Marketing for Romance Writers Magazine February 2018 MFRW Magazine Vol. 1 Issue 2 | Page 28

WELL BEGUN IS WELL DONE:
How to Make Your Opening Sell Your Story
By: Alice Orr
The opening of any
story is crucial. A po-
tential reader may be
standing in a store
aisle scanning the first
few pages, or reading
the free sample of-
fered on an electronic
device. The situation is the same. A sto-
ryteller gets one chance to make a first
impression, and you must not squander
that chance.
So, make your best first impression
with a dramatic opening. That doesn‟t mean
you have to start out with a murder scene
the way I like to do in my romantic sus-
pense novels. Your opening can be more
subtle than that, but it must be dramatic
all the same. Let me use an example from
a favorite film of mine, Casablanca, which
is in my opinion one of the great roman-
tic suspense stories of all time.
By the way, I often use movies as
storytelling examples because I find that
more of us have seen the same movies
than have read the same books, and I
want all of us to be able to relate to the
examples I use. You also have easy refer-
ence to these examples because you can
stream most of them on your computer.
Casablanca came out in 1942, when
the world was already immersed in the
most dramatic of times, World War II.
The opening of the film taps directly into
that drama with maps of Europe, then
Africa and Northern Africa, crawling
slowly, inevitably beneath the credits.
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Maps meant something very significant in
WWII. They ran in newspapers almost
daily alongside stories of heart-stopping
battles, even troop movements if they
could be made known. Maps were a life-
and-death visual to a 1942 audience.
Nothing is more dramatic than life versus
death.
Music also enhances the drama of
Casablanca’s first impression. Exotic mu-
sic initially, as the map in the background
moves toward North Africa. We are
headed for a world that is distant and
different from our own, a complicated,
possibly incomprehensible world. The
music signals us to be on guard, maybe
even afraid. Then, on an abrupt beat, the
tempo changes, from exotic and ominous
to loud and rousing. The patriotic strains
of La Marseillaise set our hearts beating to
a different tune, even more dramatic and
affecting than what we have already
heard.
And we‟re not even past the opening
credits. We haven‟t yet arrived at Rick‟s
Café Americain, with Humphrey Bogart
as Rick himself at the bar, brow fur-
rowed, cigarette stub smoldering, the
weight of a heavy psychic wound all but
visible beneath the square shoulders of
his white dinner jacket. If you want to see
what a romantic hero, or any kind of
hero, looks like, screen this scene ASAP.
Plus, in the next two minutes, you will
witness the revelation of his inner charac-
ter, too.
Casablanca shows us that a story‟s
dramatic opening has a lot of work to do,
a lot of weight to carry beneath its square
shoulders. This film does that in spades
as clear and unmistakable as the ones on
the cards the croupier turns over for his
customers in Rick‟s gambling den. Does
your opening carry that weight effec-
tively? How dramatic is your story open-
ing, anyway? Ask yourself, and your
story, these Ten Crucial Questions to
find out.
1. At this moment, my hero/ine must
be plunged into a situation where she
feels as if her world is being yanked
out from under her. Is that happen-
ing, and how does it happen?
2. From this point on, her life will
never be the same again. How, spe-
cifically, will her life be changed?
3. From this moment on, my hero/ine
will be engaged in a struggle. How
specifically does that struggle begin
in this opening scene?
4. This scene must begin in the middle
of something dramatic already in
progress. How, specifically, is that
the case in my story?
5. I need to describe what my main
character looks like. I must describe
her or him by way of a couple of
significant details, rather than by in-
terrupting the dramatic action of the
scene. What, specifically, are those
significant details for my main char-
acter?
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