A Much Improved Opening Scene
We talked about the rather un-enga
ging opening scene in my new novel Sunk Cost. With feedback, I re-wrote the opening:
ging opening scene in my new novel Sunk Cost. With feedback, I re-wrote the opening:Dr. Nicolas Ratzenberg has always been an inciting incident. Always.
I pulled my rental car into a weedy parking area. Aligning my rental alongside two other rental cars, old habits. After slowly leveraging out of the bucket seats, I stretched my back and regarded the castle that loomed over the lot. A perfect specimen: gray, forbidding and purpose built to deter the enemy, either the British or a mother-in-law. Two towers flanked the front façade, the right one was gradually disintegrating, while the tower on the left was still intact, an arched window opening offering a full view of the rolling green hills and crashing sea beyond. I had hoped for at least a single head to appear over the crenelation with a Monty Pythonesque rebuke. But no luck. Despite the parked cars, the place looked deserted. No sign of human life.
Gravel crunched under my feet as I approached the enormous double doors. A small National Trust sign, bent and battered, claimed we were well within opening hours, but after two years of COVID, signs like this were less about accurate information and more an expression of hope over recent experience. The Trust clearly was another non-profit venture defeated by economics and, in this case, plague. Just like old times. No wonder the Trust was willing to sell. At least that’s what I thought.
I tipped my head back and studied the doors. How did Nic get involved in this? A tiny detail he had failed to illuminate during our call.
Yesterday I was home in Venice. I had stared at my buzzing phone in equal parts delight and dread. In hindsight, Nic’s photo should not have been linked to his number. He grinned up at me; the phone vibrating like an excited puppy. My hand hovered over the phone. I wanted to see him; I wanted him in my bed; I wanted him. Was this maturity, desperation, or just loneliness? At the very last minute, I answered.
“Hey.” His tone was falsely casual.
“Hello.” I tried to match his nonchalance, but there was something wrong. For the first time in a long, long time, I hoped it wasn’t us.
“Troy and I are flying to Dublin. Want to join us?”
My heart leapt at the idea. Not because of Nic, I would act on any excuse to board a plane and sit uncomfortably still for three hours with only one lousy whiskey-no-ice to mitigate the leg cramps. Oh sure, the last 24 months, three days and 17 hours had been productive. During the lock-down, the young man living above me thoroughly cleaned and cleared his apartment. Now Phillip was ready to leave the building and move freely around the world, as was I.
“And what are we doing in Dublin? Bloomsday?”
“Ha, no. The Wild Atlantic. Troy just purchased a castle.”
And who could resist that?
The original opening consisted of long scenes describing Nic and his friend Troy sitting around and discussing and thinking about their history. By re-focusing the action and starting the book with Vic, the heroine – the opening was more engaging, leading the reader to want to learn more.
The back story was not lost. Troy and Nic’s relationship and their story was broken into smaller paragraphs and scattered throughout the middle of the narrative. Backstory can be strategically inserted to create tension and set up reveals. You can even stretch out a tense scene by inserting a paragraph of backstory, just to make it more excruciating (but not too much!) for the reader.
The new opening also created immediate place – instead of starting the novel with a scene in Santa Barbara, it now opened with our heroine at the very castle where the bulk of the action will take place. Again, the reader is immediately in the right scene and the right time. The rest, the scene in Santa Barbara, Vic’s scenes in Venice, those are pushed into the narrative and reveals or explained later, after the reader is already hooked and already cares.
What do you think? Do you want to read more?
The book Sunk Cost will be available for Pre-Sales in May – set to release June 28th.
Be ready, and thank you for reading.
