Craft: Openings (Part One, Begin as you mean to End)
Kate Elliott September 12th, 2006
I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.
(Peter Brook)
Openings are part of the overall plot arc, the overall narrative. The opening carries within it the ending, it can foreshadow, reflect, parallel, hint at, paint the mood of, contrast with, or lay the groundwork for the ending. Openings should not only engage the reader by hook or by crook; they should be consistent in tone in relationship to the ending.
I’m not a believer in the One True Path. I am not going to tell you that there are hard and fast rules that govern openings.
Here are the three main things I consider when I am searching for the right place to begin.
1) Consistency of tone.
A tragedy will not usually start with a comic episode, unless there are tragic implications hidden within the joke. A comic story will not have a portentious beginning, unless you are Terry Prachett and that is part of the point.
I personally tend to emphasize consistency of tone between opening and closing, even in a lengthy series.
2) Why is this the right place to begin instead of some other point?
We are making arbitrary choices. In rare cases, such as a story that starts with the birth of the hero and ends with the death of the hero, your starting and ending points are chosen for you (although even there you have to decide how you’re going to approach the scene). More commonly you, the writer, must choose from a selection of possible starting points.
Do you begin with the duke receiving the letter informing him that his son has died at court under mysterious circumstances, or with the morning he sends him off to court and worries that his enemies there may wish to do the lad ill?
Do you begin with the young schoolmarm facing her first day of class in a one room school house in the middle of the frontier, or with her tempestuous parting from her disapproving father, who believes that education and employment are unwomanly and that she is disgracing the family?
Sometimes a more overtly dramatic scene is not the right place to begin because the reader doesn’t have enough identification with the character to make her really feel for the situation. Sometimes a seemingly-good introductory scene merely becomes a long stretch of infodump. Exhausted, she reached the city gates only to find them closed with approaching dusk, and she sank to the ground and wept as it rained on her uncovered head. She thought of the hardships that had brought her here, and then followed 2 pages of infodump background. In such cases, the information would be better introduced through a series of scenes during which the reader (we hope) comes to identify with the protagonist(s).
Ask yourself WHY you want to start with this scene.
If it is for the sake of some inherent coolness or shock value of the scene itself, then you may want to reconsider. Or not. Every now and then the Coolth Value or Shock Value wins, but be careful.
If it is a slam-bang action scene without other context, you may want to reconsider. In media res can work, but it can also backfire badly if the reader can’t identify with the characters or situation and so finds the action merely confusing and distancing.
Any opening can work if it does work, but avoid what seems flashy or sleek just for the sake of flashiness or sleekiness. There should be more than one reason to choose a particular point of opening. Maybe it’s cool AND emotional; maybe it’s emotional and quiet and has subtle foreshadowing; maybe it’s kick ass action but so clearly laid out and with such a strong hook for the reader to identify with the protagonist that there’s no problem with the reader feeling distanced from the scene.
Ask yourself how this scene will book-end the closing, or if what you reveal here, no matter how small, will resonate throughout the narrative.
+++
3) By what method or (hook) are you going to grab the reader’s attention?
Part Two, Craft: Openings (Part Two, the Hook) will follow in a few days.
One of things I find interesting about this post is what I assume is an assumption, namely, that the writer has a clear idea of the arc of the story in mind, at least in general terms. I almost never do, so I tend to start where the story decides to start, that is, in the first place/image/bit of action that floats to the surface of my mind. Now, these starting words may not in fact be the beginning of the finished book or story. They may be moved farther in when I realize that the reader will need more setup than I’ve given them. On one occasion they never made it into the final draft at all. But usually they are the beginning or at least, very near it.
This is interesting because I’ve been starting a new book and wrestling with the entry point. Part of it has been wanting to start with the right tone. Part of it has been figuring out where the story actually begins. That’s one of the hardest things for me to sort out sometimes. In my first two novels, the original first chapters ended up being in actuality something like chapters 5 and 8 or something like. In this case, I’m trying to get a better feel for the main character, and trying to avoid the infodump to set the stage, and yet trying not to start in the backstory. I have a feeling I won’t really know much until I write a fair distance into the book.
