: 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

@XinRu607

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On the general topic of opening with a dream, I'm going to second Kate's excellent comments: it's a technique that's heavily predisposed to backfire, because you're explicitly kicking off with something that is not part of the actual story, of what's actually going on.

Even if there is a clear connection to the actual story (e.g.: the dream becomes a plot point later on; the dream reflects the protagonist's personality and present concerns; etc.), the reader doesn't know that unless you establish it right away - and he's got little reason to stick around and find out.

So if opening with a dream, or even having it feature fairly early on, is important to you, I suggest you establish right away why the reader should care. Some examples:

"This was the fifth time this month he'd had that dream." This is common shorthand for "this dream sequence is significant, and not just a normal, random, meaningless dream, but I won't tell you why yet." Not terribly compelling, but it makes clear that the author has a decent reason for the dream, which will be addressed later. Likewise, "It had seemed so real and vivid - far more than just an ordinary dream."
Clear ties to something going on in the protagonist's life - e.g. dreams about his family, or a big event - can segue easily from dream to reality, and then the reader feels like the dream sequence "makes sense," because he knows what it's there for.
One person telling another about a dream is rather different from what you've tried here, but it can get across both the dream, and all kinds of character/plot/setting details from the actual scene being played out.

In reaction to your particular piece of writing, I was fairly underwhelmed by it. I didn't get much more than "somebody's in a weird place" out of it - nothing in the description seemed particularly attention-grabbing. There's no distinctive features in the setting that I want to understand better; I don't know yet who the protag is, so I don't particularly care about him; he doesn't seem to know anything about where he is, so I didn't feel like the opening had much direction or drive; there's a lot of weaselly "protagonist 'somehow' decides to do things for no particular reason" lines that I find annoying.

This could have worked if I felt that you were going for a dream-like writing voice - disorienting, nonsensical, dream-logic stuff. That's tricky to pull off at the beginning of a story - particularly an SF story - because the reader is all set to accept whatever you tell him as ground rules, even very weird stuff. I don't think you did that here, because the narration is a straightforward, matter-of-fact account of what Josh sees around him and what he does. There's lots of ways to convey a dreamlike experience; I don't feel that you did much of that here.

So, from this opening, I felt neither the "exciting fake-out" of a dream as a false beginning, not the "dreamlike experience" of actually being in the middle of a dream. Neither of these would bother me in the least if we were further into the story; it's not poor writing. It just doesn't strike me as an effective opening - it doesn't ground me in the story or give me interesting things to care about.

Hope this is helpful :)

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