Starting with action

Starting with action isn’t the same as starting with conflict, though the two occasionally get confused. Conflict at the beginning of a story is nearly always good.

Action… is another matter.

When this doesn’t work

I read several fantasy stories some time back, because the writer needed critiques on them. They all started with the same thing: a knock-down drag-up fight between some villain and the heroine.

Despite the hacking and parrying and blood spilled and limbs lopped off, the stories were oddly dull. I soon realized that was because the characters were ciphers. Sure, one was obviously the protagonist (because the story was told from her POV), which made the other the villain, but I didn’t know why they were fighting or what was at stake.

Because action can’t realistically be slowed down to include details of backstory or characterization, starting with this kind of scene is usually tantamount to saying, “A and B fight. You need to be cheering for B.” Why? I need an in-story reason to care. There’s a reason even the most actiony of action films don’t start with a car chase.

Plus, if I know the protagonist is B, the fight loses even more suspense, because B has to win. Of course, if there’s a climactic battle at the end where B finally goes up against the villain, yes, I also know B is likely to win. But here’s the difference. If I’ve been reading the whole story, and if I’m thoroughly immersed in it, then it’s much easier to suspend disbelief. Maybe the villain has also been built up enough through the story that I’m genuinely afraid the heroine will lose.

None of that is possible at the start. I don’t automatically turn off the skepticism filter because I’m reading. The story has to earn that, and at the start, it hasn’t.

When this does work

David Farland’s The Sum of All Men begins with a fight to the death in an alley. That pulled me in, and I ended up reading the book.

1. The fight was between a named character who wasn’t the hero, and an unnamed assassin. So while I knew whom to cheer for, I didn’t know for certain that the good guy would win.

2. The fight was a great way to show off the worldbuilding. I read that book a long time ago, but I still remember the assassin smelled of curry powder. Through fighting him, the good guy also realized that the assassin must have “endowments”, which are donations of strength and reflexes that come from other people. That was an unusual detail which heightened the suspense.

At that point I wasn’t aware of the bigger picture, of Raj Ahten vs. the Earth King, but it didn’t matter. That tense alleyway struggle in the dark was done well and made me keep reading. And in the end, that’s all that counts—whether the story starts with action or not.



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Why not begin with dialogue?

I’d read on more than one site that beginning a story with dialogue might turn off agents and was therefore not a good idea. No particular reason was given for why this was a turnoff, so I accepted it and just made a mental note to start in some other way.

Then I read a story beginning with a seven-line conversation, which didn't intrigue me. The writer had asked for critiques, though, which meant I had to think about why the conversation didn’t work – and for comparison purposes, I found a story starting with dialogue which did work.

So, why are writers warned off beginning with dialogue?

1. Talking head syndrome

Close your eyes and turn on the television, making sure you get a show rather than a news broadcast or documentary. Can you follow the plot simply through dialogue?

I imagine that reading a conversation between two unknown people is often as fun as not-watching TV, trying to tell what’s going on without visual clues. Very often such conversations look like this:

“We can’t tell anyone.”
“But that was a kid--”
“I don’t care. You want us to end up in there too?”

Is this a conversation between a couple, siblings, friends, strangers on a train? It’s words in a vaccum, talk in white space. The writer could fill in more details through the dialogue, but then we run into another problem…

2. As you know, Bob

“We can’t tell anyone what we saw Grandma Peters doing.”
“But that was a kid she lured with one of her homemade blueberry pies.”
“I don’t care. You want us to end up in there too? It’s not all blueberry, you know.”

The characters are telling each other what they already know. And the conflict doesn’t work too well either…

3. Dramatic personae

Since the dialogue alone has to hold the reader’s attention, some writers try to make it as gripping as possible. However, this can backfire if the dialogue is crammed with conflict and emotion, since the reader hasn’t had a chance to connect with the characters and experience whatever they experience.

