As I’ve said in previous posts, tension is the key to hooking and keeping readers. To show you exactly how to write a first chapter filled with tension, step by step, I have annotated the first chapter of my second novel, A Storm of Doubts.
“Just stop it!”
Here’s my hook. In a mystery, if someone yells a line like that, readers are prepared for trouble. So there’s tension in the first sentence.
The shout made me jerk and get poked by a dead branch of a honeysuckle bush.
Wasn’t that a woman’s voice? Not a girl’s, not my cousin Coral’s.
My protagonist is asking questions, concerned about her cousin. This adds tension.
Swiveling on my hips, I sat higher and caught strands of my dark gold hair on the bush. The fox cubs or kits or whatevers I’d been photographing leaped and rolled over each other between muted beams of sunlight, undisturbed.
This description is to orient readers in the story world.
Two voices, one higher, one lower, slipped through the budding understory shrubs and bushes.
Back to the voices, adding description to add tension.
Who would be out in the woods on the morning of Memorial Day between my cousin’s farm and my dad’s? If we were still on family land. Coral knew exactly where we were, which was why I’d asked her to guide me after she told me about the fox babies. But Coral didn’t care much for civilization and nothing at all for ridiculous things like property boundaries.
More questions from the protagonist to increase tension and set the scene. Also how the protagonist describes the situation allows readers to get to know her.
“Coral?” I called, long, white honeysuckle blossoms brushing my cheeks, their thick Easter-y scent clogging my nose.
When had she left me? I couldn’t have been photographing foxes that long. Although she was the guide, she was only twelve, and I was just a day short of twenty. So it was my responsibility to return Coral home in pristine condition.
More questions and scene setting. And humor because that’s part of my protagonist’s personality.
The voices continued, but too quiet for me to catch any words, their murmur blending with the faint rustle of leaves in the morning breeze.
So Coral might have met someone. But she knew not to talk to strangers.
I collected my camera and the small tripod it sat on and eased myself backward through the thicket.
Did not talking to strangers still apply if you met one in the middle of nowhere in the middle of a county as rural as Marlin County, Ohio?
“Coral?” I ticked up the volume.
Ticking up the volume also ticks up the tension.
“Leave me alone!” The woman’s voice again. She sounded desperate, not angry.
The women’s words and how she says them adds more tension.
“Did you call me, Rae?” Coral seemed to pop out of the morning air. She could move like a ghost in the woods.
Coral’s appearance de-escalates the tension because now Rae knows at least her cousin is okay.
“I wondered where you were.” I closed my tripod. “Did you hear that yell? It sounds like somebody’s in trouble.”
Removing her baseball hat with a galloping horse on the front, she wiped copper bangs from her sweaty forehead. “Naw. Just some rich chick and her boyfriend.”
My cousin Amber had mentioned that high school kids used an abandoned bridge as a party site.
“Did you talk to them?” I placed the camera inside my padded backpack.
“Nope. I just heard voices and followed them to see what was going on.”
The distant hum of conversation continued to glide through the cool morning air.
“You stay here.” I tucked the tripod into a pouch on the outside backpack. “I’ll go see if the girl or the woman needs help.”
Now the tension increases with Rae’s decision to check on the woman whose voice she’s heard
“She looked more like a woman. But I said she wasn’t in trouble.”
“I know, but … well, I’d like to see for myself. I mean, if I were in a lonely spot in the woods with someone upsetting me, I’d want help. Can you lead me to them?”
Coral squinted at me like I was a new species she’d stumbled across. Then she shrugged and headed for a short slope overgrown with young trees and dense stands of pawpaws.
An engine roared to life. As it pulled away, another one turned over.
Tension fades because Rae won’t be entering into this argument she’s overheard. But I have to add new tension to keep the scene moving.
“Hold on, Coral.” I unzipped a pocket of my cargo pants. “It sounds like they—” Looking at the time on my phone, I gasped. “Coral, can we get back to your farm in twenty minutes?”
Rae’s gasp indicates something else is wrong. which means tension.
“What’s the rush?”
I stared at her. “Amber and Dad are marching in the Memorial Day parade. He won’t be upset if we miss him, but Amber will be. I promised her I’d take pictures.”
Coral rolled her brown eyes. “Oh, yeah, I forgot. But she won’t care if I don’t come. She can’t stand me.”
“That’s not true.” At least, not completely true. The fights Amber and Coral had were more intense than the spats I’d witnessed between my three half-brothers. “Can we get back in time to ride into town with your parents?”
Coral studied a slug on a rotten log, a frown puckering her pretty, freckled face. “I don’t think so.” Now she looked worried, probably thinking that Uncle Hank and Aunt Jeanine would believe she deliberately wandered away to miss her older sister’s performance with the band.
Not a serious problem, but one with a little tension.
She raised her head. “We’re not far from Walter’s place. Do you think he’d drive us?”
My anxiety notched a few degrees higher.
Readers are curious about why Rae’s anxiety increased.
That all depended on what kind of mood we found our great-grandfather in. And Dad and Uncle Hank and Aunt Jeanine would not approve of us going over there without one of them. We never knew which outlaw relatives might be hanging around Walter’s house.
But if there was trouble, Coral and I could escape to the woods. Once Coral was in her natural habitat, chances of anyone keeping up were slim.
“Okay.” I hitched the shoulder straps of my backpack higher. “We’ll go to Walter’s.”
Now the tension is high again because readers know Rae and Coral are heading into a potentially dangerous situation.
I spend the next page describing their hike to Walter’s house to give readers info about the outdoor setting and how remote it is. Rae can’t get any bars on her phone. Then they reach the home of their great-grandfather.
As we hurried across the patchy grass, someone opened the squeaky screen to the front door and sauntered onto the porch with a mug.
I skidded to a halt.
The man had shaggy, golden hair and a scruffy beard. Sipping from his mug, he studied us.
Although I’d expected to find a few of our relatives from the outlaw branch hanging out at Walter’s house, it never occurred to me that our great-uncle Troy might be back in the county.
And according to Dad and Gram, Troy was a synonym for trouble.
So the tension has increased even more because the possibility of encountering a criminal member of the family is now a certainty, and Uncle Troy is a particularly threatening relative. Here’s where the chapter ends.
If you have questions about how I built tension, please ask in the comments.
Here are all my posts this month on writing the beginning of a novel.
