There’s nothing but action in the first two minutes of the film.
That’s how your book should start—jump straight into the action—hook your reader and get them flipping the pages.
Almost every writers festival has a “first pages competition” where writers submit their first 2-4 pages of the book they are writing for critique.
Make your first lines count
Why are those first pages so crucial?
Those first few pages are what hook your reader and get them to keep reading.
The judges from the Stockholm Writers Festival said that the first line of the story was the most important. They could tell if a story would deliver or not after reading the first line alone.
Since then, I’ve analyzed a lot of first lines of all books in all genres.
Here are a few first lines worth mentioning: