When I worked as a literary agent, I received hundreds of novel queries a week and had to judge quickly and accurately whether they were worth my reading time. Like every literary agent, I developed the skill of judging the quality of a novel by its first paragraph—a skill I still use in bookstores to decide what new books to buy.

If you’ve poured years of work into a novel, it may seem horribly unfair that a reader would judge your novel off just one paragraph. But what I’m going to argue in today’s post is that the first paragraph of a novel really does tell you everything you need to know.

A novel’s opening paragraph reveals:

• the skill of the writer

• the thematic concerns of the story

• the prose style

• the likely flaws and virtues of the novel

Of course, the opening paragraph does not reveal whether the story will have a satisfying ending, whether it will sustain its initial pace, and whether the novel is well structured or well conceived.

But the first paragraph of the story is the one that the writer has worked hardest on, and so it represents the writer at their most intentional. This is how the writer wants to be perceived—this is the standard the rest of the book is trying to live up to.

Which means that if the first paragraph is disappointing, there’s no point to reading the rest of the novel. It can only go downhill from here.

“But what if a novel really does get better in chapter two?” you protest. “There are plenty of classic novels that have questionable opening paragraphs.” (Here you give a few examples.) “Shouldn’t an agent keep reading beyond the first paragraph to see if the story improves or settles in?”

Yes: on your first day on the job, you probably would read the full ten-page sample of every submission that came your way, just to be sure. You’d read the first paragraph and think: hmm, this doesn’t look very good. And then you would read the rest of the sample pages and confirm your hypothesis: yep, it’s bad.

If you did that twenty times in a row, and your hypothesis was correct each of the twenty times, you’d probably stop reading the full sample pages. You would trust your gut reaction to the opening—and the more submissions you read, the more accurate that gut reaction would get.

After thousands of submissions, you would no longer need to read the sample pages to confirm your hypothesis. One paragraph would be enough.

Which leads us to the obvious question: how to write a really good opening paragraph.

Last week, I wrote about common mistakes in short story openings. 100% of that advice applies to novel openings too—and a lot of the examples I gave in that post were drawn from my memories of the query inbox, as well as from my recent spelunking in Submittable.

But avoiding common mistakes isn’t the same as writing a great opening. So today I’m going to try to articulate what makes an opening paragraph work.

Here’s what the first paragraph of your novel needs to do:

It needs to introduce the central thematic question of the story through a handful of odd choices that hook the reader’s curiosity.

The reader, hoping to find an explanation of those odd choices, will read on past the first paragraph, and the subsequent paragraphs will explain some of the choices but not all of them, and in the meantime new details will prompt new questions worth reading on to answer, and ultimately it will take the entire novel, up to the very last paragraph, to answer the thematic question posed in the first paragraph. And then your reader will walk away satisfied.

Does this sound easy? It is, actually. The hard part is 1) knowing the central thematic question of your novel, 2) figuring out the opening moment that will plant that question in your reader’s mind, 3) making enough odd choices so that your reader’s curiosity is piqued, 4) knowing when to pull the reins on odd choices so that you don’t overwhelm or confuse your reader, and 5) writing the rest of the book in a way that flows from and delivers an answer to that initial question.

We’re going to talk about steps 1-4.

Okay, so as stated above, our goal with a first paragraph is to do a couple odd things that get the reader curious, but not too many odd things, because that would overwhelm them. And those odd things that get the reader curious can’t be tangential or easily resolved—they have to be related to the central questions of the book.

Let’s look at this in practice. Here’s the first paragraph of The Compound by Aisling Rawle, a splashy summer 2025 debut:

I woke up first. There was no particular significance to it, only that I have always slept poorly and generally wake early in the morning. I had no way to tell the time, but I thought that I had slept a while: my limbs were heavy and stiff from a long, motionless sleep. The room was dark and windowless, with only a small skylight directly above my bed, though it didn’t smell of sleep, or musk: it smelled fresh and airy, as if it had recently been cleaned. I thought I could detect the slightest trace of air freshener, citrus-scented, or maybe pine. There were ten beds, though only one aside from my own was occupied. The girl in the bed across from me was slowly emerging from sleep. She sat up and looked at me. She was beautiful, but that was to be expected.