It feels intrusive to begin a story with characters screaming at each other or confessing their love to each other. If there’s not even a minimal connection to the characters before they start talking about their divorce or the sniper across the street, the readers will be watching the scene from a detached distance. The conflict will be told to them rather than shown.

On the other hand, there are exceptions to every rule. And the one which came to mind right away was Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt”.

”George, I wish you’d look at the nursery.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, then.”
“I just want you to look at it, or call a psychologist in to look at it.”

The first sentence establishes who’s speaking to who. “I wish you’d look at this” is something most likely said within the context of a marriage, rather than a romance or a friendship. And since it starts with a name, we know the husband is George, meaning that this is probably a conversation between humans in the present or near future (since Bradbury writes science fiction, readers can’t take that for granted).

Also, there’s a problem with the nursery. “George, I wish you’d look at the kitchen” would not have had the same impact, the same uneasy little sense of children-in-jeopardy. Though as the story goes on to show, nothing could be further from the truth.

So the first sentence also sets up the conflict, but does that in a subtle way, so that the reader can learn about the problem along with the characters. Starting with, “Oh my God, George! The children are in danger!” would not have worked so well. By the time the dialogue gets to the request for a psychologist – meaning that whatever’s wrong with the nursery, it’s not easily fixed – I’m hooked.

Finally, this is a stripped-down, minimalist start to the story. That parallels the nursery, which is featureless and blank-walled when someone first enters it.

Picking up on the emotions and wishes of the person, though, the nursery walls quickly produce different three-dimensional scenes, complete with temperature and smells and sound, to make its occupants feel as though they’re in another place and time – hence the title, “The Veldt”. Likewise, the intriguing conversation at the start quickly unfolds into Bradbury’s beautifully descriptive prose, which uses the senses of smell and touch better than any writer I’ve ever read.

I’m still going to begin my stories with something besides dialogue, but it’s good to see how that can work when done well.

Look who's Tolkien

Bad puns aside, I recently came across a story a writer had put up for critiques. The story began with a long description of how a god created the world and the various races in it.

When other critiquers explained that this was likely to deter readers, the writer was surprised. Wasn't that how Tolkien's book started out? Didn't the film version of The Lord of the Rings begin with a prologue?

The thing is, though, we aren't Tolkien.

The Lord of the Rings was written before 1950, and acceptable writing styles were different then. Especially in speculative fiction, readers were more willing to plow through paragraphs of description and backstory at the start. Everything changes, though, and these days readers want to be involved with the characters right away.

Also, Tolkien was more than a storyteller - he was a poet as well, and his prose has a beautiful, lyrical feel to it. Great writing covers a multitude of sins, but most new writers aren't likely to match this level of voice.

But the most interesting thing, for me, is that Tolkien's most famous books don't begin with the history of the world and how the gods created it. The Hobbit starts with a simple and personal introduction to Bilbo (a character, not a country), and The Fellowship of the Ring starts with Bilbo's party. Frodo - and the reader - has to wait until later to learn about the Ring and about the splendid and tragic history of Middle-Earth.

The Silmarillion is the definitive example of a book with a Genesis beginning, but even that isn't an encyclopedic entry. Instead of being dry and factual, it's woven through with emotion - Melkor's jealousy, Aule's love for his creations - and lyrical descriptions of the Valar.

And the book was published after the other two, when readers wanted more of Middle-Earth. It wasn't an introduction to the epic or a prologue which explained all the worldbuilding.

When I first began writing fantasy, I used prologues to describe both the world and the (usually portentous) birth of the protagonist. After a while, I realized these were both dull and cliched, and now I just start in media res. Works a lot better.

The character wakes up

And the agent reaches for a rejection slip. I’ve often read that it’s not a good idea to start with a character waking up – this is advice both from other writers and from agents – and after realizing that one of my own stories was much stronger without such an opening, I was scrupulously careful to follow this guideline.

But then I began to wonder. How many openings in published fiction include a character waking up?

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis.

