Your First Pages: What Agents Are Looking For

In their own words

I recently had a friend who was going to pay $40 to attend a workshop about writing opening pages to hook agents (and readers), and I thought… Heck, I could save them the money! I’ve been to multiple seminars and classes on the same thing.

The first pages of a novel should be an invitation into the story. It should set up an event that has the promise of propelling the plot forward, and engaging the reader.

According to author Hank Phillippi Ryan in her seminar Great Beginnings: First Pages, the first pages should be the “first domino of the story that falls. The promise of action or emotional action.” And the first page should do the following information:

• Introduce the main character

• Reveal the setting

• Set the tone

• Have some action, or the promise of it

Let’s break those things down and explore them more, and then let’s discuss things not to do. At the end, we’ll look at a couple of examples.

Introduce the MC

The main character of your book is your driving force. Your setting, concept or magic system can be incredibly cool, but if your main character can’t capture your audience, the story won’t land. I’m sorry to say I’ve DNFed many books when I get half-way and realize I simply do not care about the characters or what happens to them.

When you introduce your character, you want them to be one or many of these four things: compelling, relatable, interesting, or likable. (Hank Phillippi Ryan, Great Beginnings, 2021) We want details about who they are, not what they look like, and not their back story. (How to Make a Good First Impression, Panel, 2021)

A repeating refrain from agents was that they saw a recurring pattern in submissions: people writing their main characters doing something mundane, such as waking up and getting ready for the day, or looking in the mirror and describing themselves, or running an errand, etc. Another recurring no-no was giving a backstory infodump before we get to know the character.

TLDR: a reader needs a reason to care about the character, and they need it quickly. Agents want to know what makes a character tick, they want the catalyst action which changes their trajectory, and sets them on the path of the story. Do they lose their job? Is there a special event that day (a popular one in fantasy/scifi)? Did they have a meet-cute? What makes this day different, and how does the character react? What does this change mean for them and their future?

Their reaction should be the thing that endears us to them, or at least interests us and compels us to read more. The emotional stakes in the first pages will help agents connect with a character, while the exterior stakes will help set the pace for the story. (On Reading Submissions, Amy Bishop-Wycisk, 2021).

Reveal the Setting

Agents want to see a strong sense of place to make a submission stand out. The opening needs to ground the reader with no confusion. We should know what world we’re in (our world, or secondary world), and have an idea of where the scene is taking place. (Sam Farkas, First Pages, 2024)

One tool to ground the reader is to use sensory details to create a visual, almost tactile scene. (How to Make a Good First Impression, Panel, 2021) Things like the aridity of the air, grass or scrag, the constellations, can set up whether we’re in our world or another world, and create a feeling for the environment, even in the first few sentences. Evoking a constellation we have in our sky, for example, would instantly set up a fantasy as being in our world, rather than a secondary world.

But there’s such a tight space to work with in the first pages, sometimes the balance between setting and character can seem at odds. For first pages, I like this tip: “Zooming in on one detail and focusing on it with an extraordinary sentence that activates the memory can replace a lot of setting.” (Writing Sentences that Sing, Colwill Brown, 2021)

To ground the reader, avoid floating scenes. According to Kristina Stanley, the CEO of Fictionary, “when a reader starts a scene, they need to know whose point of view they’re reading, where they—the characters—are physically and the time in which the plot occurs.” No, she doesn’t mean the exact time, but consider whether it is day or night, morning or evening, 1845 or 2024. These things should be detectable in your pages. You want to anchor your reader to a time and a place, and build your setting from there.

Set the Tone

The purpose of setting the tone is to let the reader know what kind of book they’re going to be reading. The character voice, and the words you choose, and even the format of the story (epistolary, for example), can help the reader know what to expect. Agent Sam Farkas defines the tone as answering the question: What kind of book is this?

From your atmosphere to your voice, every element should work together to be the kind of book your reader should expect. You are setting the emotional tone for the entire book, as well as the type of writing (will it be literary, commercial, a blend?) the reader should expect. If your beginning pages are flowery and beautiful because you’ve overworked them, then it’s going to surprise the agent when they get onto the next chapters and realize their expectations are not the reality.

“Voice makes your characters stand off the page. Merge it with the narrative tale. Your narrated words should work well with voice.” (This is a loose quote, On Reading Submissions, Amy Bishop-Wycisk, 2021)

If you aren’t really sure what voice is, don’t you worry, I have a whole substack post on that subject.

