One of the hardest questions for novice writers to answer is: where should I start telling the story? When I first started writing books, especially using discovery writing, I tended to start in the wrong place. That is, I had a lot of pages of not much happening before the inciting incident (the point of no return mentioned in yesterday’s post–that point at which the main character is fully committed to pursuing his or her goal).
Pages where nothing happens kills reader engagement and guarantees that they will put your book down and never pick it up again. No matter how much you think that the reader needs to slog through twenty pages of everyday events in order to understand your characters, they don’t. They need, maybe, a few sentences here and there, woven into action and forward motion in the story. Let’s take another quick look at the graph of rising tension from yesterday’s blog:
As you can see, although the tension starts out low, it is already rising from the very beginning. It doesn’t dip again until the middle, and then it stays higher than at any point in the beginning.
Giving a draft a slow start isn’t necessarily wrong, as long as you understand that you’ll need to go back and cut out probably most of your first chapter, maybe even a few. You learn a lot about your characters, your setting, and the backstory from those first plot-less pages. The problem is that the common fix to the boring beginning is to do this:
1. Put the inciting incident on the first page
2. Put the information you should have cut after the inciting incident.
No, no, no, no. There are two major problems with making this fix:
1. The reader is confused about what is going on in the inciting incident and doesn’t yet care about the character, so the relevance of the inciting incident is completely lost on them.
2. While they might be engaged for the first few pages, a slump in the tension will lose the reader just as surely as a slow start. You’ll notice on that tension graph, the line doesn’t start high and then slump down. It is imperative to keep the story moving forward and keep tension higher than the starting point at all times.
The question, then, is where do I start my story, and how do I provide the right amount of information in the first few pages without boring the reader?
The first part of that answer is to know clearly what the inciting incident is. And it might not be as opaque as you’d imagine. Just ask the question: at what point is the main character fully committed to pursuing his or her objective? At what point do they no longer have a choice? Here’s an example from a movie I’m sure we’ve all watched: In Star Wars, Luke has a desire to leave the farm and train as a Jedi, but he doesn’t actually do it until his family members are killed. Once this happens, he can’t return to life as normal. He is committed to following a different path in that moment.
But a lot of events happen before the deaths of Luke’s Aunt and Uncle. If the movie started with those deaths, they would mean nothing to the viewers.
So next, ask yourself, what does the reader need to know, feel or understand about the character, the setting, and the situation in order to fully appreciate the event of the inciting incident? Make a list. I’m serious, make a list of the things the reader really needs to know or feel. Now look at that list and ask yourself, where do I need to start the story in order to reveal all of these things before the inciting incident happens? By working backward like this, you ensure that only the truly relevant information is included.
The second part of that answer is our old friend Density. When you write (or rewrite) those first few necessary scenes proceeding the inciting incident, keep density in mind. Don’t devote whole paragraphs to backstory and other whole paragraphs to description if you can help it. Make every sentence do at least two things. Put a character in motion and reveal a sympathetic trait that makes the reader care about them. Give the reader an impression of the setting and move the plot forward with causally linked events. While your entire book should be dense, the first few pages are the most important place for density, because readers will not have much patience for a slow moving story here.
Even before the inciting incident, there should be something happening in the beginning that is out of the ordinary, that conveys a sense of wrongness or danger to the reader. And just because you need to start your story before the inciting incident, doesn’t mean you need to start the story in a boring place. You could start in the middle of a battle. But you have to bond the reader to the character right away, or you risk them asking the question, “So what?” You have to reveal something of the setting and situation right away, woven in with the action, or you risk the reader being so confused they don’t care about the danger to the character.
There are all sorts of creative ways to manage beginnings and to work in the crucial information before the inciting incident. I just started reading a Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child called Persuader. Child begins the book with a gun battle and the main character rescuing a young man being kidnapped. At the beginning of chapter two, we learn that the inciting incident, which was Reacher seeing a man he’d thought he’d killed alive, happened eleven days before the action. There are two important, brilliant lessons in this:
1. The action was not the inciting incident. The inciting incident was actually less action-y (though no less suspenseful) than the beginning.
2. Even though the inciting incident happened before the opening scene chronologically, Child backed up in time to show it after the fast-paced beginning. Imagine if Child had instead written a chapter showing us a day in the life of Reacher, slumming in his hotel room (boring), then revealed the inciting incident, then built up to the action. A whole chapter would have been wasted. Instead, a few lines interspersed with the action of the first chapter told us all we needed to know about the character, and still before the inciting incident.
In short, whether you are discovery drafting, re-writing, or drafting with a clear plan of the story, know what your inciting incident is and work backwards from it. Use density and a sense of danger or disturbance to avoid boring the reader while you reveal just enough information and get them to care just enough about the characters to keep them reading.
Once you’re through the inciting incident, it’s onto tomorrow’s topic: 101 TIWIK #16: Stuck in the Middle
This post is part of a series of 101 Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Wrote My First Book. Start reading the series at the beginning.
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