I'm going to drop this interesting blog post link here, in case you watch the video and don't read the transcription: Character In Action: A close reading exercise. KJ Charles reflects on how the opening of one of her books reveals character:
https://kjcharleswriter.com/2023/10/11/character-in-action-a-close-reading-exercise/
Transcription: Welcome back to “Write Better Right Now” with me, Chris Eboch, writing for adults as Kris Bock.
I've been talking about openings for novels in particular and how to get off to a fast start and make the correct promise for your novel, so go back and review those videos if you missed them.
I want to spend a little bit more time talking about opening scenes because they're so important.
In some ways, it seems quite simple. You have a likable character, or at least one who is interesting and compelling in some way, and put them in a challenging situation where they have a goal. Then you have tension and hopefully grab your readers and get them to keep turning pages.
Of course, it's a little bit more complicated than that to get all those elements working together correctly.
If you start too slow, you're going to have a boring opening and you may lose readers. Boring openings can happen because the author provides too much backstory, thinking that they have to explain everything before they get started. You don't want to do that. You want to make sure that you're starting with a scene where something is happening and the character has a goal.
It's important to remember that wishes are not goals. If you have a character who's in a difficult situation, they're miserable, and you're showing all the terrible things in their world, but they're simply passively thinking about those things or dealing with those things, there's not a lot of drama and it can be just depressing.
It's almost always better to make sure that you have a character who has not just a wish that things were different, but actual goals for how they would like things to be different and what they are doing to change them. Make sure those characters are active even in their opening scenes!
If you get off to too fast to start, it can be confusing. That can happen when authors are worried about losing readers. They try to just jump right into a big action scene where tons of things are happening, but the reader doesn't know what's going on. So action alone is not necessarily a great start. It's not the same as having conflict.
You could open a book with a sports scene and the teams are out there in the field, competing and trying to win. But if we don't know anything about those teams or what the stakes are for this particular game, we don't care about any of the characters. That's not really compelling either.
It could be more dramatic to have, say, a high school football game, and start with characters on the bleachers, where a girl is talking to her friend about how as soon as the game is over, she's going to have to tell her boyfriend that she's pregnant and she's afraid of his reaction. That has a lot more drama in just a simple conversation than the action happening on the field.
Keep in mind that conflict comes from a problem or goal that's important to a character we care about. We need to know enough about the character to care about them, have some reason that they're likable or compelling or interesting at least, and we need to know what their problem or goal is and then see them working toward it.
You want to raise some questions, but also provide enough answers so it's not confusing. You don't have to give away every detail right up front, but if you keep piling on more mysteries and more mysteries, then the reader will tend to get confused and possibly give up reading. So include a few questions, a few answers, and kind of overlap them so that the reader can figure out what's going on fairly smoothly.
Examples
Let's look at a few specific examples of how you could start a novel.
In The Well of Sacrifice, this is about the pre-Columbian Mayan people, and it's for middle grade students, so they don't have a lot of background in this culture. That made it particularly hard to jump right into the main novel problem, which is the evil high priest is trying to take over the city after the old king dies.
So I started with the main character, Eveningstar, in the jungle, looking for medicinal plants for her mother, who is a healer. She hears a strange people talking in a language she doesn't understand, and she has to hide from them. Then she races back to the city to tell her older brother, who is a warrior, that she saw these “savages” in the jungle so that he can gather the warriors and deal with it.
That does not maybe directly lead to the big problem of the evil high priest taking over the city, but it does set up some of the challenges that the city is facing right now with outside pressure. And it shows Eveningstar's tendency to bring her problems to her older brother to solve rather than trying to solve things herself. Starting with that bit of action allowed me to then slow down and give a little more detail of Mayan life, introduce her family members and the old king and another priest and so forth, so that the readers were hopefully already hooked – then they can get that background.
So one way is to make sure that you have that opening small problem. Ideally it relates to the big problem in some way, maybe leads toward it, but if not, make sure you have some kind of additional problem. It's kind of like in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. The opening scene shows Indiana Jones in the jungle trying to get this particular artifact, not because that's terribly important for the plot, but because it's a much more exciting opening than having him in the classroom and then being called in to meet with these government agents who talk about the Ark of the Covenant. All that backstory is necessary, but we can have that exciting opening first.
The Eyes of Pharaoh came out in 2008. Looking back, I feel like I could have done a better job. I mentioned that in part because I want to make the point that there is really no single right way to do something. And there certainly is no perfection when it comes to writing. Sometimes you do have to make choices, move forward, not get bogged down in trying to make the perfect opening. It can still be okay. You may look back at your earlier work and feel that you could have done better if you were doing it now. That's fine. That's part of the writing life.
What I think worked in this is that it starts with the main character moving. It opens with: “Seshta ran. Her feet pounded the hard-packed dirt streets.” Then it introduces a little bit of Egyptian culture. She's going through a market. We get some of what she sees and hears and smells. What doesn't work as well is that you find out pretty soon that the reason she's running is simply that she enjoys running. She's more physically oriented than mentally oriented, which will cause some issues for her during the story. By the end of the first chapter, she gets a hint from a friend that there may be something mysterious going on.
But it could have opened with Seshta having more of a specific goal that was more challenging to achieve. It's still better than if she were just standing in the market looking around and describing what she sees or shopping or something, because it's less passive. She is physically moving.
