How to Make Promises to the Reader

The promises that you make at the beginning of a story are the promises that you intend to pay off by the end of it. We should be setting up character motives, one of the most important things to be doing in these early chapters. In a broader sense, the story has what, for lack of a better term, I'll just call body language. By doing those sorts of things, you are inherently promising things that belong to that form.