A thread asking this question on the Absolute Write discussion board resulted in a surprisingly large number of examples, but these are taken from published work, which will be better than much of the slushpile. Too often, such a character-wakes-up opening goes on to describe the character having breakfast and taking the subway to work. Maybe there, he’ll be fired, but the readers aren’t going to stick around that long, especially if they have twenty other manuscripts to deal with before the end of the day.

Another pitfall of this opening is that the character may be waking up from a nightmare. The nightmare can be very tense, but when the character wakes up, it will be a letdown to the reader – oh, it was all just a dream. Even if something very exciting and gripping will happen on page 2, the reader may be too annoyed to get there.

Lessa woke, cold.

Anne McCaffrey, Dragonflight

Writers are usually advised to start the story with conflict, and there’s rarely any conflict to a character waking up, unless it’s occupied England in an alternate reality and the Gestapo is shaking her awake. With my story The Mark of Vurth, the character originally woke up from a nightmare about an attack that had nearly killed him a few days ago. He soon realized that the people who had rescued him were much worse, but I didn’t want to risk readers being turned off by the opening. I revised it to begin with the attack, and that was a much stronger start.

The best character-wakes-up openings are ones where the character (or the reader) immediately realizes that something is wrong, that there’s something out of the ordinary in their world.

At eight o'clock on Thursday morning Arthur didn't feel very good. He woke up blearily, got up, wandered blearily round his room, opened a window, saw a bulldozer, found his slippers, and stomped off to the bathroom to wash.

Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

All the examples I’ve quoted are from books published before 1980, but there are still manuscripts which do well with this kind of opening. They hook the readers right away and reel them in. This kind of opening isn’t something I’d like to do, but it’s a good example of a rule that can be broken if you know exactly what you’re doing and are willing to take the risk.

Conflict at the start

One of the first how-to books for writers that I read, which was Dean Koontz’s How to Write Best-Selling Fiction, offered some simple advice. Start with a character in trouble or conflict.

I took this to heart, and starting with conflict is good advice – as long as the conflict is convincing and well-presented. Here are a few examples of what doesn’t work for me in this regard.

1. The Grey Room

This is where the character wakes up in a locked room and has to escape from it. It’s not a bad opening per se - there can be plenty of conflict in such a situation – but one drawback is that there’s no sense of what the character’s life was like before the imprisonment. And one grey room looks very much like another (we won’t get into whether or not it’s a good idea to start with the character waking up).

I ran into this problem when I started The Mark of Vurth with the protagonist waking up in a mud-walled jail cell. The mud walls were the only clue to the fact that this was set in an Africa-esque land. After a discussion, I realized that starting the story with the protagonist’s kidnapping would give readers a chance to connect with him as a character, see that Africa-esque land for themselves and still have conflict.

(Named after the room in which half of Cage a Man by F. M. Busby is set.)

2. The Family Argument

Or anything which starts with spouses separating, children coming out of the closet, children being locked in the closet, etc. Without knowing any of these people as characters, it’s difficult for readers to be fully involved with their struggles and setbacks – and if the story immediately leaps to people shouting or weeping, this can come off as melodramatic.

It might be better to start with a small, simple problem and then realistically escalate this to a major one. For instance, in the one where the spouses separate, perhaps they start with a minor quarrel over a missing handbag. Wanting to patch things up, the husband searches the house again once his wife leaves for work, and finds the bag… except there’s a letter from another man in it.

3. The Amnesiac

IMO, this is one of the most difficult openings to pull off (and one reason I needed to rewrite Redemption). With partial amnesia, the writer might be able to tell us the character’s name; with total amnesia, either someone else will have to do it or the character will be “he” and “him” for a while, which doesn’t really aid reader identification. There’s conflict inherent in such a situation, but the very premise can get in the way of it.

Even someone with partial amnesia can be difficult to relate to, since if they don’t remember their past, they can be too much of a tabula rasa.

