6 Little-Known Ways To Spike Up Your First Scene (for Your Fiction Stories)
First scenes are like first dates; if you leave a lasting impression, you get to see them again (or, in this case, the reader keeps reading).
We are at our best behaviour on our first dates because we want to see them again.
Some people are inherently interesting, so they don’t have to do anything extra; you feel the charisma, energy, and vibe you crave all around them.
They leave you wanting for more. That’s what a first scene needs to do to your reader.
Here are 6 ways you can write your first scene:
1/ Start Late, Exit Early
She found herself tied to a wooden chair in a dark room. Her mouth is taped as she struggles to free herself.
As she looks around, there’s a small window at a distance. She tries to move with her chair but fails. She could feel the room moving like it was floating up and down.
She aggressively forces her body away from the chair but ends up falling with the chair as one leg of the chair breaks.
Right then, she hears someone unlocking the door.
She can’t see who it is as she faces the other side of the room, her cheek kissing the dusty floor. The door opens, and a silhouette of a human figure enters the room.
- Who is she?
- Where is she?
- Why is she tied to that chair?
- Where is this dark room located?
- Who was that person that entered the room?
This is an excerpt of a scene, not an entire scene.
It’s so much better to leave your readers wanting more rather than to bog them down with a ton of information that they’ll either skim or find boring enough not to finish reading the story at all.
Drop the reader in the middle of the action; you can give background information later. Skip the prologue, start your story, and start in the middle of some action.
No one needs to know everything about your character or your world before you start your story immediately.
2/ Setting
Emphasize your setting in the opening scene. The reader should know what world or era your scene is set in really quickly.
This doesn’t mean dropping a ton of exposition.
It means choosing a scene in your story that’s both interesting and grounding in the world where it takes place.
I’ve read so many books that I’m unaware of the genre of the book until I’m into chapter three or four, and that’s not good. You need to ground your reader way sooner than that, and your first scene could be a great place to start.
Even if it’s not extremely clear in your first scene, in the first or second chapter, set up the rules that your world will follow; and by rules, I mean the readers should be aware of what kind of world they’re entering.
Let’s say you’re writing a contemporary fantasy story, and everything is exactly as it is in reality except for our protagonist, who can talk to animals and have them talk back to him. We need to know this immediately—don’t delay this information.
You cannot have your character spend two-thirds of the book trying to get out of a situation where he ends up talking to an animal who saves the day for him—where did that come from?
It ruins the suspension of disbelief and makes it difficult to connect with because your audience feels you’re being dishonest. You make them feel like anything can happen in this story, and this way, you’re losing your reader’s trust.
So, set up the rules and limitations of your story world as soon as possible so readers can align their expectations and anticipations with your story.
3/ Character
The best way to establish a character is to show them doing something extremely characteristic. Show that one thing that immediately tells us who this character is.
For example, if a character has anger issues, do not show me how he gets up in the morning, how he eats his breakfast, and which car he drives when he goes to work.
Show me — show him getting uncontrollably angry the first time we see him, or at least set up towards his anger in the first scene.
Yes, you have your full story to develop the character and get your readers to understand the character.
However, the earlier you make that empathetic connection between your reader and the protagonist, the more compelled your reader will be to finish the story.
You made them care about that character, and now they want to see how it turns out for their character.
4/ Conflict
Conflict is like your story’s respiration system.
The moment conflict ends, your story is on a ventilator, meaning your story is counting its last breath.
- We need tension
- We need anticipation
- We need engagement
- We need to care about those characters
- We need to connect with those characters
We need all these things as readers; we don’t know it. An engaged reader is the one who loves to work for their meal, but they don’t know it.
A reader will enjoy reading “2 + 2” rather than “2 + 2 = 4”.
You need to hook your reader, especially as an emerging writer. You don’t have that established trust with your audience yet, so you must pull them in quickly.
So, you need to ensure that the story in your opening scene is intriguing and filled with conflict.
A lot of writers utilize the prologue this way — they take the most interesting scene from somewhere in their manuscript and just put it like a flash forward as a prologue, which doesn’t really serve any purpose and is rather a short-cut hack and an easy way out of writing an interesting opening scene — that’s not the solution.
Again, most readers will skim or skip through your prologue. Your opening scene should have enough tension to be interesting on its own.
Do you remember the opening scene of The Dark Knight? Throughout the scene, I wondered who the real Joker was and what he wanted.
It had all the elements we needed from an opening scene:
- It showed the character in their most characterizing action
- the scene had immense tension as we were witnessing a bank robbery
- it raised questions in our minds about who the real Joker was, and we were waiting to find out
- from the first moment, there was an inherent tension that raised more questions than answers, and that’s a good thing when done with solid craft.
And even if we were consuming this story through the written word, I’m pretty sure we’d continue to read to find out what happens next.
5/ Avoid Over-Exposition
It’s not that over-exposition cannot survive; it’s just that the reader does not care yet.
Remember the first date analogy?
Show what you can do in your first scene, and once you have your readers' expectations set, slowly get into the exposition and finish it.
If I were you, I wouldn’t consider exposition a separate entity.
I wouldn’t think of it as a stop to all the drama and the story, and let’s give away all the information required about the characters, world, and thematic nuances that are to be expected from the story.
However, we need this in some stories where the concept is complex and complicated.
In those cases, you can start with a banger of an opening, and it’s all right if you raise a few questions and doubts in the readers' minds while you do that.
Once that’s done, you can move into the realm of exposition and give away all the information you need the reader to have before your real story begins.
Again, it's not recommended, but it’s possible to do that.
Ideally, your exposition should be part of your dramatic narrative, and you need to find a way to allow it to happen while the drama in the story is continuously building.
6/ Avoid Scenes Where Too Much is Happening
Pick a sustainable moment.
What scene can last several pages without needing a lot of exposition? Let’s go back to “The Dark Knight.”
Don’t worry if I’m talking about a movie scene; we’re talking about the writing. Remember, that scene was written on paper and then shot—and a writer had to do that.
It might appear that a lot was happening in that scene, as the Joker’s conspiracy was to create multiple Jokers like him and execute the plan while ensuring it was like a competition for all those low-level goons.
But there was only one dramatic two-part question:
“Who is the real Joker, and can they execute the bank robbery?”
When we get the answer to these scenes, the scene ends, and we can see the extent of chaos that Joker can create.
This is enough intrigue to kick off the story.
Last
Never overthink your first dates. Remember, you are not the only one nervous; even your date is nervous.
Work towards finding a way to have fun.
That’s the most important element of writing, not just your opening scene but your entire story.
Because if you’re not having fun, that energy will be transferred to your reader through your words.
Meanwhile, let’s quickly revise your opening scene. Again, your first scene should be chunky -
- revealing interesting things about your character
- ground us in the setting immediately
- establish the rules of your world
- pull your reader in immediately
And if you can do the same with all your scenes, you should be in a great place as a first-time writer.
Here, you need to understand one thing—not all scenes are the same, and not all scenes are supposed to impact the reader with the same kind of impact.
Stories have rhythm.
Because the previous two scenes had relatively lower energy, the next scene with a big reveal has a great impact. Catching your reader off-guard speaks volumes about your craft, but setting your reader up to relax and go off-guard makes you a skilled writer.
Horror stories are not about the moment of revelation but about how skillfully you sustain your readers as you build up your story.
Your true craft comes out for everyone to witness when nothing much is going on in your story. These are the scenes that you need to be able to get past with dignity.
Until next time,
Ciao!
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