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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/39330
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/39330
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

If you give the audience action, you've got to give some reason to care for that action. I wouldn't want to be reading about a whole lot of violence between some people I know nothing about - I'd have no stake in that violence, no one to root for. I wouldn't be particularly interested to find out whether this guy or that guy survives (or whatever the stakes for the characters are).

**The reason readers care about anything you write about is the characters.** We're persons, we care about other persons. (I use the word 'person' here to encompass characters who are not necessarily humanoid.) So, right from the start, you've got to give us characters. Show us who we should care for, and what their stake is in the fight. Tell us, at least to an extent, who's fighting who, why, what's going on. Show us the characters' human reactions, give us the interactions that help us connect to the characters. **Give us a reason to care which way the fight goes**.

And when I say "show us who we should care for", I don't just mean "introduce us to the MC". I mean give us a reason to care for the MC. Give us something of their internal world, their day-to-day, make them a fully realised human. Then you can throw them into action.

It's not that you can't start _in medias res_, pique the readers' curiosity first with a tense scene, then go back and explain how we got there. But then, the explanation, or at least some sort of introduction to the characters, has got to come sooner than 20 pages in.

Original score: 1