4. Jack London Inspired

I love The Call of the Wild, but it’s not easy to start a story with a character against the environment or a sociopolitical situation. The antagonists in London’s novel are all secondary to the protagonist’s struggle to survive and then dominate the new world in which he finds himself. Half of the time, he’s fighting himself – or his past – as much as he is them.

The London novel works because he was writing about something intrinsically interesting – the Gold Rush, from the point of view of one of the dogs used in it - and his omniscient POV works well in this context. I’m not sure that would work as well today as it did in 1903, and a writer would have to be pretty good to pull off something similar.

I’ve found that all of my manuscripts start with the protagonist quickly plunging into a tense or dangerous situation. This always involves a hostile character to whom the protagonist will be attracted eventually, providing sexual tension as well. So far this has worked, but I’ll vary this pattern in the future. There are other ways to start out with conflict, and I’d like to try more of them.

A book is not a movie

I recently critiqued a short story which began with a cinematic description of the landscape and the weather. People in a generic medieval village were briefly described, but they were unnamed and didn’t speak. After a few paragraphs of this, the camera panned away to another location and the main character (who was named) began to speak. The writer explained that she often wrote as though watching the events unfold movie-style.

Such a cinematic point-of-view opening is used in any number of movies, where it works well whether with or without voiceovers, and this makes a number of new writers use it too. But to do so without understanding the difference between the two media can be a stumbling block. A movie offers an unfolding visual, which is often more atmospheric and attractive than a written description. Such an opening, coupled with stirring music, may well do what paragraphs of written description at the start of a novel cannot.

Minus moving pictures and an orchestra in the background, most writers don’t have a page or two in which to describe the setting, especially not in this day and age where competition for publication slots is stiff. Even a paragraph of description may slow down the pacing. Most writers may therefore be safer beginning with the main character dropped head-first into a difficult or dangerous situation, and allowing the setting to unfold and develop around him or her. On the other hand, there are some circumstances under which a more leisurely and descriptive opening could work.

1. The description is unusual.

A soft grey mist settled on the fishing village isn’t going to be as interesting to me as A soft grey mist settled on the first human settlement on Jupiter Prime. If the story is describing an obviously alien or fantastic environment – and doing so well – that might be enough of a hook to overcome the fact that the main characters haven’t stepped on to the stage yet. Poul Anderson’s “The Queen of Air and Darkness” begins with such description, but when I’m reading about braidbark, jewelleaf and flitteries, I don't notice anything but the unusual and well-thought-out setting. An exotic locale and a vivid style can be as fascinating as people in danger – but this locale and style has to be as intriguing to the reader as they are to the writer.

2. The description is evocative.

Phillipa Gregory’s Wideacre begins with a paragraph of description of the titular hall, but the paragraph is imbued with the narrator’s emotion, full of her love for her home. That was one problem with the cinematic point of view in the story I critiqued. Since the writer was recording the villagers' actions from a detached and emotionless distance, I felt detached from the events and the setting as well.

3. The description is strongly connected to the story.

Putting anything – a character, an aphorism, a description – at the start of a story tells the reader that that thing will be important. This works in Wideacre because the setting is almost a character in its own right; the story could not have taken place anywhere else. And it connects the opening of the book to its end, where Wideacre Hall lies in ruins.

As Orson Scott Card says in Characters and Viewpoint, we have a trick the filmmakers don’t. Short of having the characters in a movie think aloud, there’s no way the screenwriter can put the reader into a character’s mind or have an interesting omniscient narrator comment on events. I’ll take those any day over the panoramic pan over the setting when it comes to hooking readers at the start. That’s not to say this can’t work, just that it may often be easier and more effective to begin a story (especially a short story, where every word counts) in other ways.

