Five things I need to know more than the color of your protagonist’s eyes

Anat Deracine
4 min readSep 16, 2018

I’ve been on a pet project for the last few months, reading the first chapter of nearly five hundred books to see if I can identify what works and what doesn’t.

I came up with a list of five things I absolutely need to know in the first chapter of a book. In a book done well, I don’t even realize these questions are being answered. And…

Anat Deracine

Author of "Driving by Starlight" https://goo.gl/N35aS1 and “The Night Wolves” http://bit.ly/TheNightWolves I'm on Twitter at @anat_deracine