9 Tips on Opening Lines & Opening Chapters of Your NaNoWriMo Novel

If you’re doing NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month, you’ll be starting at midnight tonight or first thing in the morning. You’ll be opening your story with a great scene, right?



Here are resources for those first lines, opening chapters of your novel.

  1. 10 Opening Line Strategies, illustrated with the top 100 opening lines of novels.
  2. 4 Goals of Opening Chapters
  3. 5 Ways Openings Go Wrong
  4. Backstory’s Emotional Weight, or Where Do I Put the Emotional Backstory if It Doesn’t Belong in the First Chapter–Which it Doesn’t
  5. 4 Ways to Deal with Narrative Summary, Or How to Deal with Another Common Opening Chapter Mistake
  6. Still trying to decide on the POV for your novel? 5 Questions About First Person POV
  7. Round-up of Links for Opening Chapters
  8. Prophetic Openings: Foreshadowing the Story’s Ending in it’s Beginning
  9. Improve Your Weak Opening. No, you’re not revising yet, but read this one to see what to avoid.

2 thoughts on “9

  1. Mrs. Pattison, I love your tips… and I think a fun topic for your next one would be the story structure example in the nursury rhyme “Jack and Jill”!

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