Do I need to start off my book by describing the character's "normal world"?
I know a lot of books do it (Harry Potter, LOTR, Wheel of Time). It's even part of the "Hero's Journey". However, my book starts with the "inciting incidient" i.e. my main charatcer begins her first day at school. Part of the reason I did this was to subvert the expectation that a book has to start with the "normal world". Lately, however, I have considered sticking in an extra chapter or two in the beginning as a way to slowly introduce my reader to my world.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of staring a novel with the "normal world"?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/47316. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
3 answers
Yes, please start in the MC's Normal World.
The point of beginning in The Normal World is directly related to the inciting incident: Namely, the inciting incident has the potential to change the character's life. For good or evil. Whether they like it or not. It may change it immediately, or it may grow to to change it. In all these cases, the inciting incident is going to take the MC out of their Normal World to deal with it, and learn from it, be abused by it, and eventually solve it.
After that, they will return to some Normal: Sometimes their previous Normal world (e.g. the villain is no longer a threat) or more often to a New Normal World (It is new because they have changed, sometimes become a better person, taken responsibility, or become more aware of the World or more Adult and decided their old Normal is too small, or they have a higher purpose, etc).
In order to make the Inciting Incident matter to the reader, the reader should already know the MC, sympathize with the MC, and understand what the MC is facing when their Normal World is disrupted. If they don't know the MC,* then by definition the MC is a stranger and you have something happening to a stranger they don't know and don't care about. They expect heroes and villains, they don't know which they are looking at. It doesn't seem like a person to them. They don't have any sympathy, yet, they don't know if they like her.
Further, the second reason for starting in the normal world is that in the first pages of a book, readers expect and forgive a little world building, that authors will be more careful to include setting details and the rules of the world (like whether magic works, like whether we are on Earth, like what time-period we are living in, from cave-dwellers to far future, like cultural details, even whether we have mobile phones and the Internet or not).
Those details need to be incorporated to orient the reader's expectations, but they will also get in the way of dramatic scenes, reducing the impact of them. Even if your setting is entirely modern present-day Earth, your MC has a local culture, attitudes, and permissiveness that readers need to know about. A reader living San Francisco California has a much different "Normal World" and expectations than a reader living in Laredo Texas, or one living in New York City.
They are all flexible, they read for entertainment because they LIKE other worlds, but you need to SET their expectations for YOUR story.
Typically, instead of the Inciting Incident, I open the story with the MC in their normal world but with a normal world PROBLEM, something minor that isn't life-threatening or life-changing, just some issue to deal with like we all encounter in normal life. Something breaks or doesn't work, or we run out of something, whatever.
As I've said in other answers: We wake up late because there was a power failure while we slept, and our alarm failed to go off. Or there's no hot water to take a shower. Or we usually have a bowl of cereal for breakfast, but when we pour milk on it, the milk glops out: It has gone sour. Or we have pop-tarts, but the toaster is broken. Our shoe breaks, or shoelace breaks, we have to improvise. Our car won't start; the battery isn't dead, and that is the full extent of our knowledge about trouble-shooting cars.
A small low-stakes problem gives the reader something interesting to follow, to see how the MC behaves in her normal world, how she thinks, if she is creative, etc. We are able to introduce the setting, because the stakes aren't high, and the danger is not life-threatening; it doesn't feel like we are pressing pause on a life-and-death action scene to explain how a light-saber works, or that Luke thinks Darth Vader killed his father.
In most novels the Normal World is the first half of the first Act, which amounts to 10% to 15% of the story. It can be shorter, but without it, stories generally flop, because the reader doesn't know the character, doesn't get what's wrong, doesn't see the Inciting Incident as a change from Normal, and when you try to justify the MC's feelings and actions you inevitably stall the story with backstory.
Readers aren't stupid, they are flexible and ready for anything when the book opens, they are expecting you to set the stage and introduce an MC (or more than one) and supporting characters and culture. If you don't give it to them, they will not find your story Exciting because you jumped right into the action, the will find it confusing and flat, because they don't care about the characters involved.
In The Hunger Games, Katniss is introduced in her weird Normal World, shown to be an expert huntress, shown to love her sister, be afraid of the drones, etc. The Inciting Incident (foreshadowed by nightmares of her sister) is her sister being chosen for the Games; the only way to save her is for Katniss to volunteer in her place. The equivalent of a mother sacrificing herself to save her child.
In Die Hard, John McClane's Normal World is visiting his estranged wife and daughter and trying ineptly to repair his marriage. The Inciting Incident is his family being held hostage, and it is 100% action from there: But we did not OPEN with that, and have to explain "By the Way, his wife and children happen to be hostages too! And he loves them so much, he will run barefoot over broken glass to save them!"
The Normal World introduces the MC, introduces the World and Setting of the story as they know it, and introduces the stakes for the MC.