Have Action, or the Promise of It

The end of your first page should have some kind of action, or at least the promise of action, whether it be emotional or physical. You want the reader to have a puzzle to solve. (How to Make a Good First Impression, Panel, 2021) Each answered question should soon lead to an unanswered question, to create the propulsion that pushes a reader along.

Let’s look at a first line example, as given in the First Pages talk with Sam Farkas.

From Uprooted, by Naomi Novik: “Our dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley.” This first line creates intrigue about the dragon (not to mention it instantly sets up the world as a secondary world). It also certainly implies that there will be some kind of interaction with the dragon.

In another session, an agent said first pages should “establish stakes and conflict, so we can be engaged in seeing this character face the challenge. Make the reader ask ‘what’s next?’ not ‘why?’” (Maeve Maclysaght, Getting Published Bootcamp, 2024)

Your action doesn’t have to be something huge, it just needs to be something forward. Your reader should say “yes this is going somewhere” instead of “where is this going?”

Things to Avoid

In no particular order, here are things that were almost unanimously suggested as things to avoid:

• Mundane tasks

• Flashbacks

• Dreams

• Circumstances that are familiar

• Random thoughts

• Disconnected details

• Too much description (also, too much setting before you care about the characters)

• Alarm clocks

• Overly flowery language

• Too many characters right off the bat without the reader knowing who to care about

• Unnecessary prologues, also “getting ahead of myself, let me back up”

• Training scene

• Weather discussion

• Getting ready/waking up/looking in mirror

Examples

Literary agent Sam Farkas said she knows in the first paragraph or two whether she’ll want to read more, so the margin for capturing an agent’s attention is small. Agents won’t give you the time to build, and honestly, neither will readers. Let me pull some books off my shelf, and we’ll dissect the first paragraph.

The Bear and the Nightengale, Katherine Arden:

It was late winter in Northern Rus’, the air sullen with wet that was neither rain nor snow. The brilliant February landscape had given way to the dreary gray of March, and the household of Pyotr Vladimirovich were all sniffling from the damp and thin from six weeks’ fasting on black bread and fermented cabbage. But no one was thinking of chilblains or runny noses, or even, wistfully, of porridge and roast meats, for Dunya was to tell a story.

While this does talk about the weather (on the no-no list), I think this works. It doesn’t linger, but it sets the time, and the atmosphere, and the destitute feeling of a starving cold winter. However, we end the first paragraph on something intriguing—a story is about to be told. From the tone, we can feel this is probably going to be a folktale, or a fairytale type story. We do get a character (Pyotr) and the promise of more characters (his family), and the storyteller (Dunya). After reading this, I feel anchored in the setting and intrigued to go on. I am one of the children sitting around Dunya. What do you think, did you enjoy it? Would you keep going?

The Crimson Moth by Kristen Ciccarelli

When the blood guard suspects a girl of being a witch, they strip off her clothes and search her body for scars.

During the Sister Queens’ rule, witches wore their casting scars with pride, putting their power on display like jeweled rings and silk garments. Scars signaled wealth and rank, and most of all, magic.

In this one, I instantly know we’re in a second world—because of the terms “blood guard” and “Sister Queen”. There are plenty of first-world books with witches, so magic alone is not enough to differentiate between our world and a secondary world. In this world, I know there is or was a monarchy, I know that witches used to wear their casting marks proudly but now they are hunted. I know there’s still magic, because the blood guard is still searching for witches. We don’t have a character yet (they show up in the next 2 sentences), but the setting and worldbuilding I have already are enough to propel me forward. I know we’re going to be interacting with witches, and I can pretty much guess that our MC is going to be one, and that they are going to be hunted. This is a promise of action. Again, these first lines worked for me. Did they work for you? Why or why not?

Wrap-up

So now you know what agents are looking for in the first pages. Agents read between 50 to 200 queries in one sitting. Simply getting them to move onto your pages is a feat in and of itself. You don’t have time to mince words. Focus on capturing their attention, and focus on holding it.

Take your first two paragraphs and send them to some beta readers who haven’t read your work. Ask them the hard questions—would you keep reading this? Why or why not?

Well, that’s it for this newsletter! I know that I send them out infrequently, but I hope they are helpful when they do arrive!

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Until next time,

~Bee