On Writing
The Problem of the Second Chapter
Every novel I have written has required a different second chapter by the time it was finished. Some notes on why chapter two is where books decide what they are.
12 August 2025
The first chapter is an audition. The book is performing its best self, trying to convince you — the writer — that it is worth continuing. First chapters are seductive by nature. They offer a beginning, which is always a kind of promise.
The second chapter is where the promise has to start being kept, and this is where most novels I have begun have stalled, or broken, or revealed themselves to be something other than I had thought. The energy of beginning is gone. You are now simply working, and the work is harder than the beginning suggested it would be.
In each of my novels, the second chapter that survived to publication was not the one I wrote first. The first version was always too eager — it rushed towards what the book was about, made everything too explicit, tried to justify the first chapter by explaining it. The surviving second chapter is always quieter. It trusts that what was established in chapter one does not need to be confirmed immediately.
What I have learned, after three novels, is to think of the second chapter as a place to deepen rather than advance. Not: what happens next. But: what is the texture of this world, this consciousness, this way of paying attention? Get the texture right in chapter two and the plot — when it arrives, as it must — will feel inevitable rather than engineered.