Justina Ireland, On Openings – A Twitter Thread

Justina Ireland; @justinaireland, March 13, 2018

Writers, gather round. Let’s talk about openings. Most especially: establishing scenes and the promise of the story. The promise of the story is the aboutness of your book. Not necessarily the theme, it’s the point of the story.

At some point the conventional wisdom became that writers should start their stories as close to the inciting incident as possible. And while true, that doesn’t mean you start your story in the inciting incident. We need to spend some time in the normal world.

This in movies is the establishing shot, it’s Scott Pilgrim practicing with Sex-Bob-Omb, it’s John McClane talking about messing up his marriage with a limo driver, it’s Buttercup and Wesley on the farm. It gives the viewer a frame of reference before adventure starts.

As a writer, you have to show your character in the environment where they’re most comfortable before putting them through hell. Or put them in an environment where they’re uncomfortable and explain to the reader why. But it has to be rather benign.

You do that to give the reader time to form an emotional connection with a character, to show them what they’re about. Same way as when you meet someone IRL. Usually folks do [no?]t open with their deepest darkest secret. They open with best behavior. (Whatever that might be)

And once you’ve set up the establishing shot/moment (this might be a bit longer for worlds that have to be built) you launch into the inciting event. For me, this rule of thumb is usually by 5-10% of the way through a story (it isn’t an exact science).

If you want to see how this is done well, watch a Marvel movie. Seriously. The beats in a Marvel movie are usually air tight. Disney movies also follow this super well, think about Cinderella or Beauty and the Beast.

There are a lot of writers that will pooh-pooh looking at movies to learn narrative structure, but movies are a great way to understand how story works. And once you understand what works, you are free to experiment and dare to change those story frames.

Looking at recent books: THUG doesn’t start at the moment of the shooting. It starts with Starr at a party in her neighborhood, being uncomfortable because she attends a private school.

This gives the reader a clear entry into the kind of person she is, and it gives context to the inciting incident (the shooting). If the story started at the shooting it would be harder for readers to connect with Starr. The scene resonates because the connection already exists.

So when you hear the promise of the story, it’s the combination of that establishing shot and that inciting incident. Billy Madison: an affluent man child must redo K-12 to inherit his father’s fortune. Black Panther: T’Challa must learn what it means to be a king.

(This is where I point out that each of your characters in a story should have an establishing shot and inciting incident woven into the larger narrative but that’s a maste[r] class).