Start in the middle

The first page of our story is crucial to get right.  It's the bit of writing that gets an editor's or agent's interest, or persuades a potential purchaser whether to buy our book or not.  And if we're writing genre fiction we have to grab the reader by the scruff of the neck and thrust them straight into the heart of the story.

We have to start in the middle of the narrative.  I might love the beauty of a savannah sunrise, but my readers want to know what's happening, dammit.  They don't want to read pages of description of the golden dawn.  So in Panthera : Death Spiral I started with Ren examining the litter of dead kingcat cubs.

I started in the middle of the story, with my main character finding out something important about the dead cats.  She'd been hired by the Conservation Authority three months ago to investigate the deaths, and had already examined two other litters of dead cubs.  But the reader didn't need to know that, because she hadn't discovered anything relevant to the story then.  So I started in the middle, with Ren examining the third set of cubs and discovering the theft of their thymus gland cells.

In Panthera : Death Song I start with Ren and her brothers at an eco-rock  concert, discovering something nasty left by the singer's trailer.  And in Panthera : Death Plain I start with Panthera's viewpoint, as he returns to Earth and doesn't even get off the dockside before he's being hunted.

Start in the middle of the story, draw the reader in, intrigue them with a problem or question, and leave them at a cliffhanger is a perfect formula for a pacy genre first chapter.  Start with a bang and keep moving.  And with any luck your readers will keep moving through the story too.