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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26347
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26347
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Every story has a bootstrapping problem. You have to establish characters, a world (fantasy or not), a problem or desire, and the obstacles to that problem or desire, and the story cannot really get going until all of that is done. Starting with action is not particularly effective in itself because action is not interesting unless you care about the character.

I think there is far too much emphasis given in advice to writers about the sequencing of things in early chapters. Sequencing alone does not solve the problem. What I think you have to do in early chapters, in order to keep the reader going until all the elements of story are in place, is to maintain promise. Whatever you start with, you have to execute it in such a way that the reader sees promise in it, and wants to read on to see that promise fulfilled.

One can find examples of promise filled openings that start with every kind of device, from character to world-building to action. You can find countless examples that start with all these devices that have no promise at all. It is not that any one of these devices is inherently superior, inherently has any more promise, than another. It is that whichever the writer chooses, it is executed it in a way that has promise.

What is promise? It may be different things for different readers. It is probably quite different for a hard SF fan than it is for me. But whatever its subject matter, I think all promise has one common ingredient, and that is a sense of reality, of grittiness, of three-dimensionality. If it starts with people, you immediately feel them as people.

In the opening of Pride and Prejudice, which opens on two secondary characters, you get an immediate sense of affection between the Bennetts from Mr. Bennett's affectionate teasing of his wife. It all seems real. It is full or promise. You are in.

In the opening of the first Harry Potter book we get an extensive and highly exaggerated description of Privet Lane and its inhabitants. (A secondary setting peopled by tertiary characters.) The promise here seems to lie in the wit of the telling and also in a recognition of the kind of place and people that are being satirized. Again, we are in.

Every Steinbeck novel starts with a lengthy description of place, and by about the middle of page two you are ready to call your real estate agent, put your house on the market, and move to wherever he is describing, because it seems so much richer and brighter and livelier than where you live. It is full of promise.

So yes, we need to pull the reader in, we need to provide promise, but promise is not found in any particular sequencing of the elements of story that have to be introduced -- it is found in lucidity of the telling, in the writer's ability to make us feel we are somewhere real, however fantastical it might be.

Original score: 11