Six editors on the first page that made them stop
No prologue tricks, no weather. Just the openings that earned a second page.
By Marguerite Vane
We asked six of our editors a deliberately unfair question: name the submission whose first page stopped you, and say why. None of them named a page that opened with action. Four named pages that opened with a voice doing something slightly strange.
'The first paragraph told me the narrator was lying,' one said, 'and it did that without telling me anything was wrong.' Another described an opening that established a whole marriage in the way one character passed a plate.
What none of them mentioned: prologues, dreams, weather, or a character waking up. Not because those are forbidden, but because they postpone the moment a reader decides to trust the writer. The first page is not where you set up the book. It is where you demonstrate that you can be followed.
