Whether or not your first scene has a subtext, it needs to have dramatic tension. Dramatic tension is the feeling that something could go wrong for your protagonist, whether by forces working against him, or by ill-advised or unwise choices he makes on his own. You want to be sure that your significant situation immediately gives the reader cause to worry about your protagonist.
Once your significant situation is underway, you'll want to be sure that you keep the tension alive throughout the scene. You'll notice how Freed's first scene is positively dripping with the potential for conflict or consequence. Here is a young woman, kept naive to men by her mother, out on a clandestine visit at night with a much older man. The reader knows that something is going to happen, and that it will probably go against Thea's mother's wishes and Thea's own expectations.
Pacing
Pace should match the emotional content of your scene. First scenes should get going with an emotional bang—start big or dramatic, ratchet up the suspense or lay on the fear, since you're capturing the reader here.
In Philip Pullman's young adult fantasy novel The Golden Compass, the first scene opens with an air of nervous anticipation, and the quick pace mirrors that feeling. Protagonist Lyra, a ten-year-old girl, and her animal daemon Pantalaimon live at Jordan College in Oxford, England. In the first scene, Lyra is snooping in the chamber of the Master of the college despite Pantalaimon's warnings that she will get in trouble. The action is quick and the exposition and reflection kept to a minimum.
"What d'you think they talk about?" Lyra said, or began to say, because before she'd finished the question she heard voices outside the door.
"Behind the chair—quick!" whispered Pantalaimon, and in a flash Lyra was out of the armchair and crouching behind it. It wasn't the very best one for hiding behind: she'd chosen one in the very center of the room, and unless she kept very quiet. ...
The door opened, and the light changed in the room; one of the incomers was carrying a lamp, which he put down on the sideboard. Lyra could see his legs, in their dark green trousers and shiny black shoes. It was a servant.
Then a deep voice said, "Has Lord Asriel arrived yet?"
It was the Master.
Within a few paragraphs of quickly paced action and brief description, Lyra finds herself in the midst of her significant situation: As a result of being where she isn't supposed to be, she sees someone slipping poison into the brandy of their visiting guest, Lord Asriel, and overhears a conversation she isn't meant to that sets the plot in motion. In order to save Lord Asriel's life, she'll have to let on that she was in a forbidden room, and thus face punishment—putting her in quite the dilemma, which is a great way to thrust the reader into a first scene!
Your first scene is like a cold pool—the reader needs to dive in and get moving fast, or he'll be too cold to stay in the water for very long. In other scene types, you'll have more leeway with pacing. In the first scene, however, a quick pace—with more action and less reflection or exposition—will be a better sell.
To keep the pace quick, think in terms of action. What actions can your protagonist take that stem directly from the significant situation? You might want to have your protagonist take a risk, or be surprised in some way. First scenes are great for reactions—that is, characters being caught off guard in one way or another and having to think quickly about what they'll do next.
Ending the First Scene
Eventually, your significant situation will have to taper off to its close. No matter what kind of plot you choose—a quiet, character-driven one, or an action-based one as your genre and writing style demand—end your first scene with a feeling that trouble, conflict, crisis, or a dilemma has only just begun, and you will almost certainly guarantee the reader keeps on going to the next scene. To do this:
• Leave the consequences of the significant situation unresolved. A
promise of more to come in the next scene keeps the reader turning the page. For example, if your protagonist has just been caught at the scene of a murder, don't let him be arrested or proven innocent before the first scene's end—leave the reader guessing.
• End the scene before the character makes a major decision. This also works if you end the scene just after the character makes a bad decision, like Freed did with Thea in House of Women.
• Allow your protagonist to have a disturbing realization that ultimately changes everything in his life. What could prompt such a dramatic realization? Maybe your protagonist must flee the country, because his wife is a double-agent and an evil nemesis has found them.
• Let your protagonist have a knee-jerk reaction to the significant situation. This reaction should make things more complicated for him and help the scene transition go smoother.
Take a look at how Freed wraps up the opening scene of House of Women:
Even as I slipped out of my sandals and crept down the back stairs, stopping at the bottom until Maude had delivered the drinks tray to him-even as I ran along the pantry passage and through the dining room, out onto the verandah, I knew that nothing they could do would stop me now. Not even if they caught me. Not even if they dug their nails into my flesh and screamed for the police.
"I sail tomorrow," he says.
I can hear my mother in her dressing room. She is humming, she is happy. "I've never seen snow," I say, standing up, "I've never even needed a coat."
While you want to taper the action of the significant situation to a close, you don't want it to feel too conclusive. In Thea's case, she has made a decision: "Nothing they could do would stop me now." She's going. But this is only the end of one stage of her life, at home with her mother. And Freed gives us a final, painful image of the mother "humming, she is happy," which the reader suspects will be Nalia's last moment of happiness before she realizes her daughter has gone.
You can also drop a thematic hint at the end of your first scene, as Freed does with this lovely metaphoric line of dialogue, "I've never even needed a coat." The coat symbolizes protection. With her mother as her keeper, Thea has been safe. But now she's entering a new territory without a coat, without protection.
