Dear and darling K,
You gave a great argument about how to start a first chapter. You are spot on in your assessment about action and moving back 5 minutes from the true action Then you blew it and used Hamlet as your example. How could you say that Shakespeare should be used as a model?
1) it's a play. Wrong medium.
2) There is a LOT of talking and conversation By your logic, Romeo and Juliet should start after the lovers get married and when their families pull them apart (Even better, right before the suicide scene)
3) Shakespeare always put the action in the end. Here's a summary from a cliff-notes site on Hamlet. "Prince Hamlet devotes himself to avenging his father’s death a(fter speaking to his father's murdered ghost), but, because he is contemplative and thoughtful by nature, he delays, entering into a deep melancholy and even apparent madness.
Not the suspense I think you're looking for. Here's a great first chapter I just read. Blood Rites (by Jim Butcher) Here is the link http://www.jim-butcher.com/books/dresde … -chapter-1
Here are the first four paragraphs.
The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault.
My boots squeaked and squealed on the tile floor as I sprinted around a corner and toward the exit doors to the abandoned school building on the southwest edge of Chicagoland. Distant streetlights provided the only light in the dusty hall, and left huge swaths of blackness crouching in the old classroom doors.
I carried an elaborately carved wooden box about the size of a laundry basket in my arms, and its weight made my shoulders burn with effort. I’d been shot in both of them at one time or another, and the muscle burn quickly started changing into deep, aching stabs. The damned box was heavy, not even considering its contents.
Inside the box, a bunch of flop-eared grey and black puppies whimpered and whined, jostled back and forth as I ran. One of the puppies, his ear already notched where some kind of doggie misadventure had marked him, was either more brave or more stupid than his litter mates. He scrambled around until he got his paws onto the lip of the box, and set up a painfully high-pitched barking full of squeaky snarls, big dark eyes focused behind me.
Assessment: Great first line. First three paragraphs: Lots of action, threat to the main character and a lot of ducking during an unexplained combat. Fourth paragraph: Add in the puppies (innocents at risk.)
He has a system. This isn't an accident and is a GREAT opening start to an action book. There is a reason that he's on the best seller list.