I’m going to give it to you again, but I’m going to boldface the odd choices that I’m curious about:

I woke up first. There was no particular significance to it, only that I have always slept poorly and generally wake early in the morning. I had no way to tell the time, but I thought that I had slept a while: my limbs were heavy and stiff from a long, motionless sleep. The room was dark and windowless, with only a small skylight directly above my bed, though it didn’t smell of sleep, or musk: it smelled fresh and airy, as if it had recently been cleaned. I thought I could detect the slightest trace of air freshener, citrus-scented, or maybe pine. There were ten beds, though only one aside from my own was occupied. The girl in the bed across from me was slowly emerging from sleep. She sat up and looked at me. She was beautiful, but that was to be expected.

I woke up first. There was no particular significance to it…

Our narrator tells us something and then immediately undermines it as insignificant. That’s a little odd. What kind of narrator does this? From these first two sentences I’m getting the vibe of someone self-effacing, modest, on the defensive: well yes it’s true I woke up first, but please don’t go getting the idea that there was anything significant about it, oh no no, perish the thought…

This is such a strange, limp opening, from a narrator that doesn’t seem to want us to pay attention to her. That’s interesting. Logging that in the back of my mind.

…it smelled fresh and airy, as if it had recently been cleaned. I thought I could detect the slightest trace of air freshener…

This feels repetitive, doesn’t it? (“fresh and airy” / “air freshener”) Why are we focusing so much on the scent of the room, if we can’t even tell whether it’s citrus or pine? And again there’s something defensive or on-edge about the narrator, working hard to detect the slightest traces of an irrelevant scent in the air.

There’s something weird about this place, and this moment brings it home to me more than any of the other details. This is a place where someone has sprayed air freshener, but doesn’t want you to notice it. What else don’t they want you to notice?

She was beautiful, but that was to be expected.

Here’s the kicker, and probably the only moment in this first paragraph that most readers will actively clock as odd. We have entered a world where you’d expect the stranger waking up in the bed across from you to be beautiful—where you stir from sleep and sit up and notice a woman you’ve never seen before, and she’s waking up too, and she’s gorgeous, and all of this is mildly interesting but totally unsurprising. Where are we?

So now let’s collect these questions together and see if they’re all pointing in some common thematic direction. We, the reader, are being led to wonder:

• What’s up with this place?

• What’s up with our narrator?

And these two questions will drive the rest of the novel. “What’s up with this place?” is going to be answered early, at least on a surface level: we’re at the compound of a live-televised dating show, where ten beautiful men and ten beautiful women must pair up and complete arbitrary challenges, or else be kicked off the show.

We learn in the first chapter that the compound was occupied very recently by the prior group of contestants. Aha—hence the air freshener. So within the opening chapter, we’ve satisfactorily answered our first question (where are we? what’s up with this place?), and we’ve learned the context for some of the odd details from the first paragraph (the scent, the empty beds, the beautiful girl).

But we haven’t answered the other question: “What’s up with our narrator?” Because guess what: it’s going to take the whole novel to figure that out.

Indeed, our focus will slowly shift from the weirdness of the compound, the strict rules, the rewards system, the invisible and all-powerful producers… to our narrator, Lily. Her mild, self-effacing nature. Her dislike of close attention. Her fixation on beauty. There’s something off about Lily—and it’s only in the novel’s final paragraph that we get a ringing and unforgettable answer to the question we’ve been asking with increasing urgency ever since paragraph one: What is up with Lily?

All right, so let’s go back to my initial claim and see if it makes any more sense now:

We’ve just talked through how Aisling Rawle does this in The Compound. I would argue that she actually goes a little light on odd choices—most of this first paragraph is kind of boring if you aren’t paying hyper-close attention, and you might not be, since Rawle hasn’t yet given you a good reason to. But she saves it with the final sentence of the paragraph, which is meant to make you sit up and take notice. Okay, you think. I’ll give it a few more paragraphs.

I’m not going to nominate this as an all-time stellar opening. (Though, for what it’s worth, I ended up devouring the book.) But I think it helpfully illustrates that odd choices—nagging little mysteries of diction, syntax, and observation—are what keep us reading.

The prose here is not dazzling or beautiful; there are no piercingly true-to-life descriptions; the first-person narration doesn’t have much voice or flair to it. And yet, we hit that last sentence and we want to keep going. Just a little bit longer. Just to answer a few quick questions, and then we’ll toss the book aside.

But we never do toss the book aside—because one of those questions will stretch the length of the entire novel.

