Catching readers, holding readers

I've learned that if I don't love a book by the first twenty pages, chances are I'm not going to love it for the next three hundred.

Caroline Leavitt, author's note, Pictures of You paperback edition

Caroline Leavitt

Most novelists realize, as Carolyn Leavitt does, that first chapters are important. That's why they usually devote so much attention to those early pages. Catch readers and maybe you can hold them.

Yet second chapters are important as well. There have been many novels that I loved by the end of the first chapter, then abandoned before reaching the end of the second or third chapter. So many writers start their novels in the middle of their story, or sometimes even at the end, when there is enough tension to entice a reader, then shift back to the slow, ponderous actual beginning of the story in chapter two. But do beginnings really have to be so slow and ponderous?

One of the things that most impressed me about Mystery Ride, a novel I reviewed here a few days ago, was the way Robert Boswell started at the very beginning of his story and still made it riveting. Yet his second chapter and then his third chapter are no less riveting. There isn't a dull chapter in the novel, no chapter devoted solely to dull description, scene setting or back story. Each chapter advances the plot and each holds the reader's interest. Caroline Leavitt does something very similar in Pictures of You.

Thomas Hardy, although one of my favorite writers, is not known for his entrancing opening chapters. He favors description and scene setting in the early pages. So it is ironic that Hardy wrote what has been called the best first chapter in literature, in The Mayor of Casterbridge. It's hard to top a chapter in which a man gets drunk and sells his wife. It's a pretty good novel as a whole, but the rest of it never quite equals that first chapter.

So in one regard Robert Boswell, whom few people have heard of, beats Thomas Hardy, whom everybody has heard of: He gives every other chapter as much attention as he gives that first chapter. Readers get hooked and stay hooked.