Earlier today I was looking at the first lines of various books after reading Kevin Andrew Murphy’s post. It seemed to me that the humorous first lines had an advantage over the serious-in-tone. (At least as a self-contained sentence)
A stand alone sentence can be great comedy. But, as Kate Elliott points to, serious drama needs elements that are difficult to create quickly: tension, an interest in what happens to the characters, a belief in the need to solve the problem, thwart the threat, etc.
One solution would be to have the opening scene center on a “small” tension. Another possibility is suggested be the opening line of “The Midwife’s Apprentice” (”When animal droppings and garbage and spoiled straw are piled up in a great heap, the rotting and moiling give forth heat.”) In this case, the main tension is based on the seeming mystery of garbage giving off heat–a strange fact of science which doesn’t require the reader to identify with the characters in order to work. The first paragraph goes on to introduce the main character by having her get in the garbage pile for warmth, which adds a visceral tension.
Referring to Katherine Kerr’s point above; I certainly found myself liberated, as a writer, when I stopped slavishly trying to start writing with the actual opening scene of a story. The word-processor was a godsend, for me; it meant I could write individual scenes that I knew were key to the plot, or little character illuminations, snippets of key dialogue, almost anything, and then start shuffling them into place and using them as the scaffolding around which to build the story.
So I think it’s worth noting that you don’t necessarily have to agonise over the beginning of your story before actually writing it. A good beginning may well be important for the reader, because it’s where they’ll begin; but it’s by no means, necessarily, where the writer will have begun. My one completed novel (filed awy for massive revision one day, but it was a joy to finish that 200,000-word leviathan) began with one battle scene and one scene that’s in, I think, chapter 30 (out of 36). The beginning came a lot later, growing out of the structure as it coalesced.
I usually begin with the moment something changes, or as close to that as I can. That is, the event that makes the situation unstable and so lets the story in.
—L.
I think these questions can be applied to the opening at any point in the process depending how you write. If you are someone that has a clear outline, sticking to it in the main, then these questions should be asked before you start and then again at every revision. If you write the end and work backwards then you will still eventually come to an opening that should be treated to this kind of examination. I don’t think this guide is limited to before you’ve written it.
I’m really glad to have read this, although I have discussed openings with other people at length we never put these things so succinctly. I think one of the hardest choices is how much of the relevant story to leave as a prequel to the opening moment. Especially as it is harder to avoid info-dump style passages if you have a lot of back history to reveal throughout the story.
I like this.
I also think that the “small tension” is a good way to approach an opening if the story you’re introducing is so large it needs a big build-up.
I realize now that the biggest assumption I made when writing this post was that I wasn’t thinking of this in terms of first draft or revision. I wrestle so much with openings that I tend, I think, to consider openings more as part of the process of revision than of the process of first draft.
Someone who is approaching the opening scene as the exploratory entrance into an as yet unexplored narrative will think through this process differently, which is as it should be.
Tchernabyelo, that’s how I work, too. For THE SHADOW ISLE, for example, I now have part of the prologue and the very last scene of the book written, as well as some snippets from various spots in the middle. Where that part in the prologue will come is still a mystery.
Larry, that’s a very good point indeed, especially for shorter works.
Woo-hoo!
So, I work the same way as Katharine.
Now, if I can just sell as many novels… (hey, I’d be more than happy if I could just finish as many novels…)
When I read a book I do tend to pay attention to what hooks me in. Besides humor, it’s an emotional appeal in proportion to the tone and how much investment I’ve made. The suggestion about small emotions ties in with this: I’m far more likely to turn away from a book that begins with overpowering drama–say, the heroine weeping tears of blood on a vast battlefield–because I don’t know her, I don’t know anyone in the battle, I’m being slammed with devastation before I’ve met an individual.
It may not be good but human nature does tend to swerve its passion toward the individual, thus you get nearly as many people yakking passionately on and on about the murder of a six year old child model as you do about the latest genocidal war iin Africa. More, it seems at times.
