How Starting a Story Too Late Kills Tension

We need to know a Before to root for an After

There is article after article after article discussing the perils of starting a story too early. You’ll bore your readers. We don’t want to know three years of backstory before we get to the part where the character begins to change. Start in medias res.

This is all good advice. The modern novel isn’t written with sprawling backstory that takes one hundred pages to get through (with no offense to Jane Eyre). But can it be taken too far? Of course. My mantra in life and writing equally is moderation in everything. So, what happens when you not only avoid starting a story too early, but actually start it too late?

The dangers of in medias res

When you’re writing the opening pages of your book, you need them to get the reader to turn to the next page. That’s it. If that doesn’t happen, none of the other work of a first page matters — not setup, not action, not character. With that in mind, we can look at some reasons readers might stop turning pages that show symptoms of starting too late, rather than starting too early.

Confusion

One main symptom of starting too late is that the reader is confused. Who are we following? What do they want? Why does it matter? Do we even like this person?

There’s balance to be struck here, because we do want the reader asking questions. However, there is a difference between questions of intrigue and questions of outright confusion. One out-of-place detail — the clocks striking thirteen — among otherwise mundane ones can create intrigue rather than confusion, because we know the author is drawing our attention to some ways things are different in their world. But pages and pages of questions without answers can cause a reader to give up. Let’s look at some symptoms of too much confusion.

• An overuse of jargon, made-up words, or technicalities. For instance: ‘The blargsses reached ret speed, looking at their ConScreens and yuting data into the PyRo.’
• Dropping into the middle of a scene, especially an action scene, without setup, description, or internalization to understand the character’s motivation for trying to reach their goal.
• An uncertainty of who the main character is. This could be on a macro level — are we supposed to root for the person running or the person chasing them? — or on a micro level. The latter is both more common and harder to fix: who is this person, and why should we care? Which brings us to our next point.

Inability to connect with the main character

Before we can root for a character, we need to know who they are and why they’re pursuing a goal. If the first thing we see is a character reach a goal, it’s hard to be emotionally excited about it. We don’t know what conflicts they faced in reaching it. We don’t know what obstacles they overcame or what character development was needed before we got there.

Similarly, if all we see is a character ruminating — thinking about what has happened or what will happen — we don’t have someone to root for because they aren’t doing anything. We may have plenty of times in our own life where we aren’t actively pursuing a goal, but characters almost always should be, even if that goal is only a glass of water.

Disconnect from the ending

I said the point of the beginning of the book is to get the reader to turn the page. This is true. But the best books — books worth re-reading — use the beginning to establish an antithesis to the ending in some way. Great beginnings show a character who is incapable of taking the final action. They show us who someone is before the events of the story changed them. Establishing a baseline shows us a character who has room to grow. When they have room to grow, we can root for them. If the beginning doesn’t show us why the story and the lesson is needed, readers can be grasping at straws for figuring out why they should care.

Finding the right first chapter

Finding the right first chapter is a balancing act that can put most tightrope walkers to shame, but the problems above come with correlating answers.

Think about the ending

One of the ways I always approach finding the right first chapter is through the lens of the last chapter. That is, we know the first chapter is right based on its correlation to the ending. To me, a first chapter must do three things when looked at through this paradigm (listed below in order of importance):

1. Set up a character who is incapable of completing the action of the last chapter/climactic moment.
2. Introduce or hint at — as subtly as possible, usually — as many elements of the finale as possible. At best, this works by creating a first chapter that is the whole book in miniature.
3. Mirror the ending in an effective way.

The first point is most true with a character arc that changes significantly, either a positive arc or a negative arc. When the character remains static and the world changes around them, this step can show a world incapable of understanding the lesson, as in Romeo and Juliet and the family feud.

In my enchantress book, I’m writing a fall arc, so my main character needs to be incapable at first of the bad choices she makes at the end of the book. So in the opening chapter, she’s incapable of the magic required to make those decisions, and her heart has not hardened enough for her to even want to. She will need to change to be the person she is at the end.

