A lot of ink has been spilled on beginnings. How not to start: with waking up, with a prologue, with running and chasing. How not to get bogged down on exposition.

I’m the first to agree with most of this advice; I think a beginning should be well-blended with action, emotional development, and exposition, such that none of them appears in very large blocks without a taste of the other. And I do agree you want to get moving on the main plot early on.

But some things definitely do have to be established as soon as possible, even at the price of pushing your hook back. One of those things is expectations.

How expectations change everything

If you wake up in the morning on a Monday, planning for a day of work, and a work day happens, it makes almost no impression. But if you wake up on a Saturday, not expecting to have to work today, and get a call that says you have to go in after all, you feel very different about it.

The trouble with stories is, you don’t always know when the book opens whether it’s a Monday or a Saturday to these characters. Say a book opens with the main character on top of a moving train, fighting with a bad guy. Is she a superhero; is this a regular Tuesday for her? Or is this the inciting incident that sets everything off, and in a minute we’re going to get a record scratch and “I bet you’re wondering how I got here”?

There are a million brief and clever ways to do this. Maybe while the character is doing her fight on the train, she’s thinking, “Gosh I hope I didn’t leave the iron on, now don’t forget today is Mom’s birthday.” Then you know this is normal. On the other hand, if she’s thinking, “An hour ago I was having a perfectly normal breakfast, and now this,” and then you know this is an ordinary person thrust into an extraordinary situation.

So: what, exactly, do we have to establish expectations about?

The circumstances

Especially in fantasy and science fiction, it can be very hard to tell unusual circumstances from normal ones. Gideon the Ninth is one of my favorite books, but the first time I read it, I thought Lyctor trials were like an annual thing, something that happens all the time. I couldn’t figure out why Harrow was being so dramatic about it!

Now I’m not sure how the author could have fit that information in early on, given the point of view character is Gideon and Gideon does not care at all about Lyctor trials. But I got a lot more invested when I figured out that this has never happened before and Harrow has no more idea what to expect than Gideon does.

Knowing how unprecedented the circumstances are will shed light on characters’ reactions and let you know what to watch for.

The main character’s plan

Every character always has a plan, because people always have a plan, even if that plan is just “hope the problem goes away while I am eating this pint of ice cream.” The plan your hero has at the beginning of the book obviously won’t end up happening. They’re sure to get interrupted with something else and diverted, either a little or a lot. But we should have some idea of what they think is going to happen.

Including the main character’s plan is just good characterization, but it will also set up the various surprises much better. If we know what they think is going to happen, we will understand why they react the way they do. The main character’s plan ends up being a narrative we will use to organize the facts as they are presented to us: things that are going according to plan, and things that are not. We will experience the moment the plan goes off the rails the same way they do: as a jolt, a break in expectations.

You’ll notice this in heist movies: any time the plan is described in detail, it will never happen that way. Guaranteed. The only reason the plan is given is so that you will know the moment the plan goes sideways.

Other characters’ expectations

Most main characters aren’t an everyman character. You’re trying to build a specific person with specific traits, values, and desires. As early as possible in the story, you want to establish what makes this person different from any other person who could be in their shoes right now. Are they quicker to anger, do they have different morals or politics, are they working a scheme nobody else is aware of?

Other characters’ expectations of the main character can be a sketch of what the average person in their circumstances would be and do. Then the main character’s actual behavior, whenever it diverges from expectations, is what is specific to them. Ask yourself: what reactions do other characters expect the main character to have? What happens instead?

Consider the beginning of The Warrior’s Apprentice, which is one of my favorite beginnings. Miles is going through a military test and we get to hear his conversation with the other recruits. Their reactions tell us right away that he’s high class; his father is somebody important. They also notice that he’s visibly disabled, something they have very negative views about. They don’t expect a whole lot of him, and in fact they’re waiting for him to fail on this part of the test, the obstacle course.

Miles has a plan: go around the wall and take the loss in points, because he can’t risk going over it. Everyone else has an expectation: he’ll do terribly but get into the military anyway because of nepotism. But both expectations are wrong. Because of the goading of the other people there, he decides to go over the wall instead.

This is a disastrous decision which sets him up for a lot of grief over the next few chapters. But if the expectations hadn’t been established first, it would just be a guy going over a wall. We need to learn just enough about Miles first that we understand why he did it and what the emotional fallout of that choice will be.

What do you expect?

Next time you read the beginning of a book, try taking note of what you expect to happen on each page. What do the characters in the book seem to expect? When are these expectations shattered?

You may find that a lot more information is given about expectations than you realized. They are given away in quick little comments, either in the narration or from characters’ thoughts and words. And you may also find that these expectations shape your reaction to the story, making the events of the plot have a much bigger impact.