: Re: Is it more effective to lead with a physical conflict rather than an emotional one? I currently have the choice of two routes with my novel - to lead with a knives-and-poisons main conflict,

@Bryan361

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I think that depends entirely on the nature of the story.

At the extreme: If the story is all about a person's emotional struggles, throwing in a gratuitous fight scene to try to grab the reader's interest seems counterproductive to me. It will mislead the reader about the nature of the story and put him in the wrong frame of mind.

Even if the story includes both physical conflict and emotional struggles, if it's mostly about the emotional struggles and the fighting is an outgrowth of that, starting with a fight scene might be a way to begin with high drama, but it could also be misleading and distracting.

I suppose it's easier to grab a reader's attention with a fight scene. You don't need to know much about the characters to understand it. A scene about a character's emotional struggles may require some background. But not necessarily. A story that began, "Bob decided that his only choice was to kill himself" would probably grab the reader's attention without knowing anything about Bob. Indeed if I read that as the first sentence of a story, I think I'd immediately be asking, "Why does Bob want to kill himself? What happened to him?" etc.

I'd add that in my humble opinion, fight scenes and car chases and the like work very well in movies, but not nearly so well in books. It's hard to capture the action and tension with printed words. Not impossible, but hard. I often find myself skimming over fight scenes in books with a "yeah, yeah, I get it, they had a fight".

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