This is why a bland opening paragraph with a single odd detail can work, as long as the odd detail is well-chosen. Of course, some writers go heavier on the odd details. Here’s the opening of Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher:

The piano teacher, Erika Kohut, bursts like a whirlwind into the apartment she shares with her mother. Mama likes calling Erika her little whirlwind, for the child can be an absolute speed demon. She is trying to escape her mother. Erika is in her late thirties. Her mother is old enough to be her grandmother. The baby was born after long and difficult years of marriage. Her father promptly left, passing the torch to his daughter. Erika entered, her father exited. Eventually, Erika learned how to move swiftly. She had to. Now she bursts into the apartment like a swarm of autumn leaves, hoping to get to her room without being seen. But her mother looms before her, confronts her. She puts Erika against the wall, under interrogation—inquisitor and executioner in one, unanimously recognized as Mother by the State and by the Family. She investigates: Why has Erika come home so late? Erika dismissed her last student three hours ago, after heaping him with scorn. You must think I won’t find out where you’ve been, Erika. A child should own up to her mother without being asked. But Mother never believes her because Erika tends to lie. Mother is waiting. She starts counting to three.

Holy shit. I’m not going to talk my way through all the odd choices here, because this would quickly become a forty-page essay. But let’s look at the first few:

The piano teacher, Erika Kohut, bursts like a whirlwind into the apartment she shares with her mother. Mama likes calling Erika her little whirlwind, for the child can be an absolute speed demon. She is trying to escape her mother. Erika is in her late thirties. Her mother is old enough to be her grandmother. The baby was born after long and difficult years of marriage. Her father promptly left, passing the torch to his daughter. Erika entered, her father exited. Eventually, Erika learned how to move swiftly. She had to.

Mama likes calling Erika her little whirlwind.

First odd thing: we start with a high-action moment—Erika bursts into her shared apartment, we’ve got movement, we’ve got our protagonist in sight, so far so good—and then we immediately hop to a general statement about what Mama likes. Suddenly, instead of thinking about Erika bursting into the apartment, we’re thinking about what Mama thinks of Erika. This is interruptive, intrusive—and as we’re about to learn, Mama is an interruptive and intrusive person.

So already we’re asking: Is this Erika’s story or isn’t it? Does it matter what Erika thinks of herself, or what Mama thinks of Erika?

She is trying to escape her mother.

Clearly Erika, in this moment, would not take kindly to being called Mama’s little whirlwind. Erika is trying to escape her mother. But the narrator saw fit to tell us about the attempted escape second, and about the “little whirlwind” moniker first. What is going on in this mother-daughter relationship?

Erika is in her late thirties.

And now we really want to know what’s going on in this mother-daughter relationship.

The baby was born after long and difficult years of marriage.

It’s bizarre to refer to Erika as the baby, when she’s the only character we currently know by name. It’s as if we’ve flipped back to Mama’s perspective—only Mama would think of Erika as the baby, the child. How does Mama keep butting into the narration? Is Erika ever going to wrest back control?

Also, this sentence has a subtle bait-and-switch. Reading that the baby was born after something “long and difficult” cues me to expect a “long and difficult labor”—did anyone else misread the sentence that way at first glance?—and so the swerve to a “long and difficult marriage” lands as both funny and disturbing.

Her father promptly left, passing the torch to his daughter. Erika entered, her father exited.

The narrator, who so far has pelted us with a variety of insane details, here gets repetitive for the first time. It’s as if the narrator is saying: You got that, right? I’m going to make absolutely sure that you got that. Those who felt a little squicky reading that first sentence (a father passing the torch to his daughter? the torch… of marriage?) are forced to linger on it. This is not a narrator who’s going to let us brush aside the weird stuff.

So from the first paragraph of The Piano Teacher, we’re asking:

• What is this bizarre, tempestuous bond between Erika and her mother?

• Why does late-thirties Erika still live with her mother?

• Does Erika deserve her mother’s controlling scrutiny, or not?

I haven’t actually read The Piano Teacher—I just pulled it off the shelf. (I’ve been meaning to read it for a while, and then I keep feeling too squeamish.)

But the first paragraph tells me what I’m in for if I read the novel—thematically, stylistically, and content-wise. If I were an agent who read this first paragraph in my query inbox, I would be able to extrapolate out to the rest of the book and judge: 1) what the book has in store, and 2) whether I’m into what the book has in store.

I’m guessing you also have a sense of whether you want to keep reading this book. The relentless pace, the aggressively choppy sentences, the uncomfortable turns—does it all work for you? The first paragraph is the novel announcing its intentions—you have enough information already to decide whether you’re on board.

