It seems like every literary agent wants you to send the first five pages of your manuscript. The first five pages of my manuscript are my first chapter. The problem is, I hate my first chapter. Everything after that (including the second book in the series) I love. I know it needs to be completely rewritten but I'm not sure how to do that when everything else is finished.
If you love everything after the first chapter, can you just scrap it? In other words, can your story start with what is now chapter two? I find that people sometimes stumble over chapter 1 when they are starting the story in the wrong place.
I threw out my first chapter that I loved. It was hard to do. But it misled the reader into thinking it was a prologue trope with the character as a child then moving on to the story. Instead, my story shifts from the present to scenes with the MC as a young teen in two parallel stories that then merge timelines midway through the story. So the misleading first paragraph had to go.
