603 – Common Beginning Mistakes

We all know how important it is to make a good first impression, but it can be a struggle to convey enough information in an opening scene without a confusing infodump. Not to mention, you need to set the right tone and keep things interesting or risk alienating your audience. This week, we discuss common mistakes people make while crafting their beginnings, as well as ways to avoid them and make those first sentences shine.

Show Notes

• How to Start a Story: Designing a First Scene That Resonates
• Should Your Tale Start With Dark Backstory?
• Five Tips for Avoiding Disorientation in Your Opening Hook
• My Top Seven Tips for Improving Your Story’s Opening
• Managing Exposition Starts With Simplifying the Story
• Live Action Avatar
• Choosing Scenes to Cover the Right Information
• Shield of Sparrows
• The Abbess Rebellion
• Five Tips for Portraying Your Characters as Intended
• They Mostly Come Out at Night
• Doling Out Information During a Scene
• 584 – Introducing Characters
• Black Sun
• The Blade Itself
• Judging What Information Your Story Needs
• Blindsight
• I Am Number Four
• Five Reasons Stories Have Slow Openings, and How to Fix Them
• What’s the Best Way to Create an Opening Hook?
• Four Signs Your Story Escalates Too Quickly
• The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
• Red Seas Under Red Skies
• Eight Types of Black Hat Storytelling to Avoid
• Starfleet Academy
• The Sword of Shannara
• Name of the Wind
• Wheel of Time
• The Final Architecture
• The Raven Scholar

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Savannah. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: Hello, I am your very important host, Daisy. Today we will talk about… Oh, no! The villain has me! Ah, I die…! 

Oren: Well, that’s fine. You were probably not the real main character anyway. 

Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast, where we have lots of prologues. I’m Chris. 

Oren: And I’m Oren. Hang on a second, though. I have to explain to you my backstory for 10 pages, because that’s what you’re here for, right?

Chris: Yeah, absolutely. Exposition dump me. 

Oren: Okay. All right. [laughs] Getting a little spicy in here. Anyway… 

Chris: This time we’re talking about common beginning mistakes, which I see a lot of because I frequently do analysis of beginnings of bestsellers that could use some improvement. And also, when I’m looking at my clients and followers and their works, it’s always easiest to take the beginning and analyze it, because that doesn’t require any context. So I’ve just seen a lot of beginnings, and they are also probably the trickiest portion to write. The climax is also tricky, but beginnings are really, really tricky. 

Oren: The first mistake is beginning your story, because if you never begin your story, then you can’t make any other mistakes. So if you think about it, the beginning of the story is actually responsible for more mistakes than any other choice you might make.

Chris: Maybe we can just cut it in the middle and make… Oh, no. The middle has become our beginning. 

Oren: Uh-oh. 

Chris: It chases us. No matter how much we cut the story down, we can never escape the beginning. 

Oren: Due to the linear nature of time, your story will always have to begin somewhere. Even if it’s a weird, wonky story that jumps around, it’s still gonna have to have some entry point where the reader engages with the story. Now, of course, I suppose you could do something really weird like a book with multiple places that readers are supposed to start at random, but then it would just have multiple beginnings, so you’re back to the same problem. 

Chris: Are you saying every story has a beginning, a middle, and an ending? 

Oren: Yeah, technically that is true. The most technical truth that has ever happened. 

Chris: I know that when people say that they have something in their mind, they have some structure, when they say that, it goes to show that we haven’t really intellectualized some of that knowledge. 

Oren: I think most people when they say that, they mean that there’s an introduction where you have to set the scene, and then there’s a bunch of stuff that happens, and then there’s a climax, is what I think people are trying to communicate. It’s just not a very helpful concept on its own. If someone doesn’t already know that’s what it means, then the words are not helpful even to that extent. 

Chris: I think people use it when they don’t have an intellectual understanding of plot, but they kind of have a feel for it, and so they don’t know how to otherwise put it into words that their story has plot, so they just say it has a beginning, a middle, and an ending.

