Beginnings

 My current work-in-progress is a novella called Unscripted based on a short story I wrote some twenty years ago called Without a Cue. 

It has a cute, somewhat quirky premise: everybody in this fictional world is delivered a script each day that they then have to follow. Only, of course, something goes wrong and the main character has to go off script to their great dismay.

I'm just starting the third draft, which is when I focus in on the nitty-gritty sentence level and analyze each scene. The beginning scene is the most important one in any story as it has to introduce the character and world as well as hooking the reader. I  thought it might be interesting to show a little bit of my process so here's an annotated excerpt from the first page.

EXCERPT

Chapter One

Something about the bus driver snagged Chris’s attention as he boarded the city bus on Monday morning. It took his sleep-deprived brain a moment to realize what the oddity was: she lacked the silver R on her forehead that should have marked her as a Robot. 

[ANALYSIS: The first sentence is okay, but doesn't have as strong a hook as I  would like, only raising the minor question of What snagged his attention? It does a basic job to informing the reader who the main character is, what he's doing and when he's doing it. The second sentence is better, first raising the question of Why is Chris sleep-deprived? and then alerting the reader than this is a science fictional world in which Robots are regularly bus drivers as well as raising the question of why this bus driver isn't a Robot.]

The beige City Transit uniform and peaked cap identified her as the driver, but her hair burned a garish red and the curls brushed her shoulders. Robots had utilitarian, short haircuts. They kept silent and focused on their job, their stares vacant. This woman made eye contact and spoke to him.

“Good morning!”

She sounded so cheerful that Chris smiled back at her, though, of course, he didn’t reply.

[ANALYSIS: The second paragraph is mostly added detail, drawing a picture for the reader and explaining how the bus driver is different from a robot driver. The next two  sentences advance the plot slightly. I'm hoping the "of course he didn't reply" raises the question of why he didn't reply in the reader's mind. This is the first subtle hint to my big world-building hook that everyone is following a script. Not sure if it's too subtle, though.]

She winked. “I like you. Sit up front beside me.”

Chris blinked a little at the unexpected request, but his mind was too fuzzy to recognize the warning sign that something was wrong. Assuming that the driver must be part of a new Storyline that was starting, he collapsed onto the nearest blue vinyl seat, kitty-corner from the driver. His artist’s eye saw her as cartoon bird perched on her high seat.

[ANALYSIS: Nothing much has happened yet, but we get another big hint that something is wrong and Chris's commute to work is about to take an unexpected turn. The capitalization of Storyline is another hook to make the reader wonder about the world. Then I feed the reader a little more information about Chris: he is an artist. There's a fair amount of  information packed into the first six paragraphs, but it doesn't exactly start with a bang. Conclusion: it needs more work.]

And there you have it, a glimpse into a writer's mind during revision!

  

Initiating Incident vs. Establishing Shot Beginnings

First, I should define some terms. What is the Initiating Incident? It’s that moment when your character is jarred out of their rut, their life changes and story truly begins. In screenwriting terms, this is when the character passes from the Old World into the New World of the story.

Some authors advocate always using an establishing shot of the Old World, some always starting with the Initiating Incident. Both can work. Both have advantages and disadvantages.

A beginning that starts with an Initiating incident is often more action-packed and interesting. They raise immediate questions in the reader’s mind. What is going to happen next? Will the hero prevail? The drawback is that the reader doesn’t care about the characters yet. Mindless action alone doesn’t engage. 

 However, it is possible to write an action-packed beginning that makes your reader begin to care about your main character. Karen Robards does it all the time with her romantic suspense books.  Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison starts with an initiating incident (the arrival of an airship with the new that Maia’s father and older siblings have died and he is now the emperor) and yet also immediately engages reader sympathy (Maia has been in cold lonely exile for his entire life.)

The advantage of an establishing shot beginning is that you have an opportunity to show what the character is like before their life is upended and thus can show how devastating or necessary or frightening that change is to them. The disadvantage is that with many characters their Old World simply isn’t very interesting. (This depends on the character. James Bond movies always start with an action-packed establishing shot of Bond doing spy stuff. His normal world is interesting.)

So how do you know when to use which? It depends on the particular demands of your story.

For example, I chose not to do an establishing shot for my novel Through Fire & Sea. I would have had to start off showing Leah scrubbing floors and I deemed it too boring.

In another novel, Gate to Kandrith, the Initiating incident is when Sara finds out she’s being sent to Kandrith as an ambassador. This is how my first draft started, bang, dive right in. But the published version starts two chapters earlier: while rewriting I discovered that I needed time to introduce the decadent, corrupt world of the Republic and develop some of the characters that lived there because they were important to the book’s ending. This was absolutely the best way to start this story. Otherwise when the villain showed up at the end, the reader would have been “Who IS this guy?”

Different mediums may require different beginnings. Movies are much more likely to use the Old World, New World method. People decide to go see a movie based on the trailer. They’ve paid for their ticket. They’re not likely to get up and leave the theater if the first five minutes are a little slow. Books are a different ballgame. People will put down a book if the first two pages don’t grab them.