Here is a novel that did something similar, but a little better job of it. Fatima Tate Takes the Cake by Khadijah VanBrakle opens with:
I, Fatima nor Tate, do nothing without parental approval. Today is no different.
Zaynab’s speeding will get me to the soup kitchen in time for my shift, but my homemade spice cupcakes might be DOA.
“Can you please slow down?” My left hand grips the cake carrier while my right is fused with the door handle.
“Stop complaining, Fatima, I got you. You won't miss a minute of flirting with your Muslim Prince Charming.”
So once again, characters are in movement, in the car, which adds a little sense of forward motion, even if it's not a race or anything. But this does a whole lot more. It introduces the main character and her best friend and a potential love interest. We learn that the main character volunteers at a soup kitchen and makes cupcakes. We're already learning some things about her. And she's anxious. She wants to get to the soup kitchen in time for her shift. She seems like the kind of person who would always want to be on time, but she's also anxious about being in the speeding car. There's a little bit of conflict with her friend right there. That's an awful lot going on in just the first half page.
Another example from a book that I just read, The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year, by Allie Carter. This actually starts with a brief prologue, but chapter one starts:
One Week Earlier
It wasn't until the elevator doors were sliding open that Maggie realized she was about to come face-to-face with her three least favorite things in the world:
Christmas. A party. And Ethan Freaking Wyatt.
It wasn't until the elevator doors were sliding open that Maggie realized she was
Now look at how much we get from just that opening. We get introduced to the main character. We know something about her through what she dislikes. And we're not just being told that she dislikes these things. She's in a moment where she is being confronted by all of those things at once, which immediately creates tension.
There's also this nice touch of humor. This is both a rom-com and a mystery, and that opening sets up the rom-com, the trope of “enemies to lovers,” because she hates this particular person. It’s a nice opening that drops her into the situation where maybe dealing with the party is not, for most people, a huge deal, but this is going to be challenging for her. It's a way of drawing the reader in so that they then get to the main story.
I also wanted to mention this a little bit. This is a couple of chapters in, so it's not exactly the opening, but I thought it was still an impressive bit of writing. Her friend and editor, who's trying to get her to go on this trip at Christmas, says, “Then what does the next week and a half look like for you? Sitting around, thinking about your former husband and your former best friend unwrapping presents in your former house?”
Look at how much we learn right there. This book does eventually go back and forth in time a little, so we learn more about the former husband, former best friend, how the divorce happened and so forth. But we get so much information right there. I can't tell you how many cozy mystery novels I've read that spend three chapters showing the main character getting dumped by her fiancé or discovering her husband cheating, and then the fallout of that. Then maybe she inherits a cupcake shop or a quilt shop or something in another small town. We see her going off to that town and getting established there.
We don't really need any of that. When you think about this little bit of information here just dropped in, in a sentence. It's universal enough that some people have experienced it, and almost all of us have heard about it. If you read cozy mystery or romance, you’ve probably seen the situation before. A little bit of backstory can do a lot of work without having to have chapters explaining everything that happened or even showing it as it happens.
One more example, because this is a little different – Bad News for Outlaws by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson is a nonfiction biography for young people. Instead of starting with where and when he was born, and how he grew up, and all that sort of background, it jumps right into a scene:
Jim Webb’s luck was running muddy when Bass Reeves rode into town. Webb had stayed one jump ahead of the lawman for two years. He wasn’t about to be caught now.
Packing both rifle and revolver, the desperado leapt out the window of Bywaters' store. He made a break for his horse, but Reeves cut him off.
Even if you're writing nonfiction, don't feel like you always have to start at the beginning. You can find a dramatic anecdote or scene in a biography or other kinds of nonfiction. You can start with something compelling to grab the reader's attention and give some flavor of the story. Then you can go back and fill in that other stuff if you need to.
Instead of going straight from beginning to end, this starts with a very dramatic scene that introduces some characters. It gives a flavor of the setting, helps to establish when and where this was. It has immediate conflict with these two characters trying to outwit each other.
Exercises
Does your first chapter quickly introduce a main character and a goal or problem they are trying to solve?
Could you start later? How would that change things?
Is the situation clear? Should you explain more or less?
Some exercises that you can do with your own work:
Look at your first chapter by itself. Try to forget everything that you already know about the characters in the story and just ask, does your first chapter quickly introduce a main character or more than one, and a goal or problem they are trying to solve? Now there's a lot actually going on there. You need a character, you need a goal or problem, and they should be actually trying to solve it. That is also important.
If you have a critique group or a beta reader, you can also ask them to give you this feedback just on your first chapter.
Then you might ask, could you start later? Like, what if you cut the first chapter? What if you cut the first two or three chapters? How would that change things? Do readers really need to know the elements of that first chapter? Or could you simply start later on in the story?
You also want to ask, is the situation clear? Are you explaining enough, or are readers going to be confused because you're just dumping them into a situation with not enough context?
Or could you explain less? Are you giving too much backstory, because you don't trust your readers to be able to pick up on what's going on?
That's it for today. I hope that has helped you think about how to have great openings. Next week we will get into the actual middle of the novel. By “middle,” I'm thinking about basically everything after that first chapter or two. we will talk about how to keep that middle of the novel going strong and get readers to keep turning pages.
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