The Opening Scene Problem Every Writer Has (Including Yours Truly)
Figuring out where to start the novel or story can be maddening. Until now.
Oh, where do I begin with this? At the beginning! Only sometimes the beginning can be a tricky bugger to find. It has been for me, and I would find myself writing around an idea, priming it with 500 pages of backstory, or stopping and restarting at least a million times.
But here are a few things I’ve learned from my own practice, and after teaching hundreds of university students, that just might help your story get off on the right foot.
The story never starts where you think it does
Let’s just get that out of the way so you can stop feeling badly about yourself. Honestly. And I say this because you can read a bajillion books and know intuitively that they’re working, but not be able to pinpoint precisely why. Or where it breaks down. Or, again, why. Reading a lot of stories definitely helps, and yet sometimes, we need some straightforward advice for the stories we’re trying to tell.
Here are the most common traps, and some questions to ask yourself if you tend to flail around in the beginning of your stories:
Starting too early. I’m looking at those hundreds of pages of backstory. The best opening is the moment your protagonist’s world flips on its head and not a second earlier.
Ask yourself this. What is the least amount of information I can give right now that will get the reader up to speed here? Not the whole tranche of files. Too much information is hard to hold onto, and you’re asking your reader to know, intuitively, which details are THE details worth hanging onto. Giving them the most relevant information is a gift.
Starting too late, in mid-crisis, and with zero grounding or context. You could be writing about the worst thing in the world happening to your character, but your readers might come away not caring. Not because they don’t care about abuse, violence, betrayal, etc… but because there’s a stakes problem. Your reader doesn’t understand the significance of what’s being lost or threatened. And if you want the replay to our What’s at Stake? Workshop, you can get it here.
Starting in medias res is a trap that creates chapters of car crashes that mean nothing. Action without context is noise. Ask yourself this. If I’m going to start in the middle of the chaos, what part of this story matters the most to my protagonist? Because a thing in motion that also matters, throws a life line to the reader and anchors them into one emotional thread of the story.
But where do I actually start the story?
With desire
Even if it’s not the character’s ultimate desire. Cinderella started her story simply wanting to be loved. To experience freedom and peace. Not to go to a ball. Not to wear a beautiful dress. Not to dance with a prince. Not for the shoe to fit. Even though, she would desire all of those things as the story unfolded. But in the beginning, she wanted to be swept away from that harridan stepmother and her two harpy step-sisters, and it just so happened to take going to a ball, wearing a beautiful dress, dancing with a prince, and the shoe fitting to make it happen.
The reader needs to know what your character wants (even if they change their mind as we go) before they can care about anything that happens to them. Establish desire first.
Revealing their character and the world’s rules at the same time
Your opening scene has to do two jobs. We can see how horribly Cinderella’s being treated in the beginning, that she has no choice but to serve as a maid in her own house, and how this step mother has taken her poor father for everything. And now that he’s dead, Cinderella has lost her only source of support and protection.
Does it make Cinderella angry, bitter, or vengeful? No. She’s damn near saintly about the whole thing. Does she go on a murderous rampage and write their names on the walls in their own blood? No, but we wouldn’t have blamed her if she did. We learned the rules of her world and how she responds to those rules, which gave us her character.
If your opening scene is only doing one, it’s working too hard in the wrong direction. Your character needs some structure so the reader will know when they’re breaking the rules. That also helps the reader know how terrified/happy/anxious they should be for your character as the story unfolds.
Some tests
If you can delete the first chapter and the story loses nothing, you started too early.
If a secondary character appears in your opening scene, and then disappears for fifty pages, you started wayyyyy too early and introduced someone the story wasn't ready for yet. This is also a sneaky way of filling in backstory that you probably don’t need but is very interesting to you.
If your opening scene involves your main character waking up, getting dressed, eating breakfast, or commuting, and none of those things are plot-critical, you've started too early. This is so common, it’s called The Morning Routine. And it’s understandable to start there because it feels like a natural beginning. For the day, yes. For a story, 99/100 times, no.
If your protagonist is set to lose something in your opening pages, does the reader know why their actions matter before it’s threatened? If no, and the loss or the danger arrives before your reader has even connected with your character, you’ve started too late.
If you find yourself mired in backstory dumps or flashbacks in chapter two to explain everything that happened in chapter one, it’s a great sign that the flashback material needed to come first. You started too late.
If your reader feels like they’ve walked into someone else’s crisis and are basically a stranger at a funeral, meaning they’re emotionally present, but they’re not sure who they’re supposed to grieve or why or what to do with their hands, then you’ve started too late.
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