Want to Hook a Literary Agent? Fix These Mistakes in Your First 10 Pages
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The first ten pages of your novel can make or break your publishing chances—but most writers don’t realize they’re making critical mistakes. When I worked at a top literary agency and at an imprint of Penguin Random House, it was my job to evaluate manuscripts we were considering. Those first ten pages often meant the difference between a book we decided to publish and one that we rejected. You must grab your reader’s attention in those first ten pages, or they'll move on to something else and never give your book a second thought. It's tough but true.
Here are the nine biggest mistakes I’ve seen in opening pages—and how you can fix them.
1. Spotlighting Inconsequential Characters
Unless you have a really, really good reason otherwise, the first ten pages of your manuscript should focus on your protagonist. After all, at this early point in the story, your reader is looking for guidance on who the story is actually about.
For example, I recently edited a novel where the first scene showed the protagonist landing at JFK airport and then getting into a taxi. The author spent several paragraphs detailing the taxi driver's appearance, and then we got two pages of dialogue between the protagonist and the taxi driver, where the driver revealed some of their tragic backstory. So as I read through the rest of the novel, in the back of my head, I was thinking: When is that taxi driver going to reappear? What is that backstory going to add up to? And guess what? That character never reappeared at all.
Ultimately, all of the attention given to that taxi driver in the first scene was irrelevant. It made me question why we spent so much time on him to begin with. In your opening pages, make sure you don't accidentally over-inflate minor characters who aren't consequential to the story. This is the most important real estate in your entire book, so focus only on the characters who matter.
Anytime you introduce a character in the first ten pages, ask yourself these three questions:
Is this character essential to the protagonist's journey?
Will they appear again in a meaningful way?
Do they contribute to the plot conflict?
If the answer is no to all of these questions, then don't spend much time on them at all—and you probably don't even need to give them a name. Anytime you name a character, you're telling the reader they matter and that they’re someone to remember.
I'm not saying you can't have background characters, of course, but don't give them so much attention that we mistake them for a main character. That's only going to set up improper expectations, confuse your reader, and overcrowd the narrative.
2. Delivering Too Much Backstory
This next mistake is one of the most brutal habits for newer authors to break: delivering too much backstory.
I bet you know your protagonist's life story as well as your own—their childhood traumas, their biggest regrets, their secret talent for flipping pancakes with their eyes closed. And it makes sense that you want to share all of that with readers so they come to understand your character. But here's the problem with backstory: readers won't care about your character's past until they're invested in their present.
Think about how Breaking Bad begins. We don't get a whole history of Walter White's failed career dreams or his bad health insurance. We get a man in his underwear, driving an RV in the desert. Immediate action. Immediate tension. And immediately we want to learn more about him.
So in your first ten pages, treat backstory as seasoning—not the meal itself. It should be sprinkled in only as much as is needed. If you find yourself writing pages of flashbacks or explaining your protagonist's personal history at length, stop and ask yourself: What compelling backstory does the reader actually need to follow what's going on in this scene?
If the backstory isn't absolutely essential for us to know right now, save it for later. Because as long as you do a good job hooking us into the story with the action of the scene, we won’t mind waiting a bit to learn more about the character's past.
3. Burying the Action
What actually happens in your opening scene? Many writers fall into the trap of spending their critical opening ten pages on extensive setting description or exposition. But if the protagonist doesn't actually do anything, the pace will feel slow.
I see it all the time in manuscripts I'm editing. The opening ten pages feel more like a warm-up lap rather than the start of the race, and by the end of the first ten pages, we have no idea where the plot is going. In these cases, your reader is likely going to stop reading before the story even begins.
Imagine if The Hunger Games started like this: Katniss wakes up, brushes her teeth, pets Buttercup, eats her breakfast, and reflects on her relationship with Prim. We watch her entire morning routine with no mention of the reaping and no plot development. Is that an opening that would make you keep reading? Probably not.
If you have some kind of morning routine opening like this, I'm not here to attack you—but I recommend revisiting it. The opening scene should instead show your protagonist discovering something consequential, navigating a conflict, or working toward a goal.
4. Starting with a Lengthy Prologue
This next mistake involves one of the most debated elements of fiction writing: prologues. Love them or hate them, I think that starting the novel with a lengthy prologue—meaning more than ten pages—is a risky choice and often does more harm than good.
You need to be careful and ensure that your story actually calls for a prologue, because many books that have prologues don't need them. If you're using your prologue to dump a lot of world-building or historical background on your reader, you should probably cut it entirely. That information should instead be woven into the action of the story itself.
Another bad use of a prologue is to show a cryptic scene that is impossible for the reader to understand. That’s likely just going to confuse them.
So when can prologues work? The most effective prologues either tease an event that comes later in the story—often at the climax—to make us eager to see how we reach that moment, or flash back in time to some period before the novel begins that contains important context.
But here's the key: keep your prologue short and sweet. It shouldn’t take up your full first ten pages, because then you're delaying the reader’s arrival at the main narrative—and likely delaying our introduction to the protagonist.
And if you're querying literary agents, many of them ask for the first ten pages. If that’s all prologue and nothing else, you’re not really giving them a taste of what the story is actually about.
5. Confusing the Reader
This next mistake is probably the most deadly of them all: confusing the reader.
A reader who’s confused isn’t more intrigued to keep reading to figure out what’s going on. They’re frustrated and likely going to put the book down. Writers sometimes intentionally try to be vague, cryptic, or mysterious to make readers want to learn more. But what they’re often doing instead is just disorienting the reader and making it difficult to follow what’s happening.
