How to start the “engine”, that is, how to start writing a book in a way that sets the reader on fire?

Get your reader have a taste of your book as if preparing him/her for the main course with an appetiser.

The best method to do so is an introduction where the reader can spiritually become attuned to the topic, becomes curious about the characters flashing by, gets a feel of the future conflicts or gets a glimpse of a fraction of the plot hidden behind the book’s title.  The introduction or the opening scene could be decisive about the book’s fate: if our writing flops before the shelves of a bookshop, it is a lot more “fortunate” than failing in the buyer’s home – in the latter case we will have lost the reader forever. As an example, let us take the introduction to Nicholas Evans’ novel The Horse Whisperer:

„THERE WAS DEATH AT ITS BEGINNING AS THERE WOULD BE death again at its end.

Though whether it was some fleeting shadow of this that passed across the girl’s dreams and woke her on that least likely of mornings she would never know. All she knew, when she opened her eyes, was that the world was somehow altered.

The red glow of her alarm showed it was yet a halfhour till the time she had set it to wake her and she lay quite still, not lifting her head, trying to configure the change. It was dark but not as dark as it should be. Across the bedroom, she could clearly make out the dull glint of her riding trophies on cluttered shelves and above them the looming faces of rock stars she had once thought she should care about. She listened. The silence that filled the house was different too, expectant, like the pause between the intake of breath and the uttering of words. Soon there would be the muted roar of the furnace coming alive in the basement and the old farmhouse floorboards would start their ritual creaking complaint. She slipped out from the bedclothes and went to the window.

There was snow.

The first fall of winter. And from the laterals of the fence up by the pond she could tell there must be almost a foot of it. With no deflecting wind, it was perfect and driftless, heaped in comical proportion on the branches of the six small cherry trees her father had planted last year. A single star shone in a wedge of deep blue above the woods. The girl looked down and saw a lace of frost had formed on the lower part of the window and she placed a finger on it, melting a small hole. She shivered, not from the cold, but from the thrill that this transformed world was for the moment entirely hers. And she turned and hurried to get dressed.”

What are the feelings this introduction rouses in us? Probably that something is about to unfold? Perhaps a catastrophe? The writer does not give away anything, yet arouses a maddening desire in us to get to know the girl the story commences with, and we are already almost terrified for her. This is what a perfect introduction is like.

To use this site further, the use of cookies must be accepted. More information

Cookie settings are enabled on this site for the best user experience. If the site is used without changing the setting or clicking the "Accept" button, the user accepts the use of the cookies.

Close