So we’ve looked at two examples now, one with just a couple of odd choices to hook our interest, one with about fifty. It’s worth checking in with yourself about which style is more to your taste. Do you want a mostly clean narrative, with a select few odd details that snag your attention? Or do you prefer a bombardment of odd details? Or something in between?

In his craft book A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, George Saunders has his own term for these odd choices. He talks of adding details like these to the “Cart of Things I Couldn’t Help But Notice.”1 So the reader’s just rolling along merrily, and then something in the paragraph makes them stop and say “Hmm.” And they add it to the cart and keep rolling along.

I think it’s a good metaphor, especially because you can imagine that if the reader has to add too many items to the Cart of Things I Couldn’t Help But Notice, the cart gets heavy and annoying to pull, and the reader eventually gives up and abandons the cart. But if some of those items in the cart get satisfactorily explained, then the reader can take them out of the cart and put them back on the grocery store shelves, and then the cart is lighter again…

Okay, the metaphor doesn’t extend perfectly, but the point is, you (the writer) should be in control of how many questions you’re compelling the reader to ask. You want them to be asking the right number of questions about the right things. This is especially important in your first paragraph, but frankly, it’s a good skill to master throughout your novel.

Earlier, I suggested that this process of writing a good opening paragraph has five steps:

1. Know the central thematic question of your novel.

2. Figure out the opening moment that will plant that question in your reader’s mind.

3. Make enough odd choices so that your reader’s curiosity is piqued.

4. Avoid overwhelming or confusing your reader with too many odd choices.

5. Write the rest of the book in a way that flows from and delivers an answer to that initial thematic question.

Honestly, I was just riffing—this isn’t really a set of discrete steps—but let’s treat them as such and see if it’s helpful.

Know the central thematic question of your novel.

Let’s say we’re writing a novel about alienation. The modern world is exhausting and overwhelming and upsetting and it’s bleeding us dry—our attention, our hope, our trust. Doesn’t it make you want to run for the hills sometimes? Our main character decides to run for the hills. She’s going to abandon whatever she was doing in the big city and cancel her phone plan and ghost all her friends and hide in her parents’ house and, I don’t know, maybe do like a My Year of Rest and Relaxation kind of thing.

This isn’t sounding like a very promising novel, but that’s okay. It’s our novel. We’re going to make it work.

Our central thematic question could be something like: is it ethical to hide from the world? Is cutting ourselves off from society more poisonous than society itself, however toxic? Is it okay to run for the hills, and if so, under what circumstances and for how long?

Figure out the opening moment that will plant that question in the reader’s mind.

Here’s my hot take: there are always dozens, maybe hundreds, of opening moments that could work for a given story.

It’s easy, as a novelist, to get fixated on the (belabored, beloved) first chapter of your novel as the only possible opening. But really, once you know the thematic question you need the reader to ask, you start seeing ways of fitting that thematic question into all kinds of opening scenes.

Let’s do one for our alienation premise:

Three things happened at once that morning: an email came in from Claire’s boss, a text came in from Claire’s mother, and she stubbed her toe on the metal edge of her standing desk, which was at sitting height and had been for the last six months. Every time she sat at the desk she felt guilty that she wasn’t standing, and she tried to compensate by straightening her posture, and then weird things happened in her lower back, bones shifted and clicked that simply hadn’t existed before, and she felt worse than ever, about the expensive desk, but also about everything.

Here’s another one:

Maybe Claire’s life would have been different had she ordered the roast beef sandwich instead of the grilled eggplant. But she saw the word eggplant on the chalkboard above the deli counter and she felt a moment of hope. Maybe things would be different this time. Maybe the vegetables wouldn’t be soggy. Maybe this deli, out of all the delis in the world, would have figured out a sensible and delicious vegetarian option alongside their six kinds of meat. That was a marker of how hopeful Claire felt on this particular morning—that the word delicious occurred to her. The sandwich was, of course, not delicious. Everything that happened afterwards followed from that.

You see how, in both of these openings, we’re creating a few different questions for the reader—some of which will be answered easily, some of which will take the whole novel to answer.

