I want you to look at these two charts. They are basically WHY READERS STOP READING A BOOK.

Chart 1 says the biggest reasons are:

25% stop reading because it’s DULL

16% stop because of bad writing (more on that in a sec)

16% DULL characters or characters who are unbelievable

9% stop because you fed them an inedible info dump

Let’s pause there. This means if you have engaging characters and start your story with something interesting – putting that interesting thing up front, like the opening paragraph – and you don’t write BAD, you will have avoided more than 66% or two-thirds of the reason people stop reading a book!

Gang, if you can easily avoid 2/3 of a problem, avoid it.

Bad writing is subjective, but let’s assume it means typos, poor grammar, and improper punctuation. Again, easily avoided.

So: avoid.

And do what instead?

Start with…