A potential client recently accepted my offer to provide her with a sample edit. I received the first 1,000 words of her manuscript and dug in.

The first three paragraphs dwelled on world-building, expository description of the protagonist’s immediate environment. As description goes, that was well-written. The description was evocative and atmospheric, poetic even. The action began in the fourth paragraph. Unfortunately, that was three paragraphs too late.

The problem with beginning your story with paragraphs of description is that nothing happens. Although the description may convey sensorial detail and mood, it’s an information dump. And nothing happens.

According to book coach and author Sally Lotz, the author has 30 seconds to hook the reader. Writer Christopher Garlington says the author has three minutes to engage the reader’s attention. In a Stack Exchange discussion on writing, answers vary as to how long a writer has to hook the reader before the reader sets the book down and never finishes it. There’s some consensus that the hook—that thing that snags the reader’s interest and convinces the reader to keep reading—should occur on the first page. Some even state it should occur in the first paragraph.

Today’s short attention spans may even demand that the hook occur in the first sentence. One writing-oriented Facebook group has a regular theme of “First Line Fridays” when authors are encouraged to post the first line of their manuscripts. Group participants then deliver feedback as to whether the first line (or three or four lines) grabbed their interest or not.

The moral of the story is not to drown your reader at the start of your story with a deluge of information. No matter how poetically written, descriptive detail is not action. In fact, such dumps delay the start of action or stop the action in its tracks. It serves as a barrier, a road block.

I understand the allure of beginning with description. Writers, especially those who write in fantasy and science fiction, spend a lot of time and effort on world-building. It’s important they and their characters know and understand the fictional realms in which those characters operate. However, readers don’t need to know the intricacies of that fictional world. Let me blunt: readers don’t care.

But the environment in which the characters operate and some physical details are important. That means weaving the important details into the story.

I explained it to a client recently: You, the writer, cannot transfer the image in your brain to the reader’s brain. The reader will already have formed an image in his or her own mind. What you need in writing is not photographic detail, but a general impression. Think Impressionism, not photograph.

Let me be blunt: If you want to ensure the reader sees in his or her own mind what you see, then you’re in the wrong business. Get into film making where you can impose your vision onto the minds of others.

So, you now know to avoid beginning your story with an information dump. But what should you do instead? You have three basic options:

  1. Begin with dialogue. The first line of The Bounty: Jones is “I need bullets.” When posted to that aforementioned Facebook group’s for the First Line Friday theme, it received a plethora of responses, all of which indicating the those seeing it wanted to know more. The hook was immediate and effective.
  2. Begin with action. This means someone, the protagonist or not, is doing something or something is happening. Action often conveys a sense of urgency and leads the reader to discover what happens next. In Russian Lullaby, the heroine drops the books she’s carrying when she’s kidnapped.
  3. Begin with a declaration, an opinion. A controversial opinion works well, as does one with irony or given with sly wit. My favorite first line actually comes from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” That first line not only sets the tone for an entire genre, but it alludes to the tenor or theme of the entire book: the hunt for a husband.

Each of the tactics mentioned above has its pitfalls and perils. Doing any of them well is a challenge, which makes starting a book with description easy by default. However, easy is not necessarily effective.