Finally, leave your protagonist in a little bit of trouble, so the reader feels anxious enough to keep reading. Choose whichever path will create the most potential for conflict and change in the character. A shy, fearful character, for instance, might be faced with a big, brave decision at the end of your first scene—hopefully one that is a consequence of his significant situation. Whatever path you take, leave your protagonist's fate up in the air.
FIRST SCENES VS. PROLOGUES
Many writers don't quite understand the distinction between a prologue and a first scene (or chapter). The reason you will not find an entire chapter here on prologues is because they are not a crucial scene type. Most of the scene types you will have to use at least once in a narrative. A prologue is optional, and many novels don't use them at all.
A prologue is a short scene or chapter at the very beginning of a narrative—it is the very first part of the narrative that will be read, and it comes before the first scene and chapter. But here's where it can get confusing: A prologue may actually take place in the future, or even in the distant past. In fact, it may not fit into the linear chronology of the narrative at all, because its purpose is to provide information that the narrative will not or cannot just yet, but that is somehow needed. Some writers use a prologue as a hook—to tempt the reader with information that the plot will not deliver for many more hundreds of pages. I feel that your first scene should successfully provide that hook, and that if you work hard to write an effective, enticing, vivid first scene, you won't need a prologue. You do find prologues often, however, in certain kinds of genre work. Fantasy is a genre very well suited to the prologue, as it's often needed to fill the reader in on some aspect of the fantasy world that couldn't otherwise be known. Some mysteries may also require a bit of setup that is easiest to do in a prologue, to fill the reader in on the details of the case.
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In the young-adult fantasy novel The Alchemyst, by Michael Scott, the prologue lets the reader know that even though the book is set in the modern day, Nicholas Flamel and his wife, Perenelle, are seven-hundred-year-old wizards in possession of a magic book called the Codex that is the key to their long life. The prologue simply gets the reader up to speed so the story can unfold without confusion when the Codex is stolen and two young kids are drawn into the plot.
The prologue of The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi, by Jacqueline Park, works because the entire narrative is a first-person account—essentially a series of letters to the protagonist's son—and the reader needs to know this information before the narrative begins.
In Windfalls, by Jean Hegland, the prologue works because the novel is a very literary, character-driven novel in which the major conflicts and crises don't happen immediately to the protagonists. But the prologue is full of strange, lyrical, odd images that invoke a sense of danger or tragedy, which remains in the undercurrent of the reading and leaves a sense of worry about what's going to happen to the characters.
If you want to learn how to write a strong prologue, study the novels of Jodi Picoult, particularly The Tenth Circle. Picoult has a unique way of framing a piece of plot information in a way that makes you curious and breathless and urgent. I wouldn't say that her books need prologues so much as she has just mastered the art of writing them.
FIRST SCENE MUSE POINTS_
• Introduce your protagonist and the significant situation simultaneously.
• Match your pace to the emotional content of the scene.
• Use thematic images to foreshadow an outcome. If your protagonist's life is in danger, set an eerie mood, and use setting objects that conjure up images of death or darkness—a knife, a raven, even a shift in light from bright to dark.
• Unbalance the reader's expectations through setting by employing what is not expected, such as featuring a monastery as the site of a violent crime, or a prison as the setting of a surprising revelation of innocence.
• Keep a tight pace—notice if you are using too much exposition or description that drags the pace down; and watch for lengthy, unbroken passages of dialogue or actions that push the pace too quickly.
• End with your protagonist in trouble or with an uncertain fate, setting up the next scene.
Suspense, at its most primal, is a state of uncertainty that produces anxiety. In fiction, no matter whether the condition creating the suspense is positive or negative—Will she say yes to the handsome rogue's proposal? Will he be flung off the cliff?—it tends to have the same effect on the reader: the heart races, nerves are tight, and an aura of apprehension hangs over the scene. This is a good thing. The way to get the reader to white-knuckle her way through a suspense scene is by delaying the inevitable outcome of the trouble your characters are in.
Suspense scenes can be found in almost every genre of fiction, though mysteries and thrillers capitalize on these scenes more than romance or literary novels. For a scene to qualify as suspenseful:
• The protagonist must begin in jeopardy or quickly get caught in the middle of trouble or danger
• The emotional, physical, or spiritual stakes for the character must become more complicated during the scene
• The emotional intensity must increase for the protagonist, and must not let up until the end
• The events of the scene, or fellow characters, must exert pressure on the protagonist to change or act in some way
Use suspense scenes to add emotional voltage to your narrative, to up the emotional ante for your protagonist, and to add complications to your plot that will require new solutions (half the fun of reading is following a protagonist as he gets into and out of and then back into trouble again). A good place for suspense scenes is after a contemplative scene or a dialogue-driven scene whose main purpose is to provide plot information; in those instances a suspense scene will get the reader excited again, and provide your protagonist with new challenges. Suspense scenes also have a feeling of pressing urgently forward, so consider using them before an epiphany scene, because they'll help drive your characters toward big conclusions and realizations.
