For NaNoWriMo 2018 I wrote a murder mystery set on a starliner. With
all the freewriting and deleted words stripped away, it turned out to
be a little over 22k words, a novelette by SFWA
standards. Its main contribution to my development as a writer
was that it contained a complete albeit sketchy plot – my first
NaNo project I could consider finished in some reasonable sense. For
this month’s Camp NaNoWriMo I intended to start turning it into a
full novel, but I didn’t have enough prep time to do all the
planning my research on writing
mysteries
showed was necessary. So I’ve been slogging through more research,
world-building, plot outlining, figuring out what the various
antagonists are doing – all of which is reasonably fun, but over
the weekend I got frustrated with not having actually started the
story. So I drafted the first chapter.
The story
just didn’t work.
I had
followed the advice usually given to beginning authors: readers have
no reason to trust that you will tell an engaging story, so you
must start with action. The
first chapter was the sleuths being summoned to solve the murder,
which had already taken
place. The
major conflict started within the first few pages, which was
supposedly a good thing. But the chapter felt rushed, the characters
too flat, the setting too vague.
Fortunately,
somewhere in the mists of time, I had heard of the idea of a
“bridging conflict,” so in my usual academic manner decided to research it
and summarize what I found.
The
consensus definition of a “bridging conflict,” the one that
unifies all the sources I read, is
A smaller conflict, a problem the
protagonist must solve, that takes place during setup for, or transitions between, the parts of the main conflict.
The most commonly-mentioned use was the setup for the inciting incident that kicks off the main conflict.
The reasons for a bridging conflict at
the start of a story
clarified my uneasy feelings. Except
for special subgenres like cosy mysteries, long
slow buildups are boring for most readers. They want something
to happen, some feeling of a
plot moving forward. The problem is that if you start right away with
the major intense
conflict, you’re raising
the stakes too fast, before readers
have
begun to immerse in the setting and identify with the protagonist.
They
have no reason to care
about either.
So,
for a good story opening, with
a bridging conflict, you need to;
- Start with the character of the protagonist. Reveal some aspect of their intentions, perspectives, values, needs, and long-term goals.
- Suggest backstory showing that the protagonist enters the narrative with relevant life experience.
- Pick a conflict that arises naturally from the context, that can be resolved, or partly resolved, reasonably soon; set a goal relatively easy to achieve.
- Show the immediate stakes, the consequences of failing to resolve the bridging conflict.
- Introduce a complication: yes the protagonist succeeded at the immediate goal, but another problem arose.
- Make sure that, by the end of the incident, the reader cares about the protagonist and their struggles.
This
unifies the two most-emphasized pieces of advice I’ve heard that
readers expect an interesting protagonist with a character arc, and
also expect the “action” to start quickly.
So,
instead of reworking the initial scene, my next task is to clarify my
image of the main sleuth.
I consulted the following sources during
my research, taken from the first few pages of an internet search; it
is well worth reading them for the examples and additional details.
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