Agents and editors may ask for your first pages along with the query—and they may even read these before looking at anything else. Rejections can happen not because you pitched poorly, but because your opening failed.

First, a note about procedure: Novelists and memoirists should always send the literal first pages from the first chapter(s) and not select from the middle of the book, or otherwise patch together “the best parts.” If your story takes time to develop and the opening is slow, then you need to revise the opening so that you’re not tempted to send from the middle of the book. However, if you have a prologue for your novel or memoir, I encourage you to omit it for submissions purposes. Agents and editors do not like prologues, and I see very few that are needed or helpful.

Nonfiction writers preparing book proposals should include sample chapters that are representative of the book’s content. Potentially any chapter or sequence of chapters could be used. But the more narrative-driven the book, the more you’ll likely want to include something that draws from the beginning.

Here are three questions to ask about your first pages—for novelists and memoirists.

1. What is the absolute latest moment in the manuscript you can begin your story, and still not leave out anything that’s critical to the story problem? Most manuscripts I read should really start somewhere between page 5 and page 50. Be ruthless in evaluating your opening—have you dawdled in revealing the story tension or problem? Ideally, it will be seeded on page 1.
2. What details do NOT relate to the story problem or the protagonist? We rarely need the complete biography of your main character on the first page. Let those details emerge as the story unfolds. Don’t share the everyday, mundane details we could guess. Share the most unique, special, distinctive details—the ones that really matter to the story and character from the start. The No. 1 mistake for first pages is overwriting—or working too hard at “painting a picture.” If you load up on every single detail, how does the reader know which ones are important? Be selective. Be artful.
3. Have you shown or described something that really ought to be quickly summarized (or “told”)?  Joyce Carol Oates once said, “Storytelling is shaped by two contrary, yet complementary, impulses—one toward brevity, compactness, artful omission; the other toward expansion, amplification, enrichment.” Sometimes writers go into flowery description about something that should be flat-out stated. When it comes to impatient editors and agents, favor brevity and artful omission in your opening pages.

Common Story Openings to Avoid

Here are the most common and lackluster story openings I see when reviewing clients’ work. While it’s not wrong to open in these ways—and a great writer can make even the most pedestrian series of events read as fascinating—consider if you can find a more advantageous way to begin.

1. The waking up scene

This is where we meet the character waking up in bed, then perhaps getting ready for school or work. Maybe they’ve woken up because the sun is shining through the window, or maybe they receive a phone call or text. In the case of young adult fiction, a nagging parental figure is frequently seen. It doesn’t really matter how or why they wake up—only that it’s a waking up scene.

Perhaps it’s a very important day for the character and that’s why we’re seeing it from the very first minute. Or perhaps you want to establish the character’s everyday world or routine—then disrupt it.

But morning routines and literal wake-up calls rarely make for great reading. They put a lot of pressure on the writer to have a compelling point-of-view character or literary style—to give the story life, charm, or tension that keeps us reading.

If it is in fact a very important day—one the character has been waiting for—how about starting the story during or after the big thing that will occur? That can help with not just tension, but story pacing.

If you start with an important call or text, does it really need to be dramatized (shown) on the page? Maybe it does. Make sure you’re not starting there by accident or because it was the first idea that came to you.

2. The transit scene

Ideally, we want an opening situation that presents tension—a character who’s not getting what he wants or meets opposition, or that seeds a larger story problem that will emerge and develop.

Transit scenes—describing characters moving from point A to point B—often lack this. Or if there is tension, it’s one that we’re all too familiar with. Traffic. Bad subway companions. Mundane annoyances of life.

In other words, it has a little too much in common with what agents or editors experienced that morning. Transit can make for a slow and ordinary beginning unless something quite odd is going on or we have an entertaining voice.

However, transit scenes can be tempting if the character is embarking on a big and wild trip or heading to some important event. Or they might help establish an unusual setting or world.