Starting a new story is both the best of times and the worst of times. Excitement in beginning a new project, but how to start the thing?
Over the years I've come across a lot of how-to methods. Heinlein's classic "Blowups Happen" media res opening is cited quite often with its famous "Put down that wrench!" line. Lawrence Block advocates starting with second things first—i.e., starting with a scene from further along in the story as your first scene and then flashbacking back to the story’s true beginning in your second scene. Then there's what I call the haiku method. Classical Japanese haiku poems usually start with a weather report.
I've used all of these techniques and more for stories over the years and I’m always open to more advice.
Recently, I've encountered writers on podcasts and online groups advocating that a writer must in their opening paragraph (or even their opening line) tell the reader exactly what story to expect. Your opening must signal to the reader what story you've written and how it will unfold.
I’m not much on the word must when it comes to writing, but I can see where this advice might prove useful in letting your poor reader know what genre they've wandered into, that they’re reading futuristic sci-fi tale rather than historical rom-com. Personally, however, I think that's the job of back cover copy and marketing blurbs. TV Guide does exactly the same thing with episode synopses.
But, hey, if it works for you, great. The only true rule with writing I’ve ever found is use what works.
And with some stories, telling the reader up front what your story is what works. Sometimes it’s taken to a such a degree it becomes a gimmick. One famous example is the musical Pippin, with its opening number “Magic to Do” where The Players break the fourth wall and tell the audience up front just what they're in for.
Here's “Magic to Do” acted out (from the 1981 Canadian-televised version), both the song itself and spoken dialog immediately following, dialog that lays out even more explicitly what’s to follow.
This gimmick is not new to Pippin, of course. Danny Kaye's incomparable The Court Jester did much the same in its opening title sequence:
And there’s variations on the gimmick, too. The Dirty Dozen comes to a dead stop in the middle of the film to utilize a nursery rhyme to tell viewers how the rest of the movie (the battle sequences) will unfold.
I have nothing against this Pippin gimmick. Heck, I've used it myself.
In scripting the final confrontation between Antman and Doctor Doom in the Mavel Comics FF series. I opened issue #15 to tell how the final battle against Doom would unfold by cribbing from The Dirty Dozen itself: conveying the team’s battleplan in nursery rhyme.
But before then, back on the last panels of the previous issue (#14) I utilized the Pippin gimmick by telling the reader exactly how the next two issues would unfold through a rah-rah speech Antman gives to the other heroes.
And then in a final “I Tell You Three Times,” I begin the last issue (#16) with a battle montage using a voiceover of that same speech.
Even so, I caught many readers by surprise as to the ferocity and comprehensiveness of Ant Man's revenge on Dr. Doom for killing his daughter despite telling them explicitly that’s how it was going down. A sizable number of readers did not like Doom being not only defeated, but utterly humiliated by a mere Ant(man).
They can’t say I didn’t warn them. But they did.
The tricky thing about setting up reader expectations is that readers want their expectations confirmed while at the same time wanting them—to use a current-year buzz word— subverted. Up to a point, at least.
Often a reader wants comfort food. More of the same only different. Slightly different.
This is most often true with series. Like novel series. Like comic books. Like movie/TV franchises. Star Wars and Star Trek are comfort foods. Its fans want more of the same only different and they get quite cross if you put peanut butter in their chocolate.
The makers of the recent remakes and sequels for these two franchises weren't particularly interested in providing "more of the same" but were quite taken with delivering the "but different" (and then some!). Fairly or not, these new versions have not been well received by a large portion of the audience. (Victor von Doom nods his battered. armored head.)
Yet at the same, if you never deviate from the exact expectations, you lay out for an audience, you get accused of crafting a boring story that runs on rails like a choo-choo. Trite is not a compliment. “Saw that coming a mile away” is not a phrase you want in your Amazon reviews. Captain Obvious is not a role model.
How many rom-com/harem anime series have you watched that run right down bog-standard rails? That aren’t just comfort food, but frozen TV dinners? The anime series Nanaka 6/17 even goofs a little on them. The main character in Nanaka is obsessed with a magical girl anime series called Magical Domiko. The Domiko series is, of course, fictious. It doesn't really exist outside a few tv-watching glimpses in Nanaka itself, but the producers of Nanaka went to the pains of adding an OP (theme song/opening titles) for Domiko as a DVD bonus.
Even though the Domiko series doesn't exist, even though you’ll never see it in its entirety and ever will, you know exactly how the Domiko series plays out. It's all there in the OP: the earnest, upbeat main character, the wise-cracking magical sidekick creature, the rival witch (and best frenemy), the evil overlord and bumbling henchmen, the love triangle, the daily school life, the supporting cast, the Deeper Meaning about growing up. The Domiko OP is nothing but one minute and fifty-nine seconds of brilliantly executed bog-standard expected tropes.
