: Re: How can I reconcile the exposition of the three act scheme vs. starting out with a bang? I am a few thousand words into my newest draft and starting to question if I picked the right beginning.

@Lee1909368

There's no incompatibility as long as your characters are exciting enough to begin with.

Consider Rali, a thief in a fantasy kingdom. Rali will be part of a party of unwilling warriors sent to recover a magical artifact from beyond the Kralon Veil. He will be coerced into this by the enigmatic Count Maskyl for reasons that are not entirely clear.

We could introduce Rali to the reader as he is pickpocketing in the market where he is arrested and then made available for coercion by Maskyl.

But maybe...

We could be allowed to understand that for Rali to be coerced is a way of life. When we meet him he has been forced to steal a rare jewel from a corrupt merchant to settle a gambling debt. We've upped the risk and, when he gets the jewel and escapes into the market place, we understand, automatically, why Maskyl targets him. Except he needs to be caught, which kind of undermines his master-thief credentials.

But maybe...

In the market place he is only discovered because his long time adversary, City Marshal Kund, knows that Rali has sympathy with street urchins; Rali himself grew up in that life. Kund publicly and falsely accuses a local urchin of petty theft and determines to cut off the boy's right hand. Rali is forced to break cover to save the boy, showing his underlying decency.

SUMMARY: If your characters have lives packed with interest, excitement and adventure you shouldn't have a problem introducing them and making the introduction pop with excitement. Think the little one act chase at the opening of most Bond movies.

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: Re: How can I reconcile the exposition of the three act scheme vs. starting out with a bang? I am a few thousand words into my newest draft and starting to question if I picked the right beginning.

More posts by @Lee1909368

: Should a long flashback be written in first or third person? In my novel there will be a chapter-length flashback as one character relates a story from his past. The rest of the novel is

: Would a paid-for review from Kirkus give me real insight into quality of my manuscript? As an amateur writer who has just finished my first manuscript, I want a qualified, non-biased, and thorough

: Learning storywriting for videogames - Handling deep nonlinearities A recent question asked for pointers for writing for games, and the gist of the answers was that it's not very unlike writing

: How to have a character be nameless for the first few paragraphs of a book? Let me first explain what is going in in the beginning of the story: My main character belongs to a tribal culture

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