What does a writer want to do in an opening scene? Let's turn that around: What does a writer want to accomplish in an opening scene? Answer: he wants to convince the reader that this is something worth reading.

How do you do that? By putting something in the opening scene that makes it compelling. It could be a character, a situation or idea, or even the setting. It should hint at what's coming up in a way that the reader wants to find out more. It must be something that grabs the reader and says, "Isn't this great? Let's read on!"

To do this, you need to choose the right place to start your story. A common bad habit is to start at the beginning, even if nothing really compelling happens there. Find the first compelling part of the story and start there, and fill in background info as needed. In a first draft, you might start at the beginning, but once you figure out where the story becomes compelling, you know where to start the second draft.

Just as important as what goes in an opening scene is the question of what DOESN'T go in. The simple answer is anything that is NOT compelling. Save the non-compelling stuff for later. Of course, if it's not compelling, ask yourself if it is really necessary. If it is necessary, find a way to make it interesting, and put it in later. Everything you write in your story needs to be interesting in some way, or it shouldn't be in the story--but lots of interesting stuff that doesn't advance the story can be the death of the story. So be careful about moving "interesting" stuff from the opening to other parts of the story.

Probably the most common mistake with opening scenes is to fill it with lots of information so the reader will understand the rest of the story that he no longer wants to read. The opening scene is not the time to info dump. This doesn't mean you don't give out info in the opening scene--just make sure the info given is either necessary at that point, compelling, or (ideally) both.

It's not easy. During the opening scene, the reader doesn't know anything about the world you are launching him into, and so you have to give him enough information to make the scene coherent. This is why it is important to choose the right starting point. You must find a scene that's compelling, even while giving out whatever info is needed to make it coherent. If the scene isn't coherent, it isn't compelling.

When you first start a story, creating a compelling opening scene can be difficult. Often the best strategy is to not even try at that point--just get the minimum words needed down to get the story started. Later, when you've finished the first draft, you can come back and 1) see if you started at the right place, and if not, find the compelling place in the story where you should start; and 2) make that opening scene as compelling as possible.

It's also important to make sure the opening matches and is relevant to the story. If you've written a deep, serious story, you normally don't want to open with something humorous, and vice versa. If your opening grabs the reader's attention, but the rest of the story has little to do with it, the reader will feel cheated.

You want to polish every part of your story, but think of yourself as a master artist painting a portrait. You may paint every inch of the canvas as well as you can, but which part do you spend the most time on? The face, which is to a portrait what your opening is to a story, the first thing a person looks at. Just as an artist may work on the face far longer than any other part of the portrait, you need to spend extra time on that opening to make it (here's that word again) as compelling as possible. Brainstorm, experiment, and putter about with it until it's perfect. Because if it isn't, all the genius and hard work you put into making the rest of the story compelling won't matter because it won't get read.

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About the Writer:

Larry Hodges is a member of SFWA with 29 short story sales. He has been a full-time writer for many years with 3 books and over 1100 published articles.