: Re: Vision/dream as an effective opening? I'm looking for opinions on the effectiveness of this opening scene. It's a vision, not that he knows that at first. He thinks it a dream and won't quite

Opening with a dream is a technique that I've seen get a lot of criticism. I think there's a few reasons for it.

One, if you're using the dream/vision to immerse your readers in a world, it's asking a lot of them to get immersed in that world, and then a few paragraphs later have to jump into a whole NEW world when the dreamer returns to reality.

Two, it may create tension, but it's a false tension. The reader feels ripped off, only a few paragraphs into your story, to realize that s/he has ALREADY been fooled.

Three, as an alternative to two - if you acknowledge that the scene you're painting is just a vision/dream, then there isn't any tension at all. Why do I care that some character I don't know is having a dream about some place I don't know? I don't know.

There's probably a four, relating to being a cliche, etc., but those three are the ones that jump out at me.

For your situation, how about borrowing an idea from One Monkey and having the story open in the doctor's office? You can establish enough about your character to make us care a little, you can establish a bit of setting, and you can have tension from the fact that he thinks he's got a tumour, or is going crazy, or something. And then he could have the vision, right there in the doctor's office. Just a suggestion.

Load Full (0)

: What methods can I use to revise my writing? Background I am finding it challenging to transform an early draft into a finished product. My biggest challenges are putting the prose in the

@Reiling826

Load Full 9 Comments

: One of the classic books for scientific writing is Dey's "How to write and publish a scientific paper". It gives almost step by step instructions for writing and publishing a research paper,

@Reiling826

Load Full 0 Comments

: Is there anything wrong with saying "Thanks" several times in the same email? If not, how could I correct it? E.g. here is an email I just sent: Hello X, Okay I see - thanks

@Reiling826

Load Full 2 Comments

: How do I balance work with my love of writing? I'm a programmer and an aspiring writer. I love writing. Over the past year, I had been working on my first novel. Making the plot, dimensioning

: Re: Vision/dream as an effective opening? I'm looking for opinions on the effectiveness of this opening scene. It's a vision, not that he knows that at first. He thinks it a dream and won't quite

More posts by @Reiling826

: What methods can I use to revise my writing? Background I am finding it challenging to transform an early draft into a finished product. My biggest challenges are putting the prose in the

: One of the classic books for scientific writing is Dey's "How to write and publish a scientific paper". It gives almost step by step instructions for writing and publishing a research paper,

: Is there anything wrong with saying "Thanks" several times in the same email? If not, how could I correct it? E.g. here is an email I just sent: Hello X, Okay I see - thanks

: How do I balance work with my love of writing? I'm a programmer and an aspiring writer. I love writing. Over the past year, I had been working on my first novel. Making the plot, dimensioning

Login to post a comment!

0 Comments

Back to top