: Re: Should my opening include a religious initiation ritual? I am about to start my first novel set in a fantasy world I am designing, and am struggling deeply with my first scene. I have read

@Gonzalez219

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I think you name all the correct issues. The reader starts with no context, the setting is obscure, the reader won't be invested. And of course you don't want a cliche.

On the plus side, however, it is obviously a changing point for the main character, and those are good places to start stories: Spiderman starts when Peter Parker gets bitten by a radioactive spider. Ah, but wait: He doesn't really get bit in the opening scene, we are first introduced to Peter Parker's life, the girl he hopelessly loves, and who Peter Parker is BEFORE he gets bitten by the spider.

The same goes for The Hobbit: The plot starts when Gandalf tricks Bilbo Baggins into hosting a party for him. That is the change in Bilbo's life that triggers the rest of the story; for Bilbo the first turning point. However ... to understand Bilbo's turn in life, we must first understand the straight line he was on, so the story begins with a sketch that shows us who Bilbo Baggins currently is. That is the straight line.

I think this religious transformation is a good idea for a start. But the story doesn't have to START with somebody standing in front of the altar. If I were to write a story about a couple's new life in marriage, I would be tempted to start with the wedding. And I would, but doesn't a wedding begin a few days before the couple actually stands in church? You want to know these this couple a bit for the wedding to have an impact, so I would start perhaps a week before, when this wedding is very much on everybody's mind but we can have some minor problems, comedy if appropriate, and interaction between the couple before the groom is standing before the altar and hoping the damn boutonnière doesn't fall off his jacket again.

Extend your scene. Somehow or another, your main character got to the physical location of this ceremony. Who brought him? What was the last normal meal he had before this happened? For my wedding, I might open on such a meal for my couple, to show they are living together (or not), at a restaurant or in their apartment, maybe even a fast food joint, eating burgers and going through their checklist of wedding stuff and the choreography of their roles and getting there.

How did your MC dress? Are they nervous or confident? Encouraged most by Mom, or Dad? What is their life like (in sketch) for the MC before this ceremony? How does the MC (and those around the MC) expect their life to change once the ceremony is accomplished? What new responsibilities will exist, what old relationships will be terminated or transformed? Will the MC have a new job? If so, what of their OLD job, and boss, and coworkers?

This lets you keep the focus on your MC and your religious ceremony throughout. The ceremony itself becomes the current 'problem' to be solved and the reader can be looking forward to it, as bits and pieces are described and the characters come into play.

Really the ceremony is still the opening scene, on everybody's mind, and the topics are all about this and anticipation of what happens next. It is just that a dozen pages or so (3000 to 3500 words in my counting) lead up to the moment when the blindfold and hood are tied on the MC.

The advice to open with a hook is correct, but in all forms of fiction, you will have about 5% of the total length as "good will" from your audience. If they don't already know your character (from a previous fiction), they expect your story to start in the normal world. (The movies and books that do not will typically have characters we already know from outside the movie or previous movies; e.g. Mission Impossible, Superman, super heroes, etc).

But I think it is often misinterpreted: The hook does not have to be a big dramatic scene, and usually an "establishing shot" is provided in books and movies, first. If you go to see a movie, you expect two hours of entertainment. Almost nobody gets exercised over the first five minutes of a movie with characters they haven't seen before. They fully expect the MC to appear first (or very early), but they also expect an establishing shot of context: Use your magic to solve some minor problem. Your MC snags his jacket and rips it, his mother snaps her fingers and the rip is repaired. Or the milk he spilled out of nervousness about his upcoming ceremony is stopped in mid-air and put back in the carton. Magic doesn't have to be proven by opening a portal to another world, magic is magic: An offhand spell that sews a loose button back on a shirt cuff is enough to prove the point that magic exists.

Your ceremony scene is indeed the hook for the novel, but take some time leading up to it and having characters talk and worry about it. Buid the anticipation to it. The first tiny hook that draws us in can be any problem for your MC to solve, even one as minor as breaking a shoelace while trying to tie a shoe in a hurry.

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