You’re starting too late or too early
The inciting incident doesn’t belong on page two. Neither does the entire life history of your character. Most writers either burn their best material in the setup or waste five pages explaining why the world matters before anything happens. Your opening scene should establish one thing: something is not right. A character wants something. A situation is breaking. Start in the middle of that tension, not before it arrives.
Look at the opening of The Farewell. It doesn’t begin with Billi’s childhood or her relationship with her grandmother. It starts with her getting a phone call. We’re already in motion. Everything else you need to know appears because the story needs it, not because you’ve decided it’s backstory time.
The stakes are buried or non-existent
Readers need to know what’s at risk in one sentence. Not one page, one sentence. If you can’t state what your character has to lose or what they want badly enough to risk losing something else, your structure hasn’t begun yet. You’re still deciding what the story is. The opening pages prove you know the answer.
A protagonist who wants to keep her job is not the same as a protagonist who will lose her apartment if she doesn’t. A man who might have to move is not the same as a man whose daughter will be taken by social services if he fails. Specificity creates consequence. Vague stakes make readers close your script at page nine.
The setup is doing all the work
Setup should never be your opening ten pages. Setup should be three pages, maximum four. The setup introduces character, world, and the problem. Then something breaks. Then the story begins. If your first ten pages are all introduction, you’ve written an encyclopedia entry, not a screenplay. Readers will stop because nothing is happening yet.
Action doesn’t mean explosions or chases. It means characters making choices that matter. It means something shifts because of what your protagonist does, not because you’re explaining the rules of their world. In Gone Girl, the setup is two pages. By page three, there’s a body on the floor. Everything the reader needs to know about the marriage, the dynamic, the obsession, arrives because the story demands it.
Your opening scene doesn’t have a clear purpose
Every scene in your first ten pages needs to do two things minimum. It introduces character through action, not description. It moves the story forward. If a scene just sits there showing the reader what your character’s apartment looks like, or how they have coffee, or what their morning routine is, you’re wasting time. Character is revealed through what they do under pressure, what they choose when they have to choose, what they refuse.
The scene where Luke Skywalker meets Obi-Wan doesn’t exist just to show they know each other. It sets up Luke’s need to leave, Obi-Wan’s need for a companion, and the world they’re about to enter. Every moment serves two masters. If your scene only serves one, cut it.
You’re explaining instead of showing
Exposition should never be visible. If a character tells another character something, it should be because that character actually needs to know it. Not because you, the writer, need the reader to know it. Most writers hide exposition behind dialogue, and readers can feel it. The conversation becomes wooden because the characters aren’t talking to each other, they’re talking to the audience through you.
If your opening pages contain scenes where one character explains the plot to another character who already knows the plot, delete it. Find a reason they need the information they’re exchanging, or find a way to show it through action instead. When the stakes are real, exposition becomes natural.
Your protagonist is passive or likable instead of active or interesting
Likable is not the same as compelling. A character can be selfish, reckless, or abrasive and still be the character readers want to follow. What they can’t be is passive. In your first ten pages, your protagonist should do something. Make a choice. Take action. Fail. Refuse something. Want something badly enough that they risk something to get it. Readers follow characters who drive the story, not characters who wait for the story to find them.
Walter White isn’t likable. He’s a high school teacher cooking meth. But he acts. He decides. He wants. That’s what makes him readable. Readers don’t need to approve of your character. They need to understand them and watch what they’ll do.
The world feels generic or borrowed
A police procedural doesn’t need a unique world. A cop story needs a unique case with unique pressure. A love story doesn’t need a unique setting. It needs a unique obstacle that makes this love story matter in this way. But your world has to have weight. It has to feel specific. Not “an office.” A startup where nobody sleeps and the pitch deadline is Friday. Not “a small town.” A small town where the factory just closed and everyone’s leaving. Specificity makes the world real, and the real world is where real stakes live.
Your dialogue sounds written, not spoken
If your characters sound like they’re delivering information or explaining plot, they sound written. Real dialogue has stutters, repetitions, things left unsaid. Characters interrupt. They misunderstand. They’re trying to get what they want through speech, not trying to communicate information to you. In the first ten pages, dialogue should reveal character and stakes at the same time. Every word your character speaks should show something about who they are.
Read your dialogue out loud. If you don’t stumble, if it’s too smooth, if it flows too perfectly, it’s probably not real enough. Real speech is messy. Real speech works.
You’re trying to make the reader care before showing them why they should
Care is earned. You can’t demand it on page one. You earn it by putting a character in a situation where they have to choose, and showing what they choose and why. You earn it by making the stakes real before asking the reader to feel them. Most writers reverse this. They tell us the character’s sad backstory and ask us to feel sorry for them, then wonder why we don’t care when everything falls apart.
Instead, put the character in the situation that will break them. Let us see them try to hold on. Let us understand what they have to lose. Then we care because we’ve seen what’s real, not because you’ve asked us to feel something.
There’s no clear antagonistic force
Not every story needs a villain, but every story needs an obstacle. Something or someone opposing what your character wants or needs. In your first ten pages, the reader should sense what that opposition is. It could be a person, a system, a situation, or even the character’s own nature. But there should be a reason your character can’t simply get what they want. That reason is your story. If the first ten pages don’t establish what’s in the way, you haven’t started your story yet.
You’re assuming the reader knows what kind of story this is
By page ten, the reader should know the genre, the tone, and what kind of story they’re in. Not explicitly. Not through a card that says “this is a thriller.” But through the structure, through the pacing, through what’s being prioritized and what’s being ignored. If your reader finishes ten pages and doesn’t know whether they’re reading a comedy or a tragedy, a thriller or a drama, you’ve lost them. The structure should telegraph what’s coming.
You don’t need to announce your genre. You announce it by the choices you make about what matters. What you show. What you emphasize. What you risk. The structure of your first ten pages is how you tell the reader what kind of story you’re telling.
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