The outcome of my opening scene is devastating. Can a first scene be too powerful in terms of conflict? Do you ever force yourself to pull back for the sake of creating a balanced rising action?
@museful Nopes. You want to invoke a hunger so terrible in your reader that they cannot thrive unless they keep going. The beginning of your story should serve a lot of purposes. Introduce your characters. Introduce your world. Introduce the feel for the work(Genre in Dramatica terms). The taste if you will… If it’s devastating and the stakes are plausible, immediately we are invited to follow either MC or Protagonist or whichever character you have on display. We get to care. And when we care, we’ll follow to see what happens.
1 Like
Sunset Boulevard [spoiler alert] does start off with him floating dead in the swimming pool.
1 Like
Yes, an opening scene can be too intense. The hard part to remember is that the audience/reader doesn’t know your character(s) yet and so they don’t care yet. So opening with murder by cracking a baby’s head against a tree because it won’t quit crying while you rape its mother (an actual opening I’ve seen), even though well written, was just too much. You can work up to that sort of mayhem.
1 Like
How are you defining “devastating” and “too powerful in terms of conflict”? I’d say the more conflict the better if we’re talking about Dramatica elements butting up against one another. I think of Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds opening scene (if I rember correctly) where a guy is hiding a family from some Nazi’s and has to decide whether to protect them and risk his life or give them up and save his life. Pretty intense and works really well on my opinion. And I think you can get the same amount of dramatic tension in a kids story with kid-friendly illustrations–though it may be difficult to get as strong an emotional reaction without Nazi’s and murder and…whatever it is @jassnip is watching (
), but that seems like something different.
I’m not sure if there’s any good advice from Dramatica itself–this is Storyweaving we’re talking about, after all–but in general, your first scene should establish the tone of your story. It wouldn’t make any sense to start your rollicking action/comedy with something ultra-intense, but at the same time, it wouldn’t make any sense to start a gritty noir/horror story with a frolic through the flowers. But leading the first scene with a burst of high intensity, then slowly building up to that level throughout the rest of the story–perfectly fine in my book.
Take, say, Mad Max: Fury Road, which has that early scene where he’s getting chased by War Boys through their underground halls. It’s frenetic, wild, and ridiculously metal–and then it just gets even crazier from there!
EDIT: Though I mention horror, which is a notable exception. Sometimes horror starts low and ramps up later–like my avatar’s origin, Doki Doki Literature Club. Conversely, with something like When the Higurashi Cry, the opening of chapter 1 is incredibly intense, just to remind you that all the cutesy fun with the girls in the first three-quarters is all building up to some blood and gore by the end.
3 Likes
Thanks for the input. I think I am going to tone it down. The climax is called the climax for a reason. I feel like this scene will upstage everything that follows if allowed to remain in its current form.
I could see it as an inciting incident. But there is no way it could exist as an opening scene. I’m not even sure it belongs in my story.
My story tone should be bawdy and irreverent. This scene was just disturbing (baby bashing style).
I totally agree with Jassnip. You’ve got to make the reader care about the characters if you’re going to start the story by hurting the characters. But, there are other ways to start off with a bang. I forget the story, but there’s one that starts off with establishing that we are living in the modern world just as we know it. Then, the planet Jupiter suddenly disappears, nothing left behind, just gone.
I think the most important thing is to ask what the point of the scene is. If we’re supposed to sympathize or empathize with the characters as they are going through some horrible baby-smashing tragedy, then we might need to build up to it. If the point is to show how evil your baby-smashing villain is, then you probably need to show him doing something really horrible. If you start your flick with a policeman letting some motorist off with a warning and a friendly smile, we expect he’s a nice guy. If we see him pull over a granny with a busted tail light and then pull her out of the car and beat her to death with a smile, we get a little nervous when the MC gets pulled over by the same smiling officer.
1 Like
Never forget that Tolstoy whacked off the first three chapters of Anna Karenina. You might want to just keep it and continue and see what you like after you’re done. Getting the first draft done seems to be the biggest thing in a writer’s life in my experience.
1 Like