#opening scenes

1. Draw in your audience.

Remember that your first sentence, the sentence to lure in the audience (not to mention yourself), is the Rube Goldberg to your whole novel or short story: it’ll set your story in motion. It’s got that “first sentence power.” And, remember, you are your novel’s first audience, so it should interest you. But also keep in mind that nothing is perfect! If it doesn’t sound exactly right, you’ll get a chance to revise it in later drafts.

2. Show your characters.

Think about how you want to introduce your main character(s). The scene, the dialogue, the entire mood can be introduced in the first couple of pages. You may even want to try and transform yourself into the character, (well, not really) by thinking in the way you’d want your character to think and respond to what’s happening at the beginning of the story.

3. Don’t worry about messing up. 

Forget about errors or mistakes, they are the antagonists of story writing. If you see an error, or that you spelled a word wrong, forget it (for now). Leave it for editing later. Why? Because you’ll feel like re-reading what you wrote, and you’ll start to criticize your work, and you might overthink about what you’ve written. It’s happened to me tons of times.

4. Use music as inspiration. 

Music is an incredible ally. What I mean by that is that there are so many different songs that invoke feelings in you that can make you feel super inspired and ready for the novel creation path. You can even create a “Novel Soundtrack” for songs that help you get into the writing mood.

5. Take breaks when you need to.

If you need a break, take it. I get writer’s block all the time, and sometimes I get frustrated because I just want to write but I can’t. Instead, I’ll just think “Okay, no reason to get mad at my book, I’ll just play a game or go on a walk, and come back to this later.”

6. Get to know and love your story.

Your story can be your best friend. You already started writing a story, and now you have a relationship with the story. It’s up to you to give up on it, or keep going, and make a masterpiece out of something you worked hard on, cherished, cried over, even hated sometimes, because that’s how friendships go too. There’s no strong connection without hardship.

Finally: This isn’t a tip, but I just want to say: You’ve got this. Keep writing, and keep on soaring, because the world is your oyster. Whether you break out or keep hidden, either way, you’re a beautiful pearl.

Claire is a proud resident of California. Going into sophomore year of high school, she’s already thinking about college. She loves dogs, cats, and all animals, and loves to write, draw, and of course, read. Discovering the world of writing was like discovering a piece of herself, and she swears “I will never stop!” Armed with a pencil and a notebook, she plans to take down the world, one idea at a time.

3) Tells us nothing about the Character

Kidnapping a character tells us nothing about the character as a person. You’d think it would given the way people act under pressure. However, there are only a limited set of options to what happens next after you’re kidnapped. Most of them end in beatings or sexual assault/rape or death.

When you put it first thing, we don’t know this character well enough (see point one) to know if the actions they’re taking after being kidnapped are consistent with who they are as people! So, again, we don’t care and it doesn’t matter if they get out of it or not.

4) Strips away the Character’s Power

Kidnapping is a plot driven story device. Someone comes in and takes the character’s power of choice away from them. Your character is the one we’re trying to connect to as readers. If you take the character’s power away from them right off the bat and other people are making their choices for them, we have nothing really to connect to as readers. Because the character who has been kidnapped isn’t the one really driving the story along. It’s the kidnappers.

If you put it first thing, we don’t know the reason they’ve been kidnapped. Once again, killing the tension of the story. You, as an author may tell us, but telling isn’t as powerful as showing us and building up the story over time.

Readers like to see characters doing something and taking charge or control. That’s the reason they’re the main character right, it’s their story. They’re the ones who should be leading it.

5) It’s Dehumanizing

Kidnapping turns people into objects. Kidnapping, like rape, is a violation of a human’s rights and autonomy of their own body. When you’re writing a book, the first thing you’re trying to do is to make the characters human.

So, when you put a kidnapping first thing in your book, you’re doing the opposite of what you need to do as an author. They are just another piece on the chessboard you’re moving about and not real people at all. The actions of the characters doing the kidnapping usually reflect this as they leer or try to sexually assault or hit or rape the victim of the kidnapping. Which leads to me feeling very disturbed and uncomfortable and that’s not what I want to feel when I first open a book. I want to be entertained and enthralled and curious as to what happens next. Kidnapping doesn’t make me want to continue because I know what happens next and it is not good.

Instead of making your characters strong and empowering or at least normal right off the bat, you’ve made them helpless and without power at all.

As a reader, violence against woman in books makes me uncomfortable due to the pervasive violence against women in real life. I read books to be entertained. Not to see violence against women (and it is almost always women being kidnapped) being normalized in my happy fantasy/future where this isn’t actually necessary, especially not right off the bat!

And this leads us to…

6) Potentially Triggering/Harmful

Kidnapping is sensitive issue. It’s not one we talk about as much as say, rape, or domestic violence. The thing is kidnapping happens a lot more than you’d believe often by relatives rather than strangers but we hear about strangers more and what happens after a person is kidnapped by strangers is often physical abuse, sexual assault/rape, and death.

Like rape, using kidnapping as a plot device in order to make a character stronger, or whatever you as an author are trying to do, without a lot of thought and care put into whether or not it’s appropriate or even necessary for your story as a whole, much less as the opening chapter, can be really harmful to survivors of kidnapping, physical violence, and sexual assault/rape.

Before you misunderstand me, I’m not saying you can’t use kidnapping, physical abuse, or sexual assault/rape in your books. I am questioning why it is necessary to put your character in dire peril the very first paragraph of the story without any build up.

And no, in media res, is not the proper answer. Because, the stories I’ve read with this, actually didn’t start at the kidnapping. See point one.

By using a kidnapping first thing, you’ve given your readers no build up or ability to be able to go “I don’t like where this story is going” and shut the book for their own emotional and mental health if necessary.

As a reader, I don’t want to be exposed to something dark right off the bat. That is my preference as a reader! It makes me feel the author has gone for this dark plot for the shock value and think it will keep me reading. In fact, I hate shock value in books and I will most likely put it down unless you are someone I know personally.

Well, we have to go all the way back to point two. If you’re going to drag me to a dark place with your characters, then I need to care about the characters and trust you as an author before I head into that dark tunnel. If you put your kidnapping first thing, I don’t care about the characters and we’ve established no trust between us as a reader and author.