“A Thousand Falling Crows” by Sweazy has a body and a shoot out in the first couple pages, and then long stretches of investigation and character development. “A Strange and Savage Garden” by Waggoner opens with a werewolf attack (or something similar) and turns into a story about a girl going home. The first is crime, the second is horror. (Two books I happen to have in my iBooks, if I looked at my physical books I’d find many more) Opening with an action scene is really common in those genres, because what makes it thrilling is investment in the characters, so they promise blood in the opening, set the stage, then have a climax. TV does this a lot. The anime “The Devil is a Part Timer” starts off with a ten minute battle where the devil’s army is defeated in martial arts magic combat and he escapes through a portal, leading to episode after episode of him working at Burger King. It’d be boring if I wasn’t promised more giant battles up front.
I would say crime genre books are kinda exempt - most people read crime not for how gory the murder can be but for the investigation to begin with, so it's not promising something it hasn't delivered that it starts with a murder and then goes into a lengthy investigation. The investigation is why people bought the book. A horror that's about a girl going home? That sounds really odd to me but then again, I don't read horror. The words "girl going home" makes me think of soppy family dramas. I can say I'd definitely feel cheated if a blurb told me it was about a girl going home and then gave me a horror! I would not be terribly kind on the review if that happened to me. Anime is a good example though - I've seen it done all the time in anime. But that's not written narrative so I'm not sure it counts. I'll grant it you often works well in anime.
Well, anime all starts as screenplays someone has to invest in, if it didn’t start as a manga and then directly adapted. Not to mention a lot of authors outline their novels straight out of “save the cat” and “Anatomy of story” which are both for screenplays, so I think there is a lot of crossover.
There's certainly crossover, but to say that because something works in anime that it will automatically work in Western narrative would be inaccurate to say the least. First of all, hugely different cultural context and cultural expectations when you're approaching anime vs a novel from the western world. Secondly, anything on screen has a tonne more going for it than a book (sound, lights, motion, pictures). There's a reason why books adapted into movies don't generally work - Hunger Games would be a great example where it's got a tonne of exposition in the text, all of which worked marvellously, and it was completely flat on screen. I agree with you there's crossover - it's how I write a lot of my scenes, visualising it as almost like a movie - but equally if there's one thing I've learnt it's that the two mediums do very different things to build atmosphere and suspense. Where a movie can rely on creepy music, I must build up a feeling of creeping under your skin through description in narrative. Manga is also nothing like western narrative. I can agree manga might be accurately compared with storyboarding and thus perhaps to a movie. But to narrative? Again, two very different things there. Manga has camera angles and to some extent, "lighting" through all its different textures. It can also look very very dramatic - for example how it often conveys loud sounds as part of the graphic, as well as switch in the way pictures are done, from the more elegant manga style art to chibi or caricature-style art. Screenplays - I will confess I have no experience in screenplays. Anime and manga I do have a fair bit. But the once or twice when I've tried to write a screenplay, I feel it is rather a completely different beast. Again, that book-to-film adaptations often go badly probably attest to that. (the other recent one for me was Fault in Our Stars. The film, though true to the book, was completely lacking the emotional depth and gravity of the book) Anyway, another thought occurred to me - goes to show how many different kinds of readers there are You clearly are less irked by this than I am. What I interpret as a false promise, you seem to just... go along with it? As with most things when it comes to writing novels - it all depends on whether it's suitable for telling that particular story. And I'm sure there may be occasions when it might be. I am guessing if we took the approach you're promoting, what you might have to be careful about would probably be that the reader should be able to see clearly how the slow plodding farm work relates back to that juicy battle they started with. (my word that was a convoluted sentence... ) If the reader can see a clear link, you're right they will probably be willing to sit through it and find out how it all led up to that point. For me, this technique really does backfire - because I would be far too impatient to sit through the plodding along - I'd want to flip to the end.
