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Cheating is good

TheZot

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I was going to spend some time here whining about opening scenes, 'cause I hate 'em. I really, really do; they're annoying, and hard to get right, and even when I do manage a paragraph or three that doesn't suck they never go anywhere. I mean, I get as far as:

Harold took a sip of his coffee as he looked out over the deck railing at the lake in front of him. The soothing warmth of the drink flowed through him as the first rays of the rising sun bathed the lake's waters in rich orange light. The lilting notes of the early-rising birds danced through the trees behind him played counterpoint to the beauty in front of him as another beautiful day dawned.

or something like that and I start getting the itch to have something explode, or a UFO crash into the lake, or marauding orcs start laying waste to the back garden. Or zombies, they're always good for a laugh.

 

Anyway, after chopping William's lament about pants out of the current story I've been left without an intro. This is troublesome, as it's a story that really needs some good scene-setting to work right. (Not that what I had was perfect as a scene setter, but it wasn't bad)

 

I was going to go on about it for a bit, but I think I've figured out how to cheat again. So I think I will, and maybe I'll put off the whining until later.

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JamesSavik

JamesSavik 24,882

Posted

marauding orcs start laying waste...

 

Yeah, that always livenes things up.

Lucy Kemnitzer

Lucy Kemnitzer 0

Posted

But you know what? Your itch to make some damn thing just happen already in the first paragraph is exactly right on. We don't need to kniow that some guy drinks coffee, etc., we need to know what interrupts him.

 

Now, I'm a slow starter. I want to take my own sweet time, and my idea of starting in medias res is to start with some slow-moving scene fairly late in the story. Then I realize I haven't started where the action is, and I go backwards, but then I'm telling this long boring thing. Fortunately I have a writing group nowadays who treat me with exactly the amount of toughness I need (I'm a tender flower, but I do not want to be told that I'm doing fine dear, and have this gold star for effort)and now, three years after I wrote the first draft, I'm rewriting my wishgranter story almost from scratch and I think I might finally have figured out how to do the thing you naturally want to do, so why don't you let up on yourself and just go with the UFO or whatever? (I'm less fond of the orcs, but there you go.)

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