In her recent post on Constructing Your First Chapter , Elsa Neal wrote, “The first chapter should begin just before a pivotal event in your protagonist’s life. This is something that forces a change or a decision.” Sound advice, to which Christopher Hudson sent a witty retort: "Now you tell me! Perhaps I shouldn't have started my last book with, 'When I was born ...'" Today, I want to bust Leif Enger for doing just that, in one of my all-time favorite novel openings. His Peace Like a River begins: From my first breath in this world, all I wanted was a good set of lungs and the air to fill them with—given circumstances, you might presume, for an American baby of the twentieth century. With one sentence Enger plunges us into the story of his narrator, Reuben Land. The words “all I wanted” make character motivation clear from the start. In the second paragraph we learn that Reuben’s lungs refused to “kick in,” providing what Elsa would call a "pivotal event,...