How can I reconcile the exposition of the three act scheme vs. starting out with a bang?
I am a few thousand words into my newest draft and starting to question if I picked the right beginning. As usual, when I get back into the habit of writing regularly, I have also gotten back into the habit of reading about how to write.
There are two very core ideas I've come across that I really like the sound of, but that seem to conflict with each other.
On the one hand, the three act structure says we should start with exposition. We should introduce the players, introduce the setting, and set the stage for the conflicts that are to follow. Looking at the books I'm reading now and have read in the past, especially fantasy books (my genre of choice as a writer), I can clearly see an exposition period in all of them. The characters are introduced in their element, and are allowed to live a few days or at least a few hours of their normal lives before things pick up.
On the other hand, you're supposed to start things with a bang. The first sentence of your book is supposed to hook the reader for the rest of the page, the first page hook the reader for the rest of the chapter, and the first chapter hook the reader for the rest of the book. Things have to get off the ground, now, if you want to have any chance of keeping a reader around long enough to finish this paragraph, never mind your 100,000 word novel.
The two seem incompatible for me. I went for the latter approach in this revision, but I feel like there are just too many questions unanswered. On the other hand, if I went for the former approach, I would be thinking "who would even get this far?" by the time I hit the first "disaster" of the three act structure.
Is there a happy middle ground?
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A useful tip I read about (The Fire In Fiction, Donald Maass) is to use what he calls microtension to hook the reader. This is where tension is created by conflicted feelings within the characters. That is, what are they doing or saying that makes them feel upset, or uncomfortable? What are the feelings warring inside them, and why are they incompatible?
I like using this for my starts, as I tend to write more character-driven pieces. It still has the tension to hook the reader, but it works quite well with exposition as well.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/6333. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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What you might want to do is get the whole thing written as a three-act piece with exposition in the beginning. Set it aside for a month, and then come back and see if the opening is too slow. If it is, now you can figure out a way (as Fox Cutter suggested) to add in a prologue or some other in media res opening which creates the bang you're looking for. But you'll have something to start with. You can't edit a blank page.
Also, having a slow opening (exposition) is more of the classical Hero's Journey. Not every story follows that pattern. The idea of the exposition opener is to set establish the Normal World which the Hero has to depart to go on the Journey. If the Hero is already on a Journey, or if Journey is not what your Hero does (for example, if your Hero is a detective, or a doctor, or a mercenary in the middle of a war zone), then you only need to explain as much as is necessary to understand the setting of the story.
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