Young Writers Society

So I'm figuring my novel will be around 200 pages in length. How long should the introduction be for a novel of such length. I was thinking perhaps three chapters.
It is young adult so there's going to be plenty of complaining about school and home life.
What does everyone else think?

I'd say it sort of depends on what you define 'introduction' as how long your chapters are, and what you plan to include in said introduction. I know that I like getting to know the setting and characters before things truly get started, but thirty pages of teen angst is never a good way to hook readers.

If you are thinking of "the introduction" as "the bit where I dump all the information about the character that you need to know for the rest", then you're probably going about it wrong. The first bit of your book is crucial to getting readers interested, and keeping them interested - so you should start with something happening, and tell the story of how it happens, revealing the relevant information through how the characters act, until you reach the end of the story.

The upshot of this is that there's no "introduction length" - there's no set amount of the book that should be "introducing stuff", because if you're thinking about "introducing stuff" as separate from "stuff happening", then you risk boring your readers away before they reach the happenings.

Don't worry about set up, as Cadi said. If you want to do three chapters of set up for yourself, by all means, write those three chapters. In the second draft, proceed to cut those three chapters and start the novel once you actually start the plot.

The thing to remember is that you only have a single paragraph to make the reader interested. Sometimes only a single sentence. That is the first sentence. The rest of the book has no importance what so ever if you can't get interest within the first few paragraphs. Then you have to keep interest throughout the rest of the book.

This article expands on the topic a fair bit. I hope it is helpful.

Don't worry about formally defining the introduction, just write until you' feel like you've given the reader enough information to enjoy and understand your story.

just write until you' feel like you've given the reader enough information to enjoy and understand your story.

The amount of information that is required to enjoy and understand the story before the actual story starts is minimal. One friend of mine compared information being dolled out in a story to vegetables nobody wants to eat (such as mushrooms or peppers). If you give us a pile of nothing but those vegetables, readers are going to wrinkle their noses and turn away.

However, if you bury the vegetables in a pizza, with cheese, meat, sauce, and crust, giving only tiny bits of information at a time while you load us up with interesting characters and juicy conflict, then you have people wanting to gobble up the pizza and you don't even notice that you're getting vegetables (information) in there.

This applies to the whole plot. To continue the pizza analogy, you don't order one because you want veggies. You order one because you want pizza. You read a novel because you want to be entertained— not because you want a giant info dump of the character's daily life.

Focus on entertaining and making the story interesting. Let the information you're giving hide in the story.

Rosey Unicorn wrote:The amount of information that is required to enjoy and understand the story before the actual story starts is minimal.

But you still need to spend at least a little time introducing the characters and describing the setting. The OP is asking how much time he/she should spend doing that.

A paragraph or two, max, and you should introduce it by having something else happen besides an introduction, so readers are interested in what's going on.

Just as Rosey said, however, you do not even have to purposefuly introduce the characters if you don't want to; it's possible to 'introduce' them by the way they behave in a specific situation, by synchronizing action with description. You can do that in any setting, be it calm, like f.e. classroom, or adrenaline, f.e. a physical or emotional conflict. The characters are defined by how they act, how calm/ out of control they are, what they say, in what tone, what their eyes hint, I could go on for ages like this. If you combine description with action, there's no need to 'stop and explain', so the story doesn't get slowed down and can maintain a fair interest from the readers.

If you mean introducing the settings and the circumstances, there is no need to stop for those either; just have your characters live their lives and define them through action, the story will move with them and the reader will slowly learn about the circumstances, the main events, the problems, and so on, through the actions of the characters. We live in an age where people don't really like, when you 'stop' and start 'explaining', in short creating 'an info dump'. Maintaining the readers' attention is very important, especially on the first pages, but it doesn't mean that you can loosen up once you're past the few first chapters; quite the opposite, the story should build up, by small bits, into a big bomb, that explodes near/at the end. You can proove us wrong if you find a writing style that overcomes all this, but in overall, introduce us to your story through the action of your characters, which define your characters. If I was to define the impression that gives, it's like as if you've pulled us into the lives of your characters and we watch them as we would watch people in real life, and we learn the story as the time goes (Also means that we don't learn all the secrets right away, you don't learn the secrets of others in real life so easily either, do you?).