One of the most popular classes I teach at writing conferences is an opening pages workshop. If you follow submission guidelines for Veritas and many other agencies, you'll be submitting the first five pages at the bottom of your query, and I can't stress how important it is to hook the reader in the opening and not let her go.
A common mistake in opening pages is the dreaded white room. A character wakes up trying to figure out where he is and how he got there. He's hungover or unconscious or a prisoner, or merely caught in existential angst. Other variations of this include the weather opening mentioned in an earlier blog post, or the character looking in the mirror and reflecting his appearance.
These openings represent the blank state of the author's mind. The character is waking up because the author is waking up at the same time. Authorial throat clearing, gearing up to start the story without actually, you know, starting it.
Other writers, knowing the perils of a sluggish opening, try to have too much happen. This is the character running for his life on page one, or in a screaming fight, or at some other point of high drama. This also doesn't work as an opening, but for different reasons.
I like to thing of a story, in its simplest form, as a three-legged stool of character, situation, and problem. For example:
A young widow in the Potato Famine (character/ situation), has just lost her job as a seamstress (situation/problem) and can no longer feed her children (problem).
These things need to develop in harmony, like a stool needs each leg to be of equal length. If you start with the woman reflecting on how she lost her husband, you have character and situation, but no problem. If your opening page shows her screaming at the man in the soup kitchen because he won't let her take food back for her sick kids, you have plenty of problem, coupled with a partially understood situation, but not very much character.
In sounds callous, but you can have a life and death situation, but nobody will care if they don't also know the character. Scenes that get the heart pumping or the tears flowing on page fifty or three hundred can leave the reader cold on page three.
For openings, it might be helpful to think of how you can introduce all three elements as soon as possible to a depth that is sufficient, but not overwhelming.
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