Oren: See, one common beginning mistake is getting sidetracked with a different topic in your podcast about common beginning mistakes. 

Chris: I think with exposition, kind of the big demon for most openings is too much exposition. Although the opposite can also be a problem. We can talk about that. I think the trick that happens, it’s not necessarily that people get super sidetracked with their exposition, it’s mostly that the devil is in the details. The readers do need to know about this, but they don’t need to know all of these details about this. And really honing it down to what’s important, that can be something that happens. 

Oren: The most straightforward example I’ve seen of too much exposition is not even a book: it’s the first episode of the Netflix live action Avatar show, where the characters exposition dump a bunch of information in dialogue that we don’t need to know yet. And the reason I know we don’t need to know it yet is that this show follows the animated version very closely, and we didn’t know most of that stuff by this point in the animated version, and it was fine. We did not need that information so quickly. 

Chris: I think they explained what the Avatar is three times, and it’s just, hey, you already had a really colorful intro that was based on the animated show intro that said what the Avatar is, and now you’re saying it again? Yeah, it’s technically possible somebody wasn’t there for that part, but if so, this is on Netflix. They can just replay it if they’re confused. 

Oren: I wonder if anyone’s used that as one of their writing-for-the-second-screen examples. Because the show as a rule doesn’t really do that, so I don’t think it would qualify. It’s just that the first episode is loaded with exposition for some reason. 

Chris: One thing I’ve seen in a couple novel openings is that the author really feels like they need to get in a lot of information, and this is possible that what’s lost is between the outline and drafting, where they made a cool scene in their outline, and they’re like, “Okay, I just need to add a few notes of information so that the readers know what’s going on.” But then when they actually started writing the scene, it was tons and tons and tons of information, and it just spiraled out of control. And what you end up with is a scene where you have the main character just standing around doing nothing, walking around doing nothing. Literally nothing is happening, and the scene is just a bag of exposition.

And in some of those cases, if those details are really important, that’s definitely a sign when you should just add more scenes to your beginning. And you do want to make sure there’s some kind of conflict in them, interesting and engaging. But if you have groundwork that’s that important that you have to lay it in your beginning, then maybe you just need more scenes to bring it out. I’m thinking of Shield of Sparrows, where the main character is just standing around thinking about whether to jump into the water and swim and how envious she is of her sister. That one is an odd one. 

Oren: Yeah, it’s always tricky to tell when you’re looking at something that has too much exposition. Is the problem that this exposition is just being inefficiently delivered? Could we fix this by reducing how much exposition there is and adding information later when it’s needed? Or is the issue that the concept is just too complicated? Because that was my problem. The Abbess Rebellion just has a lot of backstory because that’s my toxic trait. My characters have tons of backstory, and there was a bunch of important stuff that had happened in the backstory that set the tone for certain relationships, and a number of important characters from the backstory were dead, and them being dead was really important. That was a problem. And the solution that we came up with was to add a new first chapter and then flash forward in time. 

I wouldn’t personally call that a prologue. Some people will. Whatever. But I would say that it’s an imperfect solution. I didn’t love having to add in a big time jump, but it was the only thing that we could do realistically to manage the amount of information that I had set up, just because otherwise it was too much. Readers couldn’t keep track of it. 

Chris: What I’ve seen is like in Shield of Sparrows, for instance, you have to look at it and what task is this supposed to perform? In Shield of Sparrows, author Devney Perry is trying to build some sympathy for her main character, and also trying to compare her like, “Oh, see, she’s treated so poorly,” whereas her sister is their parents’ favorite and gets all of the attention. And you kind of have to do that beforehand because once you move on in the book, we quickly get the plot going in actually not that long. We could maybe emphasize that. I think there’s some scenes where they get ready to meet the new ambassadors who have just arrived, so maybe we could fit some of the family dynamics in there. 

But at the same time, creating sympathy for your main character so that people like them right away is a valid reason for having a scene. And part of the problem is that the main character comes off as really petty because all those… that resentment of her sister is all told and not shown. So, if we saw, we witnessed firsthand how everybody is treating the main character unfairly, then the main character would be sympathetic. But when we’re told in exposition, it sounds petty. 

