Act One: All Setup or Does it Need More?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

How much goes into setting up the beginning of a novel?

Novel beginnings don’t make it easy on us poor writers. We have to introduce characters, set the scene, ground readers in a new world (real life or make believe), and we have to do something compelling to entice those readers to keep reading.

Story structure helps with this, giving us a proven path to take after that first sentence is written: Opening scene leads to inciting event leads to end of act one. That encompasses the beginning, and act one is essentially the part of the novel where the story is set up. Introduce the protagonist, put them on the plot path, and turn them loose to resolve the story’s conflict.

And that’s where the trouble starts for some writers.

They have the opening scene down pat. They know what the inciting event is. But after that it gets fuzzy, and they wonder…
Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com