by page one, and hold them to page ten, and then have them hungry again before long.
If you're working with a novel, focus on the first three chapters above all. By the end of chapter three, we should know the main character and the conflict should be kicking off, if it isn't already well underway. If it's a romance, we've met the love interest. A mystery, the first body has turned up. In fantasy, we've met our first elf.
You get the idea.
By the end of chapter three, we need to know who, what and why. Where is just as important, especially in the realm of science fiction. The order you focus on doesn't matter, but be sure you have them all covered: who we care about, what their situation is and why it's changing now.
Once you have the details ironed out, focus in on the first paragraph. This is where to pour your gold. The first word, the first sentence and the first page aren't nearly as powerful as that first paragraph together. That is the first mouthful that will feed a reader's mind.
It is their introduction to your voice, your storytelling, your hero and/or your world. It is the face they see across a seedy bar filled with dozens of potential lovers, any or all of whom may be a complete scumbag just waiting to be regretted. That first paragraph is the shy smile from the corner of the bar that gives them hope that the night might not be a waste after all.
So when you write the last word on the last page and you're feeling the wash of relief at being finished, remind yourself that you aren't quite done until you begin again.
It's time to polish that smile.
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