Oren: And it literally feels the same way as if you meet a stranger and the first thing they do is start complaining about somebody else and about how bad they have it and about how this other person is super mean. And it’s like, I don’t know you at all. Why do you think I have any context for this? And it makes you suspect that maybe they are actually the asshole. We don’t know for sure, but that’s the feeling it gives. 

Chris: And They Mostly Come Out at Night had the same issue with its beginning, where the main character is just a ball of anger. Well, that’s a separate issue, but he’s just wandering around looking at things as an excuse to exposit. There’s actually a really eventful backstory scene that’s when he was a kid that sets the stage for everything. And I was just like, you know, you should’ve just called for a time jump afterwards. You still should’ve done it. You still should’ve had that backstory scene as your opening instead of expositing about everything and how everything’s unfair now. Show the source of the unfairness, how this event happened, how the main character was unfairly blamed for it, so that we can sympathize with the main character and not just witness him walking around seething at everybody. 

There’re definitely some situations where if you have tons of exposition and it’s supposed to make your main character sympathetic, lay other emotional groundwork, or establish characters then you might just need more scenes instead that are supposed to show those things instead of tell them. In general, in the opening, the information load is always so high because the reader is coming in fresh and they have to learn everything. So generally in the opening, if you can delay giving information in the opening scene, you should delay. Another thing−I see this a lot−besides exposition is just did you have to name the country or the kingdom yet? Was that necessary? Can you just give the name of that later? Or we’ve got minor side characters, maybe we could learn their names later. All those little details, because every name or label that you put on something, that’s something that the reader has to learn and remember. Just using titles for minor characters, saying “that’s the bartender” instead of naming the bartender even if the main character knows their name, people won’t know the difference. But it’s really helpful for delaying how much the reader has to learn initially. Space is just so precious in the opening because you have to teach the reader necessary things, but you’re also trying to engage them, so things really have to be very important and essential for the opening to include them in your opening.

Oren: You can also shape how much information your opening demands immediately by creating the circumstances in which it takes place. If you were writing a steampunk adventure story about a cool inventor, you would maybe open with them in their workshop trying to get this cool device to work properly, and okay, that’s stuff to explain. You gotta explain this cool device, you gotta introduce who this character is, and suggest this is steampunk, but that’s a lot easier than trying to introduce your character in the middle of a giant mecha battle. I’m not gonna say you can’t introduce your character in the middle of a giant mecha battle, but you are making things harder for yourself.

Chris: The thing that I see that’s on the opposite end of the spectrum of having a character just stand around while you dump exposition is having problems that don’t have time to breathe. The reader does need time to anticipate and feel things. Again, the goal of the problem is to create tension, and tension is based on negative anticipation of a possible bad future event. The readers need time to anticipate. If you have in your opening scene, in the very first paragraph, suddenly a mecha shoots at your main character, that doesn’t offer time for anticipation. 

Oren: You can open with some kind of high-stakes conflict. That can be done. It’s just do you have the ability to establish what those stakes are and why they should matter in such a short time? You usually wanna err on the side of simplicity if you’re doing that. 

Chris: It’s not impossible to open with a fight scene. I do think some extra paragraphs to appreciate who is the opponent, who is the antagonist your protagonist is about to fight, size them up, and be like, “Oh no, I’m in deep trouble now.” Or, if it’s a more complicated world problem, it’s time to explain. I do think that personal problems tend to be better openers because they allow you to multitask introducing your main character with introducing some form of tension, a tense problem. And introducing your character and giving them the best introduction you can give them and making them often sympathetic or what have you is really important.

Personal level problems, I don’t mean it just has to be an emotional problem. It could be, like, oh, the person doesn’t have anywhere they can go, or something that’s like, “Oh no, I can’t pay rent, and I’m dealing with an eviction notice.” That’s an external problem, but it’s also a problem for them personally, as opposed to a world problem where ther