Kill the First Paragraph

Cut the first paragraph of every chapter you write. Do it now. Before you argue. Before you explain why yours is different. Cut it. Read what's left. Nine times out of ten, the chapter is better. I'm not being rhetorical. I'm describing something I do to every manuscript I edit and something I wish every writer would do to their own work before sending it to me. The first paragraph of a chapter is almost always a warm-up. The writer is settling in, finding the voice, orienting themselves in the scene. By the second paragraph, they're actually writing. The warm-up paragraph is identifiable. It usually does one of these things: Sets the scene in general terms. "The morning was cold and grey, and the streets were empty." This is the writer looking around the room before deciding what to focus on. The reader doesn't need the tour. They need the detail — the specific cold, the specific street, the specific emptiness. That detail is in paragraph two. Summarizes what happened before. "After the argument, Sarah couldn't sleep." This is the writer reminding themselves where they are. The reader remembers the argument. They were there. If the argument was important enough to reference, it was vivid enough to remember. Skip the summary. Start in the sleeplessness. Describes the character's emotional state. "Tom felt a growing unease as he walked toward the office." This is telling, not showing, and it's doing it before the scene has started. The unease should emerge from what Tom does and sees, not from a label pinned to his chest. The cure is mechanical. Write the chapter. Finish it. Then go back and delete the first paragraph. Read the chapter again. Does it still make sense? It almost always does, because the first paragraph was never doing essential work. It was scaffolding. Scaffolding gets removed. Sometimes — rarely — the first paragraph is the right one. You'll know because when you cut it, the chapter loses something specific. Not general orientation. Not mood-setting. Something that the rest of the chapter depends on. A detail. A line of dialogue. An image that pays off later. If you cut it and the loss is specific, put it back. If you cut it and the loss is vague — "but it sets up the atmosphere" — leave it cut. Atmosphere is established by the writing, not by the introduction to the writing. The same principle applies at smaller scales. The first sentence of a paragraph is often a topic sentence — a holdover from essay writing that has no place in fiction. Characters don't think in topic sentences. Scenes don't open with thesis statements. If your paragraph starts with a statement that the rest of the paragraph illustrates, you're writing an essay. Cut the statement. Let the illustration be the paragraph. This is the hardest thing I ask writers to do, because the first paragraph is where they're most careful. They've polished it. They've agonized over the word choice. It's their best foot forward. And it's the foot that needs to come off.