Don't skip it. Don't think you are starting at the exciting part. That is not what In Media Res means, it means don't start the story with a lot of factoids and exposition about the history of the world so far; it means start in the middle of things, start with characters doing things, start with some sort of activity, but it doesn't have to be a battle, or the inciting incident. Start with the MC(s) doing things that show us the setting and other supporting characters and the stakes that will be threatened. The Normal World.
0 comment threads
In a story that isn't set in our normal here-and-now, be it fantasy, science fiction, historic fiction, or something else, you need to establish what's normal for your setting, and what isn't. As an example: aliens land in the local spaceport - is it an "inciting incident", or are they just regular traders? Or is landing of aliens in general commonplace, but those particular aliens are a surprise?
For your reader to understand what's "out of the ordinary", they need to understand what is "ordinary".
In the absence of evidence to the contrary, readers will assume "our normal world". @MatthewBrown mentions Hamlet as an example: indeed, we know what court is, and what court politics are. Thus, the opening scene quickly establishes "we are at court", and moves on with the story. Ghosts, we are told, are not normal. But the inciting incident is not "the ghost appearing", but "the ghost talking to Hamlet", which doesn't happen until we've been introduced to Hamlet's "normal" at Claudius's court.
Game of Thrones starts in a similar manner: in a quick prologue it is established both that the Wall is normal, and that the Others are not. (Note that in this case, this is not the inciting incident - the inciting incident is King Robert coming to Winterfell.)
The more your setting differs from our "normal", the more you would have to establish right from the start. But then, the very fact that it is all different makes the reading interesting (providing your writing isn't boring). You thus have some leeway for a longer "beginning". As an example, nothing much happens in the first chapter of The Lord of the Rings - "The Long-Expected Party". But there are hobbits, and there's Gandalf, and there are hints of other things, so that makes it interesting enough.
All the same, starting with "normal" doesn't necessarily mean starting with boring getting-up, brushing-teeth. As an example, Jim Butcher's sixth novel of the Dresden Files series, called Blood Rites starts
The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault.
My boots slipped and slid on the tile floor as I sprinted around a corner and toward the exit doors to the abandoned school building on the southwest edge of Chicagoland. Distant streetlights provided the only light in the dusty hall, and left huge swaths of blackness crouching in the old classroom doors.
[...]
I checked behind me.
The guardian demons looked like demented purple chimpanzees, except for the raven-black wings sprouting from their shoulders. There were three of them that had escaped my carefully crafted paralysis spell, and they were hot on my tail, bounding down the halls in long leaps assisted by their black feathered wings.
In this case, the fast-paced chase scene establishes the "normal": the location is urban-fantasy Chicago, the protagonist can cast spells, and monkey-demons throwing flaming poop are not a surprise for him.
For your setting, what is normal, and what isn't? Your character is going to school - that, supposedly, is normal? Or is it that for some reason your character wasn't expecting to be going to school?
Buffy starts with Buffy going to school (actually it starts with establishing the existing of vampires preying on students, but then it starts with Buffy going to school). Then there's a vampire-eaten corpse in a locker. There's a clear delineation: there's "normal", there's "weird for most of the world, normal for Buffy", and there's "so weird, it's weird even for Buffy".
0 comment threads
Start with a wind blowing through the normal world
As others have stated, you need to start in the normal world because we need to understand who the main character is, how they live, what they love, what they are capable of, etc. in order to understand what is at stake as the story unfolds.
At the same time, the reader is not going to sit still for scenes of the hero brushing their teeth and reading the newspaper.
So you start with a wind blowing through the normal world, a hint that there is a disturbance coming. In The Grapes of Wrath we start with people going about their normal business, but with a wind (literally) blowing fine dust around that coats everything. At the same time we learn what normal life is like and we see that there is a disruption of normal life coming.
In A Long Expected Party, which others have cited, there is a lot of description of the shire and its life, but it is suffused with a gentle sense of unease -- something is in the wind.
The notions of starting in the normal world and starting in medias res are often seen as in opposition to each other, but if you start with a wind blowing through the normal world, you do both.
Fiction essentially runs on promise: the promise that something interesting is going to happen soon. You don't have to start with an immediate action scene -- one in which we don't know who is fighting who or why or what is at stake -- you can start in the middle of that first hint of disturbance in the normal life of character and their community.
How long you have to spend there, though, varies greatly from story to story. In some cases, you can establish the normal world in a few paragraphs, because it is a normal world we have all seen before. Genre fiction is essentially fiction in which several aspects of the story are predetermined by the genre definition. This allows the storyteller to get on with the story quicker. Part of each genre and subgenre is a base definition of normal world which your story then only needs to invoke and modify for your needs. Got a knights and damsels story to tell? Start off with a tournament. We instantly know the location and the rules of the game. Introduce the unknown knight with the blank shield. A wind is blowing through the normal world.
But whether it takes a paragraph or fifty pages, starting with a wind blowing through the normal world and you will provide both the promise of excitement to come and the necessary background that the reader needs to understand the story when it gets going.
0 comment threads
0 comment threads