So, what does a writer do? How do you thread this needle? How do you navigate between overfulfilling and over-subverting expectations? Odysseus’s Scylla and Charybdis have nothing on a poor writer’s dilemma
It really does come back to the individual writer and the individual story and what the writer wants that story to do. When in doubt, go back to basics. For me, the basic of storytelling can be found in Algis Budrys's Seven Part Story:
1. Character
2. In Context
3. With A Problem
4. Who tries to solve it and fails
5. And tries again and fails again
6. And finally solves the problem in a do-or-die effort
7. And is validated for his efforts
In his writing workshops on the subject and his book Writing to the Point, Algis emphasized over and over again that as the Try/Fail cycle progresses, the original problem metastasizes, growing larger and larger until by the end the ultimate problem that gets solved may have little to do with the initial issue.
I think that is why the "give the readers exact expectations as to what the story exactly is" is less-than-optimal advice. The reader isn't ready for the exact story yet. What the reader might be ready for, however, is the initial “character in context with a problem.”
You see this in the "weather report" haiku poems I mentioned. Haiku poems (and other classical Japanese poetic forms) have extremely limited space to work with, a specific number of syllables in a specific pattern. And yet, often half of the very limited space of a Haiku is taken up with the “weather report,” in setting the scene. Character/context/problem or at least the opening mood reflecting that setup. The final portion is the steak sizzle, the punch of the piece. How that context is dealt with. Or fatalistically accepted. Or whatever.
But that’s poetry. For setting up expectations in a prose short story, I offer my most recent published piece "Weep All Ye Little Rains" in Space Cowboys 5: Cattle Drive as an example of what I did on a particular piece at least. At the risk of losing a sale (and annoying my publisher), I note that you can follow along with the story's opening free of charge via the sample Kindle text on Amazon.
"Weep" is a very cut-and-dried seven-part story. That’s unusual for me these days. Algis taught that as a writer gets further along in their career, the more the seven-parts framework becomes more a suggestion than rule set (“parlay!”), with many of the seven parts ellipsed, assumed, or merely hinted at, not to mention told out of order.
This can be taken to extremes, of course. Hemmingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” essentially leaves out almost every one of the seven parts, only hints at them. Coming back to poetry, William Carlos Williams’ haiku-like poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” (coming back to poetry) leaves out the meat of the story, too, the dying child who owns that toy wheelbarrow.
I play a bit more fairly with my readers. In “Weep,” I have a grizzled old cowboy dead set in his ways who wants to keep living the cattle drive life. Unfortunately, the Wild West is changing. The cattle drive era is dying. Character, context, problem.
I start the story a bit media res (ala "Blowups Happen") with the cowboy ordering a whiskey at the end of a trail drive—"Give me a bottle" instead of "Put down that wrench"—but not before spending a few lines to set up haiku-like the backdrop setting and mood.
But this initial setup is not what the ultimate crisis turns out to be. In fact, the end problem has nothing to do with Dodge City or bovine cattle or even planet Earth. I don't tell the reader that up front. I figure that the anthology's title—Space Cowboys 5—and its cover illustration of a space cowboy astride a space cow would clue the reader in on the story's eventual sci-fi elements. Like I wrote earlier, let marketing copy to do that particular job.
Like haiku, I don't even get to the outer space part of the story until the second half. Up until then, "Weep" is straight-up western genre fare. I think it a stronger story in letting expectations grow and evolve along with the character's struggles.
In fact, it can utterly ruin a story by laying out precisely what a story will be early on. One of my favorite horror films is the 1985 cult classic House starring William Katt of "Greatest American Hero" fame (who, to bring things full circle, played Pippin in that 1983 clip posted above).
House starts out like a Stephen King horror flick. Troubled Vietnam vet-turned-writer moves into a haunted house. Things get creepier and downright scary. And then suddenly, in a single moment, the movie turns on a dime and becomes a horror-comedy as Katt hunts down the haunter with all the solemnity of the hotel/Slimer scenes in Ghostbusters. It's a brilliant subversion of expectations, one that would have been absolutely ruined if the viewer had been told up front (either in the movie or even marketing) about the switcheroo.
Even Pippin, with its “Magic to Do” and its spoiler dialog, reigns back on revealing the final ending (“Think About the Sun”). The Leading Player has to tell the torchbearer who’s prematurely leaped on the stage “Not now. Later.” (See the 4:15 mark of the Pippin clip linked above.)
So, again, how does a writer go about setting up great reader expectations? A story’s opening, to butcher Charles Dickens, is the most explicit of times, it is the most concealing of times. It really does depend on the story, the writer, and yes, the readership you’re writing for.
Is your story comfort food? A switcheroo? Or something that organically grows into something it didn't start out as? Each requires a different approach.
In the end, I think the only sure solution is to craft a beginning that hooks the reader enough to hang around all the way to “The End” so they can discover for themselves what kind of story you’ve written. (And. hopefully, plunk down cash to do so, in the process. You did go back and buy Space Cowboys 5 after sampling, didn’t you?)
Lee Allred's prose fiction has appeared in Asimov's SF and Pulphouse magazines, dozens and dozens of anthologies, and various other fiction venues. He's also scripted for DC (Batman '66), Marvel (Fantastic Four), IDW (Dick Tracy), and Image Comics (Madman Atomic Comics).