Openings carry a disproportionate load. An editor reading fifty pages is not asking whether the writing is good; that is usually clear within two. They are asking whether the book has started.
Four things need to be happening.
1. Somebody wants something specific
Not "wants to be happy". Something concrete enough that we would recognise getting it. A character who wants nothing in particular gives the reader nothing to hope for, and general dissatisfaction is not a want.
The most common opening failure is a protagonist to whom things happen. Fifty pages of interesting circumstance with nobody pursuing anything reads as static, however good the prose.
2. Something is making it difficult
The want needs resistance from early on. Not necessarily a villain — an institution, a shortage of money, a person's own history, a rule they will not break.
Without visible resistance the reader assumes the character will simply get what they want, and stops paying attention.
3. We know what kind of book this is
Readers make an implicit contract in the first pages: this is a crime novel, or a comic novel, or a literary character study. They then read the rest with that expectation.
Openings that mislead — a whimsical first chapter on a bleak book, an action sequence on a quiet novel — create readers who feel cheated by chapter five, and cheated readers stop.
4. Something has changed
Stories start when a stable situation stops being stable. If your first fifty pages establish how life normally is, you have written a prologue to your book rather than the beginning of it.
The usual fix is brutal and effective: cut the first two chapters and start where the change occurs. Feed the setup in later, in fragments, where it is needed. Authors resist this and then, almost always, agree.
What editors do not care about in an opening
Whether the prose is beautiful — welcome, not sufficient. Whether the world is elaborate — a reader will not stay for the world alone. Whether it starts with action — a quiet opening with real tension outperforms a chase scene about nobody.
A test
Give your first fifty pages to someone who has not read the book, and ask three questions afterwards.
Who is this about, and what do they want? What is stopping them? What kind of book is this?
If they hesitate on any of the three, that is your revision. And if they can answer all three but do not ask to read on, the problem is not the opening — it is that the want is not yet worth caring about.
Elena Marsh
Senior Fiction Editor
Part of the editorial team at Winfrey Publishing. Articles here are written by the people who do the work, not by a content agency.
Want this applied to your own manuscript?
A manuscript assessment gives you a written report from an editor in your genre — including when the honest answer is that you should keep revising.