In the second example, we might be wondering: is Claire a vegetarian? If so, why did she consider ordering roast beef? That question will probably get answered within the next few paragraphs. But we might also be wondering: what “happened afterwards” as a result of the eggplant sandwich? Was “everything that happened afterwards” good or bad? It seems like it was probably bad, given the whole “Maybe Claire’s life would have been different” thing. What went wrong for Claire? How could she have prevented it, here, now, in this deli? Is Claire going to get punished for her brief moment of optimism—or for giving it up too early?

And in the first example, we’re probably wondering about that email from Claire’s boss and that text from Claire’s mom. But Claire isn’t—she’s fixated on her standing desk. What does that tell us about Claire? It seems like Claire isn’t at peace with the world or with the compromises she makes to survive it. How did she get this way? Can she change?

Okay, so maybe we’re not exactly asking questions about alienation and the ethics of retreat. But the questions we’re asking could point in the same direction: Claire’s ill-at-ease-in-the-world feeling, her attempts to impose healthy values on her life, and the disappointing and maddening failure of those attempts. (Vegetarianism results in a soggy sandwich; buying an expensive standing desk results in sitting at it.) The rest of the novel will keep nudging the reader to consider those same questions in more detail and with more nuance.

Make enough odd choices so that your reader’s curiosity is piqued.

Let’s see how we did:

Three things happened at once that morning: an email came in from Claire’s boss, a text came in from Claire’s mother, and she stubbed her toe on the metal edge of her standing desk, which was at sitting height and had been for the last six months. Every time she sat at the desk she felt guilty that she wasn’t standing, and she tried to compensate by straightening her posture, and then weird things happened in her lower back, bones shifted and clicked that simply hadn’t existed before, and she felt worse than ever, about the expensive desk, but also about everything.

The first odd choice we’re making here is one of focus: we offer three simultaneous events (email from boss, text from mother, stubbed toe), and then focus instead on the background detail of the standing desk. It’s the kind of move that is annoying in the hands of a bad writer and playful in the hands of a good writer. Too soon yet to tell which, so the reader keeps going.

The next snag is probably “bones shifted and clicked that simply hadn’t existed before,” which introduces some doubt about the narrator and/or the world—is this meant to be taken seriously, or is this just hyperbole?

And we end on “but also about everything,” which generates some curiosity about Claire herself. Claire is clearly in a bad place, even though the worst thing that’s happened to her so far is a toe stub. She’s a character in need of salvatory transformation—and it’ll take the whole novel to see whether she gets it.

Is this enough to get you reading to the second paragraph? Nothing has actually happened, except for Claire stubbing her toe. But the narrator is making some slightly strange choices, and Claire is exhibiting some slightly strange characteristics. The writer hasn’t yet shown that they don’t know what they’re doing. Maybe we give it a go.

Avoid overwhelming or confusing the reader with too many odd choices.

Let’s check on our alternate opening:

Maybe Claire’s life would have been different had she ordered the roast beef sandwich instead of the grilled eggplant. But she saw the word eggplant on the chalkboard above the deli counter and she felt a moment of hope. Maybe things would be different this time. Maybe the vegetables wouldn’t be soggy. Maybe this deli, out of all the delis in the world, would have figured out a sensible and delicious vegetarian option alongside their six kinds of meat. That was a marker of how hopeful Claire felt on this particular morning—that the word delicious occurred to her. The sandwich was, of course, not delicious. Everything that happened afterwards followed from that.

This is a strange opening, but it’s not remotely hard to follow. Our reader might be dubious that a sandwich could make such a difference in someone’s life, but the oddness of that assertion is kind of fun—the reader is skeptical, but definitely not overwhelmed or confused. And a skeptical reader doesn’t give up on a story immediately—they keep reading to see whether the writer can pull it off.

Write the rest of the book in a way that flows from and delivers an answer to that initial thematic question.

This is the part I can’t help you with.

Not yet, anyway. I’m still trying to work out a method myself. But once I figure out a foolproof, one-size-fits-all strategy for writing a good novel start to finish, I will let you know.

I hope this is helpful (or at least interesting) to anyone who’s working on a novel, or on any piece of writing that resembles a novel enough for this advice to apply. The pithy version that you can write on a post-it above your desk is: you want the reader to be asking the right number of the right questions. In the opening paragraph, and also throughout.

If you’re having trouble figuring out what those “right questions” are, this is where readers come in. Ask your friends to read the opening of your novel and tell you what they’re curious about. Are they getting distracted by unimportant details, or are they homing in on the central thematic strains of your book?

Good luck out there. Keep em guessing (but not too much)!