Today on Romancing The Book, I will discuss The First Scene

The opening scene in a movie can set the pace for the rest of the picture. A great beginning captures the audience. The viewer will remain in place until they find the answers to the questions that the very first scene sets up.

One of best opening scenes is the one for Kill Bill, within one minute and twenty-eight seconds you’re hooked.  A badly beaten woman is breathing hard; her bloody face conveys terror as heavy footsteps move closer. Off-screen a man asks her if she finds him sadistic. Desperation oozes from her with every second that passes.  That's it, we're hooked!

Unlike movies, in a book, the writer cannot begin with music and sounds effects. Instead we have to rely on setting the scene with descriptions and just the right words to set a tone. The first twenty words of a story have the capacity to catapult your book into the stratosphere or to oblivion.

Best Selling Author, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, writes the following unforgettable opening in the book, Call Me Irresistible.

Read this and you will ask these three questions afterwards.

·      Why?

·      How did this come about?

·      What is going to happen next?

It wasn't every day a guy saw a headless beaver marching down the side of a road, not even in Dean Robillard's larger than life world. "Son of a" Dean slammed on the brakes of his brand new Aston Martin Vanquish and pulled over in front of her.

The beaver marched right past, her big flat tail bouncing in the gravel, and her small, sharp nose stuck up in the air. Way up. The beaver looked highly pissed.

When a writer begins to write a story, the opening scene can sometimes take longer to put together than the entire first chapter.  Although one may know how to begin to tell the story, the intro is not always as clear.

Here are some pointers for writing an engaging first scene.

1. Start the story and stop after a couple of paragraphs. Read the first couple of sentences, if they do not set the story up then place your curser at the beginning and start again.

2. Sometimes the first paragraphs are not necessary. Go ahead and write them, if they are telling and not showing action, then save them for back-story.  More often than not, the second scene a writer pens is the important one.

3. Lastly, talk it out with others, narrate the first scene and then ask them how do they see this scene?  (I got an excellent start to a couple of my books this way.)

Here is start to the first book of my Protectors series, Desperate Betrayal. Does it draw you to ask the three questions above?

 Shadows.

Emma Blake always felt at home in the shadows. It was where she lived, always concealing the truth from those around her.

Now as she hid in the doorway of an abandoned building, she couldn’t help but compare the current situation to her life. The dampness of the brick wall behind her seeped through to her skin, as she pushed further into the dark to avoid being noticed. The putrid smell of trash and urine barely registered, as she was mesmerized by the scene unfolding before her.

The scene invoked images of the endless battle forces of dark and light had been waging since the dawn of time.

Everyone strives to reach the lofty goal of grabbing an editor and agent’s attention from the first sentence. But what’s the right way to do that? Is it better to open with an action scene or with a more introspective point-of-view? I’ve seen both ways done extremely well before, though I’ve heard that it’s harder to showcase your voice by opening with an action scene.

So which is a better opening for a paranormal story?

THIS…

Sometimes in the dark of night, when the earth trembled under her feet, when the wind howled through the valley of skyscrapers, when the fog rolled along the deserted San Francisco streets, Eva could feel them.

Even now, as the city slept behind its closed doors and locked windows, she sat in her car and waited, praying for just one glimpse of them. What she hoped to encounter wasn’t human. Yet it walked among them, for she had seen these strange beings with her own two eyes. They could be the waitress who’d poured coffee at the diner this morning, or the man that had stopped to help change a flat tire last week, or the diva-licious woman that sidled up against some lonely man at the nightclub on Friday night. Not in the least discriminatory, these beings come in all ages, sizes, and colors.

Oh, everyone’s wondering what they are by now, but Eva has no time to dive into such information, for at the moment her police scanners are buzzing like a swarm of bees.

(Then the scene becomes more active , more action orientated)

OR THIS.

With her breath caught in her throat, Eva exited her tweaked out Eclipse racer loaded with police scanners instead of nitrous oxide. Ether steamed up from vents on the sidewalk and mixed with the fog as she made my way down the service alley behind the now empty shopping complex. Voices reached her. She tried to calm herself with the thought that maybe it was just homeless people but knew that wasn’t true, because the radio strapped to her belt buckle zapped airwaves of static out into the night.

With her back pressed against the uneven brick wall, she edged deeper into the vat of blackness lit only by the silhouette of the moon. When two men emerged from the shadows, she plastered herself against the wall while her fight or flight reflex shot to flight.

Share your thoughts...

What’s your take on the opening paragraphs above? Personally, I like the first one, but wonder if the pacing is too slow, or that it’s too much of an information dump. There are just too many shades of gray in the writing process for me.

Until next time, happy writing.