I have to say, though, when I imagine Redemption being made into a film, it gets the panoramic sweep at the start. Every time. :)

Prologues

Many fantasy novels have prologues, so it’s normal for many new writers to begin a fantasy with a prologue. Even though I’d read several novels that began with Chapter 1, it had never occurred to me that a big epic fantasy could be written without a prologue until I read Orson Scott Card’s How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. After that I never wrote one, and enjoyed jumping straight into the story while hopefully pulling the reader along with me. If I were to write one, though, I’d keep some tips in mind.

A prologue is not the place to describe the background, the magic system or the mythology of the story – mostly because those aren’t inherently fascinating to anyone except the author. Mythology is often retold in a“Long long ago, when the world was young and gods walked among men” way, and any characters in them are unfleshed, inaccessible and may not appear again in the story. Prologues that are mostly infodumps are worse. There may be a lot of information about the world of the story, but it shouldn’t be delivered to the reader in a mighty avalanche at the start.

I made this mistake when I first started writing fantasy, trying to condense the history of my world down into a few pages and thinking, “There, now we’ve got all that out of the way, we can settle down and enjoy the story.” But now that I plunge straight in, the reader can start enjoying the story right away, and I’ve also found that the reader doesn’t need to know every single detail to do so.

The best use for prologues in fantasy novels is to give readers a brief glimpse of events from another perspective, perhaps from a point of view that cannot be included in the novel or from a time just before the story proper begins. For instance, a prologue can deal with an event in the main character’s past which shows or hints at why the main character is now in a certain position or way of life; Ursula LeGuin’s The Tombs of Atuan is a good example of this. Such a prologue still needs to begin with a hook, and to have characterization and plot just as good as that of the first chapter, but if it's short and intriguing, it has the potential to be a delicious appetizer before the main course of the novel.

One last caveat : the prologue shouldn’t give away spoilers. If it features a prophecy stating that the Sword of Sunbeams will yield to the last heir of the Shiny Kingdom, and the hero happens to be that last heir, no one is going to be in the least worried when he steps up to the Sword. No matter how menacingly it glows or how much he sweats in advance, the readers will already know what happens (unless the writer subverts the prophecy and the Sword burns the hero’s hands off, which to be honest I wouldn’t mind reading).

Action vs. conflict

I’ve read a certain opening in some works-in-progress posted for critique. It’s written along these lines.

John wheeled, just in time to parry a slash from the taller of the two attackers. The force of the block knocked the man’s blade aside for a moment. Ignoring the pain that sang along his arms, John stabbed forward at the man’s belly, fast and hard. From the corner of his eye, he saw the shorter man dart at him and he pivoted, lashing out with one heel.

Is it gripping? To some extent, yes. It’s certainly better than, say, John watching butterflies in a sunny meadow. But it’s got certain problems, and if an author doesn’t take these into consideration, the opening of the story will look as though action has been mistaken for conflict.

Conflict occurs when a character is prevented from having something he or she wants very much. It’s the backbone of fiction; there aren’t many stories without conflict, except perhaps in ultra-literary works where the style and characterization take center stage instead. It can do very well without action, but the reverse rarely applies. If action is the sizzle, conflict is the steak.

Is there conflict in the paragraph I wrote? Well, I’m guessing that John wants to protect himself from the two attackers, who want to kill him. But I have no idea who he is, why he’s fighting these men, who they are, and what’s at stake if he loses (the only clue I have that John is the protagonist is that he’s named and the story is from his point of view). The potential for conflict is lost, because the story opts for action instead. This can be very vivid in a movie, but it leaves something to be desired in a novel.

Another reason I wouldn’t start with a scene like this in a short story is because the reader will never be in any doubt that the viewpoint character will survive the fight. Towards the end, the reader might be more concerned; after all, some authors do kill off their main characters or have otherwise bad things happen to them. Towards the end, especially when you’ve shown the forces confronting the protagonist, the reader will have a you-never-can-tell feeling that allows him to be genuinely afraid for the main character.

But at the start? Unless this is the prologue to a fantasy, where viewpoint characters often do get killed off, the reader isn’t going to worry.

