Hellow fellow writers and readers, First off, this is not my native language, and I'm not writing in it either The start of my novel is with getting to know the main character. This takes about 5/6 pages (A4) After this, the main character gets transported to another world, and from there the "book" starts. I find it very hard to just go with the length and am wondering about how long it should be. In this intro, there is information about his school, his neighbors, his history about his family and his normal daily life. Is this too much for an intro? I can't show you the concept cause it's in Dutch, and google translate doesn't really do well with long stories. So: Long story short: - How long should an intro be, how long can I stretch the information before getting transported to another world? - What is important to fit into the intro, what does a reader need to know about the character? What has to go into the intro? With kind regards, Derk. Student and starting 'writer'
IMO, this intro shouldn't just be information, but should be meaningful scenes that happen to convey that information. For example, at the beginning of The Wizard of Oz (I'm thinking of the movie, because the beginning of the book slips my mind), we have Dorothy's longing for a more exciting life, the moment when she falls into the pigpen and is rescued by a character, the threat to Toto, its associated conflict with her parent figures, her running away, and so on. All of that tells us that she lives a conventional, well-loved but boring, farm life, but nothing ever sits us down and specifically tells us that.
On your first draft, the first chapter is for you, the writer, to focus your mind on the story, and motivate you to write the rest of the story. Most first chapters get extensively rewritten, or radically changed, when you do the first edit of the completed first draft. So don't worry about it, because the reader will probably never see it! If it gets you writing the second chapter, it is long enough, concise enough, and has done its job.
I looked it up. Introduction is found between the words intrinsic and introgression, in my dictionary. Do yourself a favor, and open up your dictionary to that. Now, take a big, fat black marker and block out everything between the words intrinsic and introgression. There. Fixed that for you. The very worst thing you can do to start a novel is to spend time providing an info dump of the main character's school, neighbors, history, family and normal life. JUST SAY NO! Consider that a rule, set in stone, even though every Tom, Dick and Harry does it, and a lot of them famous. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by the strategy of starting a novel out as lame as humanly possible. Others will disagree, and that's fine. Just don't listen to them. Here's the deal. You can do one of two things: 1) Bore the hell out of the reader by showing a lame slice of life that does not speak to any skill whatsoever as a writer, but presents that cool world and cool person that only you are enamored with because the reader came to you for story, not a pretty picture of normalcy. 2) Do every bit of that, only contextually alongside the actor as the actor negotiates plot and as the things presented have context and meaning to the view. Pick one.
Concur with @Gary Wed, if you need an info dump write one .... just for your own reference so you can remember who their parents and brothers were, when/where they were born, signifcant events that shaped them. In other words, a character sketch. If you are world-building, keep that separate as well. You can feed those pieces in as you go, and since you are pulling from a master reference, you will always be consistent. On the other hand, chapter one's main purpose in life right now is to get you to write chapter two, so don't worry too much about it.
Providing some infornmation is good, but please note that keeping some things a bit mysterious is a way to keep the reader interested. Who are these people? Who is this person. Where is this actually taking place? When is it taking place? All this information can be withheld in order to pique the reader's curiosity. That includes unexplained phrases that puzzle the reader and makes him wonder about their meaning. Or suspicious unexplained characters kept lurking in the backround appearing and then suddenly or gradually drifting away. Who are they? What do they want? Where do they come from? These are the things the reader wants to know and will continue to read in order to know them eventually.
Thanks for all the replies guys! It really helped to answer the questions. * All of the answers helped with this I now got a global idea on what the introduction needs and what can be written later. recap: Getting to know the character by action or something that happens in his / her life. Then tell some vague things about his/ her surroundings. With the surroundings, I have some ideas to make a bridge to the parallel world/another world. * Unexplained characters, appearing/lurking in the background. Notes can also be used as the first chapter for the writer, I personally have my own notes in a different document so this is fixed. (with photos and such) And I got my dictionary used, but I only found an English - Dutch one, so I missed the word: introgression. what I did found was everything about the introduction, so thanks for that! I hope this sums up the things you guys tried to explain to me... If not, please correct me on this! Greets!
Don't forget that it also depends on the genre. If you're writing a Jack Reacher novel, you probably have a couple of thousand words to get into some kind of action. If you're writing a cozy mystery, there might be twenty thousand words of everyday life before the old lady from the tea shoppe gets thrown in the woodchipper. For the transported-to-another-world genre, I'd expect to see at least two or three chapters of how the character lives in this world before they're transported away. As others have said, you can use that to set up abilities and interests that may help them in the other world, and maybe some mystery (e.g. the strange guy who's following them around and ends up trying to save them from the people who want to transport them to another world). Also, read some other similar books that were successful, and see how much time their authors spent on the setup, to get an idea of what readers want to see.