So the novel that begins with the devastation on a battlefield that drives me away could catch my eye if it began the day before, when the heroine is hunting over the floor for her dropped keys as her maid is trying to pack for fleeing and her insane aunt is running around the room trying to tie bird feathers to everyone for good luck. The war is pending, but we begin with individuals, each of whose motivations and reactions vary.
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Sherwood, I especially like the aunt giving good luck tokens.
Yes, Sherwood, I want to read that story! i would like to know more about the crazy aunt. Why isn’t she on the battlefield with the heroine?
Vivan and Erin: in a horror story, she’s the first to die. In a funny fantasy, she used the bird feathers to flap above the action, where she’s busy hectoring the dragon attackers into behaving. In another sort of story…who knows?
I’ve heard it said that the story truly begins when something irrevocable happens. This resonates with me.
However, I find that I need to start at least a little prior to that point, for the reasons Kate points out — that in order for that irrevocable event to matter, the reader has to know something about the main character(s) and care what happens to them.
-l.
Echoing what Kate said a post or two back, a story is likely to have two openings. The second is the one that opens the story up for the reader The first (which may or may not be the same as the second) is the one that opens up the story for the writer.
I quite like this insight.
Whatever I’ve started with gets moved further back, once the first 3 chapters are written. Same with shorter fiction and with non-fiction too.
The point of the starting point, at least for some writers, is — starting.
But the pov and the location and the tone are there and they do not change.
Love, C.
Gest moved in which direction?
Yeah, there’s the whole aspect of finding a starting point - as others have said - that allows me/you the writer into the story, and gets things going, as opposed to the actual beginning of the book that you may settle on once you are revising.
GeTs
There exists so many rules for openings, that my first three chapters have been rewritten (including long after the manuscript was finished) to the point I have many great starts that can lead into a multitude of other books–but not helping with this one. The first line to the first five pages (some agents actually only want the 1st five pgs) and all the inbetween; however, how to decide which one is the right one for this particular manuscript is enough to rip out hair, or light candles to every entity hoping one will listen. I do agree with the tone being set for the entire work, which is how I finally waded through the sludge of numerous openings. Though my heroine is a cynical modern creating quite a few laugh-out-loud scenes and in love with a not so nice here, the undertone needed to remain dark, or the reader would never ‘feel’ dread when lethal beings were ‘closing in’.
Typed too quickly previous post..so sorry. Blame coffee and pre-dawn (even entered wrong website). End of post should have read not so nice ‘hero’, not ‘here’ (smack) and as for undertone needing to remain dark, that’s how I decided where to begin–lethal beginning, a bit of humor, acquainting the reader with tone of story.
Karey,
since your manuscript is finished, I see you don’t have the problem some writers seem to have of rewriting the first 50 pages incessently without going any farther into the story. You sound a bit like me; I rewrote the opening sequence to JARAN about ten times and I still am not satisfied with the opening as it stands in the published version. At some point, I found, I had to let go.
My original post, I see now, really has to do with revision and not with where to start as a writer.
Kate,
You may not realize it, but your original post helped tremendously. This manuscript is to be part of a series. Who wants to go through the continued nightmare of slogging through an opening? Your suggestion hit it right on. You see, I’d rewritten numerous times, hit upon a beginning I could finally sit back and sigh with relief over, but it was a long painful journey. Taking your suggestion, I now see, that’s EXACTLY what I’d ended up with..a beginning that sets the tone for the story/end. You just had the knack of putting it into words the rest of us could clutch rabidly and apply to our own writing. So hats off!! Now I feel every manuscript I begin, I’m more focused with HOW to come up with the opening.
You rock (can you tell I have a pre-teen?)
K
Karey, I have teenagers, so my shock at being told I did something useful is overwhelming me!
But seriously, good luck. I think one key to writing is learning to trust yourself.
I agree wholeheartedly with balancing the tone of beginning and ending. I heard that piece of advice before I published and it made SO much sense to me.
I have also heard “Begin at the point where everything changes” - which has worked very well for me — as well as “Begin as close to the end of the story as you can” — which presumes you know where the story ends, which is a lot harder.
To me, the most important thing about getting the opening scene right is establishing the POV character’s voice. That’s what hooks me into a story.
Carol
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