In the opening pages, we need to know three things:
Who the protagonist is
Where we are
What’s going on
The reader should be able to understand these foundational facts without reading the book’s description. If they can’t, then you’re likely confusing them.
Here’s a mindset shift that’s helpful: suspense doesn’t come from intentionally withholding essential information from the reader—it comes from giving them enough information to make them eager to know what happens next.
The Martian is a great example of an intriguing yet clear opening. We know exactly who the protagonist is (Mark Watney, an astronaut), where he is (abandoned on Mars), and what’s going on (he’s been separated from his crew). We’re briefed on all the basics, yet we’re intrigued to learn how he got into this position and what will happen from here.
The other critical element that The Martian’s opening has in spades is conflict, which brings me to the next mistake.
6. Not Introducing Enough Conflict
Without conflict, you don’t have a story—you have a series of scenes that don’t add up to anything. Conflict is what gives the story shape and creates an emotional reading experience, because we naturally want to see how the characters navigate that conflict and eventually resolve it.
Conflict is so crucial to effective storytelling that we need to see it in the very first pages of your novel. Without it, you won’t give the reader any reason to continue reading.
That doesn’t mean every story has to have a major war or a gruesome murder. Conflict can be more subtle and intimate in nature—like an argument between family members or even a protagonist’s own self-doubt. It doesn’t matter how big the conflict is. What matters is that there’s tension weighing on the protagonist.
How to identify your conflict:
Ask yourself: What does my protagonist want above all else—and what is stopping them from getting it?
If they don’t want anything, or nothing is stopping them, your opening lacks conflict.
Take the opening of Gone Girl, for example. It does a great job establishing conflict without a flashy action scene. We don’t hear Nick reflecting on how great his marriage is—rather, he exposes the sources of tension in his relationship with Amy, including their debates on moving and their career challenges. This simmering tension immediately makes us want to see what happens to the relationship.
7. Forgetting the Setting
This next mistake is something that often goes overlooked but has a significant impact—it’s forgetting the setting.
This issue is also known as white room syndrome—when the story or scene has no sense of place. We have no idea where the characters are, if they’re inside or outside, if it’s day or night, or what type of room or physical environment they’re in. It feels like the characters are talking and moving in a void.
Are we in the galley of the International Space Station or in the kitchen of a Michelin-starred restaurant? When readers can’t visualize the scene, they can’t get immersed in the story.
So take a look at your opening pages and make sure you incorporate enough setting description to ground us. We don’t need paragraphs and paragraphs of setting details—that would slow down the pace—but instead, weave in these details through the scene’s action.
Bonus points if you can indicate where geographically and when in time the novel is set.
The Night Circus does an amazing job establishing the setting in the opening pages, which contributes to its immersive and cinematic quality. We get a vivid description of the circus before it opens—the tents, the shimmering lights, the ticket booth—all of this immediately grounds the reader in the atmosphere.
8. Neglecting the Stakes
Stakes are what make a reader care about the story. If nothing is at risk—if your character has nothing to lose—then we simply won’t be invested in seeing what happens.
Conflict and stakes go hand in hand. What will happen to the protagonist if the conflict doesn’t resolve in their favor? You might have conflict with no stakes, but great stories need both.
So ask yourself: What’s at stake for my protagonist in my opening scene?
If the answer is nothing really, then you need to raise the stakes.
Even a small conflict—like your character failing to catch a bus—can have stakes if missing the bus means losing out on a job interview. And stakes don’t have to be life or death (though they can be if that suits your story). It’s about ensuring something meaningful is on the line for your protagonist.
I recently edited a romance novel where the protagonist returned to her hometown after 20 years away and ran into her childhood crush at the local coffee shop. I thought: This is cool, but why do we care? The opening scene lacked stakes because we didn’t understand why running into her crush mattered to her at this point in her life. There needs to be a meaningful implication behind the action of the scene.
9. Opening in the Wrong Place entirely
This is the number one most common issue I see in the first ten pages of manuscripts. Frankly, fixing all the other mistakes we’ve covered won’t matter if you still have this fundamental issue: opening in the wrong place entirely.
Writers often start the novel way too early—far before the story actually begins.
Don’t start your novel on your protagonist’s average Tuesday. Start it on the day that their life changes forever. Where does the protagonist’s journey kick into motion? That’s the real beginning.
We often talk about this as the inciting incident—and while the inciting incident doesn’t have to occur within the first ten pages, we should at least be leading up to it.
I hear from authors all the time: “My story doesn’t really pick up until 50 or 100 pages in, but just keep reading to get there.” The truth is, most readers won’t wait that long. My advice in these cases? Cut those first 50 or 100 pages entirely, or, if the day your protagonist’s life changes forever starts in Chapter 3, make that the opening of your novel and see what happens.
I bet the pace will be so much faster, and you’ll find you’re able to get to the heart of the story quicker. For example, The Hunger Games begins on the day of the reaping—not weeks before. And The Martian begins when Mark is already abandoned on Mars—we don’t see the entire failed mission. Most often, the most effective opening scene of your story is deeper in the novel than you think.
Now, there are exceptions to every writing guideline, and you’ll find successful novels that incorporate some of these mistakes in the first ten pages. But most novels will be much stronger if you avoid these issues. So try revamping your opening and see what your readers think.
Happy writing!
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