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 there’s a plague happening, but the main character isn’t affected yet. **Oren:** There are different things you can do that require more or less explanation. If you really want to open with a fight scene, you probably want your character to be doing something that is so straightforwardly sympathetic that readers don’t have to ask questions, like protecting a child or, if they’re a military character, protecting civilians or something. If it’s more complicated than that, even if it’s the main character themselves being attacked, we don’t know who that is. The book *Black Sun* starts with what looks like the main character being attacked by a witch, but I don’t know who this main character is. I don’t know why this witch is attacking them, and that makes it hard for me to be like, “No! Not Main Character being attacked by a witch!” I haven’t been given any context that would make me care about what’s happening here.  **Chris:** If you ever have your main character encounter somebody from their backstory who they have deep emotional stuff going on there, it’s not a very good opener because you want to establish all that context so that it has emotional meaning to the reader, and you can’t really do that right away in the opening scene. Rushing things is definitely a problem, so just try to start with one problem. Give it a little room to breathe. Make sure readers understand why it’s important, and make it tense before you move on to adding a second problem.  **Oren: The Blade Itself** is another interesting example of this, where it’s sort of the opposite of the problem of there’s too much exposition to explain this conflict. It’s like, the conflict happens, and nothing is explained, and you’re just trying to figure out what is going on. This guy, he’s fighting somebody, and it’s something, and it’s called a Flat Head or a Shanka. Are those the same thing? Who knows! It mentions the Dog Man. What is going on in this scene? And it takes so long to figure it out because it doesn’t explain things, and that’s the other risk if you start with a big elaborate fight scene. **Chris:** Some people sneer at opening paragraphs that are exposition, but I think exposition can do a lot, and there’s some very good exposition openings because they just offer you more flexibility for what you say in your opening paragraph. However, it is very common, if the opening paragraphs instead of being like, “What is happening right now?” they are informational, they are exposition for you to stuff in way too much information in that opening paragraph. Because remember, readers can only learn one thing at a time, and exposition can be super information-dense. Really gotta slow down. One important idea per paragraph. And don’t throw in unfamiliar terms. For instance, the opening of *Blindsight* does this thing where I think it’s trying to create intrigue by referencing all of these wild things like vampires and Big Ben and aliens.  **Oren:** And fireflies!  **Chris:** Right, fireflies, like all in the opening paragraph. But that’s not mysterious, because in order for people to get that sense of mystery, they have to be oriented enough to know where their knowledge gap is. If people are completely disoriented, and they have no idea what’s going on, and there’s a bunch of random pieces, they don’t know how they fit, that’s not really mysterious anymore because they can’t evaluate that. We need to establish a situation, make it understandable, and then ask the question, then raise the question that is unanswered to create that sense of mystery and intrigue. **Oren:** You need to have some understanding in order for the parts where you don’t understand to matter, otherwise it’s just noise. Another big one is disconnected action. This isn’t even about the action being too hard to explain, but rather that it’s action that doesn’t really have anything to do with the story, or it’s not about the main character, or it’s just filling in some backstory that you’re gonna learn about later anyway. Authors often do this. This is sort of the classic. They start with an unrelated or disconnected action scene because their actual intro is very slow. *I Am Number Four* is probably the most straightforward example of that that you could ask for, where the bad guy chases down and murders a side character who we will hear about dying, but is not in the rest of the story and is not very important. **Chris:** Yeah, this is what I was basically making fun of with the intro: the classic prologue, which thankfully are becoming less common.  **Oren:** Yeah, I haven’t seen one for a while.  **Chris:** I think they are supposed to be hooking the readers by introducing the villain and making the villain or antagonist seem scary. So like in *I Am Number Fou*r, some people we don’t know and are not important die, but it’s the same villain who is after the main character. I think what people think is, “Okay, well, I’ve done my action, so now I can just have a slow chapter focused on my main character, and I don’t have to worry about action.” It doesn’t work that way. Sometimes backstory openings can be this way too, where you have some exciting hook in the backstory that is supposed to translate over to the rest of the story. But when you go to the next chapter, whether it’s a prologue to chapter one or chapter one to chapter two, and that next installment is clearly unrelated, that tension doesn’t stay. That hook doesn’t operate anymore. In fact, the slower chapter now will seem even slower yet by comparison, because you just succeeded in giving somebody an exciting scene, and then you dump them on a chapter that’s really slow. Now they have something to compare it with, and it feels extra slow, and they were hoping that this villain would be followed up on in some way.  **Oren:** One of the weird ones that I have encountered more recently is what I started calling the false promise, where the story opens with an intro that makes a big startling impression and is like, “You wanna know what’s up with that?” And then later when we finally catch up with that scene, it turns out the reveal is basically nothing or extremely disappointing.  **Chris:** Oh, are you thinking about *The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet*?  **Oren:** No, although that one is actually an example, because she’s not the main character. I thought she was the main character, but there really isn’t a main character. One of the crew members is in this pod, and she’s thinking about, “Oh, no, I have to escape. If anyone finds out my secret, it’ll be terrible.” And then later we find out her secret, and it’s nothing. It’s that her dad is a bad person. It has nothing to do with her. But other books do this too. *Red Seas Under Red Skies* is an example I go to a lot where it starts off with the main characters being like, “How could you betray me?” And I’m like, is it … Are they lying? Because they lie all the time. Is that the answer? It’s a flash-forward, and then we catch up with that scene, and yeah, they were lying. They always do that. That’s the answer.  **Chris:** \[laughs] And it’s a little more transparent when you don’t have actors. Those are based on heists, right? So that’s kind of a classic heist thing. I call that over-promising. We’re basically promising something that we cannot keep up, cannot follow through with. And yeah, that’s obnoxious. I can’t say that it’s not effective. I don’t know, maybe it is. Maybe you get more readers by over-promising. That’s not the experience I want people to have personally. I don’t want people to get to the content and then just feel disappointed.  **Oren:** Maybe black hat techniques are effective, but that doesn’t mean you should use them.  **Chris:** Yeah, that’s a bad one. But related to that, there can be a variety of reasons why your beginning is just not the right beginning, and we talked about prologues and the fact that the big problem with the classic prologue is it does not include your main character. So then you have to cut away to your main character, and your main character is not involved in the plot yet and doing nothing. Whereas it would’ve been better to just look at your main character and try to cultivate, “Okay, what problems do they have?” And if they’re really just living an ordinary life without problems before the plot starts, maybe they should have problems.  **Oren:** Maybe that’s not the way your story should be set up.  **Chris:** Every story is different, right? With a different situation, but that suggests maybe something should change already. You can also have a situation−I have a recent article talking about whether you should open with backstory−and this is, again, different because in this situation you *do* have your main character, you just have a time jump afterwards. So what we were talking about with *The Abbess Rebellion*, where we have kind of action, and then we meet a bunch of backstory characters, so they’re easy for readers to remember, or what I was suggesting with *They Mostly Come Out at Night*, where it’s like we have some really important backstory that establishes this entire situation and is also exciting; I think we should just open with that. I definitely think that backstory is a good opener sometimes, but there are things to watch out for, such as is your backstory really setting the right impression for the story? Because if it’s completely different in tone, for instance, you don’t want people to think that your story is a lot darker and grimmer or whatever than it actually is.  A lot of times those backstories are pretty tragic \[laughs], pretty dark. This was an issue with *Starfleet Academy*. I knew people who started watching the first five minutes, and then were like, “Oh, this is the worst,” and turned it off because they just didn’t want grimdark *Star Trek*, and I don’t blame them. And it turns out that’s not actually the tone of the whole show. That’s a backstory that’s meant to be something that the characters have to emotionally wrestle with and redeem themselves and resolve throughout the season. But you don’t know that when you’re first watching it. Just looking at I need to get this backstory done, maybe it would make a great opener, but if it’s really misleading, it’s probably not the best choice for you, and you might want to just work it in later. **Oren:** That’s a really odd one, but by the same token, you probably don’t want to start your introduction with action if your story doesn’t have any action in it later. That’s just setting the wrong expectation.  **Chris:** I will say that with *The Abbess Rebellion*, when we added that opening chapter that was backstory, one of the goals was to get more action in because the story has a lot of action disproportionately in the later chapters, which is normal, but we wanted readers to know that there would be action in the book. **Oren:** Maybe this is a thing of the past, but I’m thinking about stuff like *The Sword of Shannara* opening, or to a lesser extent, *The Name of the Wind* or *The Eye of the World*, where we just kind of go to town to a new area and just like search for the hero for a while. Is that a thing anymore? I haven’t seen that for a while. **Chris:** Yeah, maybe not. I can’t say that I remember seeing that recently. There was *The Architect*. Oh man, okay, so this is something you should *absolutely not do* with your opening. I was so mad at that opening. I was so angry. *The Architect* is a Tchaikovsky book.  **Oren:** Oh, *The Final Architect*. \[The Final Architecture] **Chris:** Yeah, *The Final Architect*. We open with a battle sister or whatever they’re called, like, this warrior woman who’s part of this warrior fleet is our character that we’re following in the opening, but she’s just there to watch super precious boy who has super brain who will take out an invincible alien ship by himself with his super brain.  **Oren:** In this way that is extremely vague and that the author seems to regret having done because they never try that again, despite it being seemingly somewhat effective. That intro is really weird. There’s a bunch of stuff that’s established in it that goes against what we will learn later, and I genuinely do not understand why it is introduced that way.  **Chris:** And so then what is the female POV character has no agency in this big opening battle. The only thing that she does is *smile* at the special boy. And that’s her contribution. I was so mad.  **Oren:** And here’s the thing, this is a great example because any time we bring this up, fans of that series will get upset and be like, “How can you say that? This book has so many great women, so many great female characters.” And I agree! It does! So why would you introduce it that way? What is the reason if your story has all these great women who get to do stuff, why would you introduce it in such a way where your main woman has to just kinda watch the dude do stuff and then smile at him? It’s just the most bizarre intro to that story. It does not make sense.  **Chris:** In the beginning, it’s really important to establish who your main character is and set expectations because whoever seems to be your main character, people will actively try to get attached to that person and start rooting for that person, and that’s how their expectations will be set. So when we have Warrior Lady, I’m like, “Ah, cool, a warrior lady,” and then she’s just there to play emotional support for some guy, I actively resent his presence. And that’s just what happens. This is also why there are a lot of people who just absolutely hate prologues where you have a POV character who gets killed because again, they assume this is the main character, get attached to them, I’ll just say that if they’re about to die they’re probably sympathetic, and just hate that experience of them having that person killed. *The Raven Scholar* has a decoy protagonist but managed to switch off I think only because the actual protagonist is so similar that they felt like the same person.  **Oren:** Do you like nerdy, ambitious young women trying to overcome their station in life? Well, great, because we’ve got two of ’em!  **Chris:** \[laughs] So I did better with those ones, but even so, the problem with *The Raven Scholar* is everything takes longer than it should. There’s a lot of backstory in there that is genuinely useful, but we didn’t need to spend that much time on it. Similarly, we don’t need to spend so many hours in the opening just with a decoy protagonist only to kill her off. That was a waste.  **Oren:** With that, I think we can go ahead and call this episode to a close. **Chris:** If you would like to know your beginning mistakes, you can actually submit 500 words to me if you’re a patron, and I will gently, in a friendly fashion, critique them on our weekly Patreon newsletter. And you can find out all about what you could be doing better. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.  **Oren:** And it is going to be a friendly critique. I know for all you people who are like, “No, be mean to me. Destroy my beginning.” It’s like, no, that’s not a service we provide.  **Chris:** We don’t do that. We always use the tone that is as friendly as possible while still making it clear where you can improve.  **Oren:** If you want that really mean tone, you have to go publish a best-selling book, and then we’ll do it in a lessons post. Now it’s actually time for us to head out, and I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week