The opening in your writing carries more weight than any other part of your work.
Writing Tip for Today: Let’s look at ways to improve your opening.
Time and Place
Whether you write fiction or nonfiction, novels, memoirs or articles or essays, your readers must be oriented in time and place. If not, they may become confused or disinterested. Think of your readers as an audience at a movie or stage play. They want clues to when and where the story will unfold.
Orienting readers doesn’t always have to be plainly spelled out. You can insert hints by referencing clothing, tools or modes of transportation. Current events of the period will also help readers understand what era or time period they’re to imagine.
In scenes, after you’ve established a general time and place, you can use simple transition words such as On Wednesday, In the morning, by next year to differentiate time’s passage. Places might be labeled by room, by building or by town, city or nation—even galaxy for sci-fi.
Get to Action
If you write fiction, creative nonfiction or memoir, it’s tempting to want readers to know as much as possible before the action begins. Try to avoid this tendency—a bunch of back story or an internal monologue only slows down readers and makes them anxious for action. See my posts about Cold Mashed Potatoes for more on back story.
If your main character is alone on stage, there is no one to interact with. See my posts about the Wilson Principle. Get at least something or someone else on stage with that MC. The opening can still draw in readers without a lot of background information. Just orient us to time and place and let your characters start acting out the story.
With almost immediate action, you can use dialogue and action to build tension and introduce conflict. In your opening, it’s often good practice to hint at the opposition to your character’s goals in order to make every succeeding scene more tense than the last.
Use emotion to pull readers into your opening.
Pull on Emotions
When you craft your opening scene, even your opening page or paragraph, keep in mind that agents and editors want something that they cannot ignore. One agent I know said she wants to laugh and cry on the first page.
The point is that by employing emotion in that opening, you intrigue readers, so they want to know more. Be sure the stakes of the story (goal) are high—in other words, if the character doesn’t achieve the story goal, So What? See my posts on the So What test.
Your opening may require more rewriting than the rest of the piece or book. Many writers must revisit their openings to add depth of emotion, intrigue and excitement to those opening words. Revise and let the emotion be over the top, then pull it back so that you avoid melodrama or hyperbole. Keep at it until you’ve written an opening that makes readers laugh, cry or be so curious that they can’t wait to read what happens next.