Pacing obviously plays a large role in the success or failure of a sus-penseful scene. When building to painful realizations or inevitable outcomes, it's good to slow down the pace by focusing on small details in a scene or by using a few well-placed lines of exposition or interior monologue. Part of what creates suspense is the agony of not knowing what is going to happen next. Of course, a fast-paced scene can often add that much-needed surge of adrenaline that propels the reader forward. Generally, though, suspense is built upon slow and carefully measured action that builds and holds tension.
Suspense can get lost if you try to rush into it. Think of how nerve-racking it is to watch a ghost-story type movie in which a character is walking slowly down a darkened hall toward a room where he has heard a noise. If he runs down that hall, there's no time for suspense. But by walking slowly and fearfully, he allows the viewers to feel his anxiety. The same technique works to build suspense in your narrative—the more time the reader has to feel nervous, the more effective the scene will be.
OPENING A SUSPENSE SCENE
Suspense scenes should open in a way that gives the reader immediate concern for the protagonist. While your protagonist doesn't need to be dangling from scaffolding just yet, he might be starting the climb. Or you can create a more subtle uneasiness—the protagonist can simply feel that something is not quite right about the unusual silence or overly bright lights of a house or building. In a suspense scene, you want to give the reader an uh-oh feeling, a sense of trouble, which should begin to mount and reach a crescendo of pressure toward the end.
Let's look at a suspense scene from Paul Auster's novel The Book of Illusions. Though his novel is literary, he works in suspense masterfully. David Zimmer, a translator who is still trying to recover from the loss of his wife and two sons in a plane crash over a year before, has just arrived home after a harrowing drive and a minor accident in the rain. The significant situation of the plot was a letter he received, inviting him to meet Hector Mann, the elusive silent-screen comedian thought to be dead, about whom David wrote a book. David is not convinced of the veracity of the letter, and has written back demanding proof that Mann is actually alive. His proof shows up in the form of a mysterious woman, Alma Grund, sent to fetch him back to New Mexico. Notice how the scene begins fairly benignly, but causes a prickle of anxiety:
We found the keys with her flashlight and when I opened the door and stepped into the house, I flicked on the lights in the living room. Alma Gr-und came in after me—a short woman in her mid- to late thirties, dressed in a blue silk blouse and tailored gray pants.
The fact that the strange woman comes in after him is cause for concern. The scene takes on more suspense when, within a couple of paragraphs, David begins to act irrationally though Alma has done nothing threatening. (Aus-ter does not use quotation marks in his dialogue, so I have added them for clarity's sake):
"Just give me five minutes," she said. "I can explain everything."
"I don't like it when people trespass on my property," I said, "And I don't like it when people jump out at me in the middle of the night. You don't want me to have to throw you out of here, do you?"
She looked up at me then, surprised by my vehemence, frightened by the undertow of rage in my voice. "I thought you wanted to see Hector," she said and as she spoke those words she took a few more steps into the house, removing herself from the vicinity of the door in case I was planning to carry out my threat.
Here's the brilliant moment of this scene: the protagonist, David, starts out as the aggressor—the reader isn't afraid for him, but afraid he's going to do harm to this poor woman. But subtly, with a slight shift, Auster turns the tables when Alma "took a few more steps into the house." Those few steps are full of suspense. What does she want? Why isn't she afraid of him? Sudde
nly, Alma has taken the power. And the suspense has only just begun. David still isn't afraid, but the readers is, and rightfully so, for when David comes back downstairs from his bath and finds that Alma is still in his house, after trying unsuccessfully to convince him with words, she takes desperate action:
The gun was in her hand. It was a small silver-plated revolver with a pearl handle, no more than half the size of the cap guns I had played with as a boy. As she turned in my direction and lifted her arm, I could see that the hand at the end of her arm was shaking.
"This isn't me," she said. "I don't do things like this. Ask me to put it away, and I will. But we have to go now."
To build suspense, you don't need to throw in a gun or a physical altercation, though those will work. Suspense can be created by shifting the power back and forth between characters, letting the reader wonder if your protagonist is going to grab the ancient treasure out of the enemy's hands, or if he's going to fall into the burning pit of magma.
David later wrests the gun out of Alma's hands and shocks them both by putting it to his own head, jacking up the emotional intensity—the stakes— more and more until David finally pulls the trigger.
To create suspense at the beginning of a scene you can:
• Introduce a catalyst or antagonist whose intentions seem suspect to the protagonist. David, and consequently the reader, does not trust Alma from the very start because of the manner of her arrival—sud-denly, without notice, and in the middle of the night.
• Allow your protagonist to feel threatened or pressured by another character or event, and to resist the ensuing demand or request.
David is tired, wet, upset, and just wants a bath. Alma's presence and her demand that he fly to New Mexico with her puts pressure on him—his family died in a plane crash, remember, and he's emotionally unstable.
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