In a positive arc, some potential changes might be from selfishness to selflessness, from meekness to being willing to stand up in a crowd for what is right, or from individualist pride to a humility more focused on the collective whole.

Mirroring the ending is an effective way to give evidence of this change. If you open with a character standing all alone on a stage and failing an audition, ending onstage with a cast behind them while they belt out a solo is an effective mirror to prove the change.

The TV show Astrid and Lilly Save the World uses this kind of mirror in the first and last episodes of season 1 (please give me a season 2!). In the first episode, outcasts Astrid and Lilly crash a party where they’re made fun of, and it’s obvious they are not welcome there. They’re called a derogatory name. In the last episode, they crash a party where they’re not welcome. But by then they’ve claimed this name for themselves — getting it put onto the back of jackets. I don’t want to spoil it, but there are a lot of important callbacks from episode 10 to episode 1, and all the other similarities are by contrast to who our plucky main characters were at the beginning of the show.

Beyond the change of character, ways to show the whole story in the opening chapter include hinting at an antagonist or a foil for an antagonist, meeting the love interest in some form, and having the goal and subsequent disaster show the character trying — and failing — to pursue the thing they need to learn. Which brings us to the next way to know we’re starting in the right place.

Introduce the character via an immediate goal

K.M. Weiland has long established that stories happen in sequences of goal, conflict, disaster, reaction, dilemma, decision. Stories that open anywhere but a goal do not work, and are proof a story starts in the wrong spot. If the disaster opens the story, we miss the goal. If we open in reaction or dilemma, we have a character ruminating. If we open in decision — or in a goal that succeeds — we miss the conflict.

Now, this goal doesn’t need to be the goal of the story. In fact, I’d argue the story is better if you don’t. Day Zero by Kelly DeVos has one of my favorite opening scenes to a book because of the way the unrelated first goal establishes character and sets up the story.

All our hero, Jinx, wants is to buy snacks for a(n essentially) World of Warcraft raid that evening. We learn so much about Jinx just based on this goal and the obstacles she has to overcome in getting her food. We learn about her family, her brother’s diabetes, her fraught relationship with her stepsister… we even get hints of the Big Bad and a bunch of opponents along the way, worked seamlessly into a mini story about buying snacks at a convenience store.

Establish a before

Finally, before we can care about the big goals of a plot and invest in a character, we need to have a Before moment. While the structure found in K.M. Weiland’s plot and pinch points, Jessica Brody’s Save the Cat Writes a Novel and even Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces varies significantly in terms of how they’re described, all three have a moment 20 to 25% into a story where the world changes.

Weiland calls it the First Plot Point and says:

The first major plot point changes everything. This is the point of no return for your characters. Often, this plot point will be the Key Event. The first plot point is the moment when the setup ends, and your character crosses his personal Rubicon.

Save the Cat calls it Break into 2. Brody describes it this way:

This is the moment when the hero decides to accept the call to action, leave their comfort zone, try something new, or venture into a new world or new way of thinking. It’s a decisive action beat that separates the status quo world of Act 1 from the new “upside-down” world of Act 2.

Campbell talks about Crossing the First Threshold:

With aid and guidance in hand, the hero sets off on their adventure until they come to a point where they are further away from the world of comfort and familiarity than they have ever been before. Ahead of them lies the danger of the unknown.

In every case, this event happens about a fifth to a quarter into a story, and has the character entering a new world. If the new world happens any earlier than this, we don’t understand the contrast between new and old. We don’t see the character’s comfort zone before they’re thrown out of it, which can make us confused instead of invested.

Building a Before — and then tying it to the ending in subtle ways — can ground your reader, helping us care about the character and root for them as they develop while the world around them shifts.

If you look at your own fiction, how have you established your world? Do we get a Before that prepares us for the change of During and After?

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