Thanks a lot, this really fills in some gaps. I am currently busy with my first book about transporting person-to-another-world, and try to grasp the guidelines. And creating the person with his abilities and interests is indeed a thing to worry about. * In a good way. * Thanks for the advice!
So, like I mentioned, you will get all sorts of advice on this. So, having seen this, I'll reassert my contention that I wrote above, and I repeat: There is absolutely nothing to be gained by the strategy of starting a novel out as lame as humanly possible. Others will disagree, and that's fine. Just don't listen to them. You hear all sorts of arguments against this, and they are never on target. The most compelling one will be that we don't have to have action right out of the gate, and to that I agree. There is a confusion between the call for compelling content promoting a forwardly moving plot and content of intense action. By saying to not spend time sitting in a chair basking in introduction land, I am not telling you how to make content. I'm simply telling you to make content. That is a much more expansive idea from having someone fall off a cliff or engage in a fist fight. You can have very compelling content that is plot progressive, and not even leave that chair. The bottom line is that readers came to you for a story and you gave them an encyclopedia. I think it's really a mindset thing for the writer. Take, for example the time travel example above. Now the contention is that you need a slice of life in order to promote contrast. If that is what you intend to do, fine. But, what is a slice of life? What compelling thing do you do during that misnamed "normalcy" that you use to contrast? If you are thinking setup, or slice of life, or normalcy, you're not being creative enough with that space (the most valuable space in the novel). As a general way of thinking, writers ought not imagine the terms normalcy, slice of life or setup, as they write. Remove these concepts from your brain. Those ought to be red flags, right out of the gate. My writers can care less about normalcy. They came to me for something else. That is regardless of genre or what you might interpret that something else to be.
I believe there can be a lot of difference between what your opening chapter is like when you first start writing, and what it's like when you finally get it published. Some writers start stories with a bang. Others don't find their feet until a couple of chapters in. I believe it's important to get the thing written. I also believe it's important not to worry overmuch about whether you're doing it 'right' or not. That can make you fearful, hesitant, and your lack of confidence will show. You really can't afford to lose enthusiasm for your story. It's very hard to put it back in later on, if you worry it away. If you want to dive right into action and forget about backstory, go ahead. If you want three chapters of backstory before you get going, go ahead and get them written. My motto is: write without fear; edit without mercy. Nothing you do in your first draft is carved in stone. That only happens once you've published it. Just get started and get it finished in all its imperfect glory. THEN start to do what needs to be done to make your beginning perfect. Yes, your beginning is extremely important, and you have to get it right. But it doesn't have to be perfect right at the start.
True. The one thing we know for certain is that the character is going to end up in the other world and do stuff there. So that's a part of the intro that definitely won't get cut. It may be a good idea to start writing with the character arriving in that other world, and then go back and write the intro once you know what it has to set up about the characters and setting.
I thought so myself. But I was still uncurtained if this could work out. Just the everyday life of a protagonist was pretty attractive. I hoped that it just could start out very slow and easy to catch up to, and not full of action or more high phased. Thanks for the advice. I will try to implement the general idea into the script. (So sorry for the typos, if I made any.) Greets.
An intro doesn't need to have a lot of action, or be fast-paced, but it does need to be interesting in some way and draw the reader into wanting to read the rest of the story. Even the last Jack Reacher novel I read opened with two thousand words of description and dialogue before Reacher beat anyone up. Another thing to consider is why this particular protagonist is the one who ends up in this other world, and not one of the other billions of people on Earth. If you know that, you can probably figure out how much and what you may need to show the reader before the character is transported (e.g. if they're needed for their l33t video game skills, you might want to show them playing video games.. or you might decide you want to keep that for a big reveal later).
Yes. I have another fine example to share. In the book, The Secret Lives of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd presents us with a child in a bedroom, late at night, listening to bees buzzing in her wall. A few are loose in the room. She is infatuated, as opposed to terrified. The girl sneaks out, obviously afraid of her father. She goes into the orchard and digs up a box that has a picture of her dead mother standing near a honey sign. Now we ought to think about that a moment. All the conflict and forward plot motion captured in the simplicity of a child waking up and going outside to the orchard. Three points of conflict, none of it hidden away. Bees. Daddy. Mommy. I don't think that Sue Monk Kidd, writing literary of all things, cared one bit about INTRODUCTIONS. She was busy presenting plot, conflict and a damned good opening with compelling content that left us hungry to turn the page. When I say to get the thing on feet, I mean to put something of the story on the table. Through that we see a child in CONTEXT. It means something. From the very first moment, a child who is not afraid of a room full of bees means something. We don't have to introduce crap. We just have to present character in real space doing something worth reading about. A page later her father beats her within an inch of her life, and the servant is made to watch. If you're not turning that page, you have mental issues.