Think about the difference between the opening for The Martian by Andy Weir and the movie. Both were smash hits, but I honestly believe the book wouldn’t have grabbed as many readers if it had started in the same place that the movie did: before the accident leaving the hero stranded.

Of course, Initiating incident and Establishing shot aren’t the only options. There are a couple of hybridizations.

The Hunger Games starts off with a tease. We are told that it is the day of the Reaping but not what that means until after ten pages of Katniss’s Old World. The drawback to a tease is that the reader won’t wait forever for the payoff.

Another solution is to have a bridging conflict, so that something of interest is happening to your character while you establish their Old World. This is what I ultimately used in Gate to Kandrith, showing Sarah at a very tense political dinner.

Remember, the first beginning you write isn’t chiselled in stone. I usually rewrite my beginning more times than the rest of the novel. Don’t be afraid to take several stabs at it until you hit one that accomplishes what you want. Good luck!

By Hook or by Crook -- Writing Beginnings

Whenever I can’t decide what to read next from my towering To-Be-Read pile, I hold a first sentence contest.  I read the opening paragraph of each book and whichever one hooks me the most wins.  Sometimes I don’t even make it through the entire pile before getting caught by a skillful author.  A good opening can make me laugh, raise my eyebrows or shiver in anticipation.

Here are some of my favourites:

London, 5 October 1822. 
My Lord, You must Burn this Letter after reading it.  Should it fall into the Wrong Hands, I shall be once again Exiled to the COUNTRY, where I shall most certainly be placed in ISOLATION. 

Last Night’s Scandal by Loretta Chase.

If the other novice wizards on the row hadn’t broken into Raeshaldis’s rooms the previous day, pissed on her bed and written WHORE and THIEF on her walls, she probably would have been killed on the night of the full moon. 

Sisters of the Raven by Barbara Hambly.

I was never particularly keen on my job before I got shot and nearly lost it, along with my life. 

Odds Against by Dick Francis.

As a reader, I love hooks, but as a writer, they drive me crazy. 

Most of my novel receives 3-5 drafts, but those opening pages are so important and have to do so many things--hook the reader, show the setting, introduce the main character in a sympathetic way, set the tone and voice for the rest of the novel—that I often do 5-10 drafts of them.

My first draft opening for Gate to Kandrith is lost in the mists of time—I used to simply save overtop of the first draft when I did the next one—a practice that now makes me wince--but here is the second draft beginning:

On the morning of my exile I awoke with a vile taste in my mouth and a headache.

This opening has a few things going for it, mostly in that it raises questions.  Why is she going to be exiled and from where?  Why does she have a headache?

Unfortunately, during the revision process I realized I’d started the novel too early.  Most of the book deals with Sara’s ‘exile’ to Kandrith, but I needed some space to show the reader the corrupt and decadent Republic of Temboria and introduce some very important characters (like the villain!) so that they didn’t come out of nowhere in the ending chapters.

Sara still wakes this way with a vile headache, but the scene now takes place at the beginning of chapter three.

3^rd draft:

Sara stared down at the peppered songbirds’ tongues curled on her plate with revulsion.  Tonight should have been a triumph for House Remillus, but she longed for the feast to be over.

She turned her head to the side, but the sick feeling in her stomach didn’t subside.  The banquet hall’s white dome pressed down on her as if she were an insect trapped under a bowl—with two thousand other ants.  The rise and fall of hundreds of conversations battered her ears with a sea of sound.  The thick, sweetish smell of burning incense sticks warred with the odor of sweat.  That and the stifling hot room combined to make Sara feel muzzy-headed.

In addition from switching from first person to third person POV, this new opening achieves some of my goals: it shows the decadent setting and hopefully provokes some sympathy for Sara.  Everyone has had the experience of being sick to their stomach and bird tongues to eat?  Blech.

I played endlessly with this opening, polishing the sentences, changing their order, etc. ad nauseum, (pity my poor writer’s group) but was still unhappy.  Eventually, I decided I needed a better hook.  I’d been trying so hard to establish my character and setting, that the first actual bit of action had drifted all the way down to page three!

7^th draft:

Sara's stomach compressed into a hard knot as the tall, cadaverous high priest of Nir, the God of War, strode into the banquet hall. 
 
Seeking reassurance, Sara touched the crossbow she'd secretly had mounted to the underside of the head table.  The other high priests had come to confer a blessing on her father, the new Primus, but she doubted Nir's motives were so benign.

I didn’t delete the description of the hall and the bird tongues.  It’s still there in the first scene, it just comes a little later.

The introduction of Nir and the crossbow punches up the conflict nicely.  This is the version I submitted and was accepted, but my editor Stacy Boyd asked for one more tweak.

Final version: 

Almost time.

Sara’s stomach compressed into a hard knot as the tall, cadaverous high priest of Nir, the God of War, strode into the banquet hall.

Seeking reassurance, Sara touched the crossbow she’d secretly had mounted to the underside of the head table.  Hidden by the tablecloth, her fingers found the crossbow bolt she’d loaded, the cord she’d cranked back still taut, ready to fire as soon as she gave a hard pull on the lever.

 Keep reading:

If you’re a writer, do beginnings drive you crazy, too?  As a reader, what are some of your favourite first lines?