Sometimes the story or novel begins with a practise fight or training sequence, but this has the same problem. There may be plenty of action, but unless there’s real tension, it won’t be fun to read. That’s one reason the Pai Mei scene in Kill Bill was delightful – Pai Mei hated women, Americans and Japanese, but he had to train an American woman who spoke Japanese and who thought she was good enough to defeat him. Most training-the-protagonist scenes don’t go this far. Instead, the protagonist gets a mentor who likes him and doesn’t really want to hurt him, so there goes any fear the reader might have felt on his behalf.

To be continued…

In the beginning

I like reading and commenting on stories or excerpts submitted for critiques on the Absolute Write forums, but there are many such works-in-progress. So I read the first few paragraphs of each to see which ones look more interesting. That's the same thing agents and editors will do (though they may not have the time to read paragraphs and might just look at the first few lines instead), so it's important to make sure the start is as gripping as possible. I've seen a few things at the beginnings of stories and novels that might discourage readers from continuing.

1. A character is bored.

Jessica looked out of the window at the rain, then closed the curtains. She had nothing particular to do that evening, so she turned on the TV. Reruns again. She wished she didn’t feel so bored.

The only reason I can see why writers might use this start is as a contrast, so that when Trouble enters the protagonist’s life, Trouble looks even bigger and more interesting in comparison. I don’t like to use absolutes, so it’s possible that some writer could take this kind of opening and make it work, though I’ve never read anything like it in a published novel. But there are two reasons why I’d leave Jessica to her boredom and try another story instead.

The first is that readers, in general, feel what the character feels. If the protagonist feels afraid, and there’s a good reason for him to be afraid, the reader will feel afraid too. Likewise, if the protagonist is bored, the reader will be bored as well – and most readers won’t persist past the boredom, hoping the story will be more interesting if they read far enough. Agents and editors are even less likely to slog past such an opening.

The second reason is what it implies about the protagonist’s personality. What I know of Jessica after reading that paragraph is that she’s bored and has nothing to do. Not very compelling. No conflict, no interesting details about her job or her problems or even her appearance. I like to see characters in motion, people with places to go and things to do, women in danger, men in deep trouble, children with problems to solve. I’ll read a story that gives me those, not one where the main character seems bored.

2. A weather report.

The storm cracked above the city. Even before the thunder could roll out, the first drops fell, and soon blankets of rain blotted everything from view. Lightning flickered against the masses of grey clouds.

Is anything happening yet? Well, there’s a lot of meterological pyrotechnics, but if the writer’s lucky, the flashes and bangs will cover the fact that there is no character or conflict at the start. If the writer’s not lucky, of course, readers will move on to something else, something that hooks them from the start. Starting with storms or fog or so on sets the scene – but it’s usually safer to set the scene after the reader’s hooked, and to do it gradually rather than beginning with the weather report.

There are ways to start with weather and still intrigue the reader, though, and one of them is to imply that something’s not quite right in the world. One of the best-known examples of this is the opening line of George Orwell’s 1984.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Dean Koontz does something along these lines in The Servants of Twilight.

It happened in sunlight, not on a dark and stormy night.

Something bad happened in the sunlight, and it was the kind of thing that you’d expect would happen on a night with terrible weather instead. I’m reading on to see what this thing was.

Another way is to open with a great image; a good example of this is William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Opening with disastrous weather, such as a tornado swooping down on a village or on a car speeding up to get to safety, might also work.

3. Descriptions of the setting, unless there’s something unusual about the setting

Jessica’s bedroom was decorated in pale green and white, with lace curtains at the windows and a rug with roses on it. It was a pretty, feminine place and she loved spending time there.

Jessica’s bedroom was in the Twisted Tower, and the servants removed the bars from the windows before they carried her belongings in.

Which one sounds more interesting to read? The second, since it's not only strange but there's action in it, rather than passive description. The only bad thing about the second example is that now I want to complete the story. :)