Starting a Story with Action

I'm pretty sure someone talked about this topic somewhere, so it pains me to ask this.

I'm working an adventure...well, let's just say adventure story-calling it a series now would be pretty premature. I had the idea of the character being in the middle of a quest in the beginning of the story, then tragedy strikes, wiping out her party and leaving her the last survivor. The story would follow the hero after that event.

But would starting the story in the middle of a quest and essentially kick the story off with a fight scene be a good idea?

It sound like you want advice on writing an Action Prologue? No wait, you are asking if an action prologue is a good idea? Usually, I tend to think it is an excellent idea.

I think there is no problem with it as long as you get a sense of who the character is, as long as you flesh out your hero at least a little during the fight scene and immediate aftermath.

For action to have weight and meaning, the audience needs to know why the characters are doing what they're doing. They need to know why the characters care about what they're doing, so they have a reason to care via empathy. You can't just open a story with action and assume the audience already empathises with your characters. You need to do the leg-work. For an action-prologue you need to establish, as quickly and concisely as possible, who the characters are, what they're doing, and why. This isn't as simple as it sounds, I know, but without it you'll just be throwing names and actions at an audience that is in no position to understand or care.

There's also the element of structure. The start of your story is where you're supposed to introduce the status quo of your world and your characters. The idea is that this is their "baseline"; their "mundane". Then comes the Inciting Incident, at which point things start to change. The characters are shaken out of their status quo, and must find a way to move forward. Things start happening, things start changing. The characters cannot go back to the way things were; that time is lost, and the only way they can go is forwards, into the future.

The characters may choose to rise to the challenge, or they might cling to the status quo. But the conflict must be resolved eventually - that's the whole point of a story.

In your case, your main character is on a quest when tragedy strikes, leaving her the only survivor. Okay, that can work. You just need to establish:

• What was the aim of your main character's quest? What was she attempting to do, and why?
  • What's at stake if she doesn't complete her quest?
• Who are the other members of her party? Why are they following your main character on her quest? What's their interest in all this?
  • How does your main character know the other members of her party? How does she feel towards them?
• After the tragedy strikes, what does your main character decide to do then?
  • Does she still attempt to complete her mission? Does she give up all hope?

Furthermore, it's good to think about where this story is going to end up. What's the end-result of all this? Stories need a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it's all fine and dandy to talk about how the story starts, but if you don't have a clear ending in mind, your work is just going to meander along with no direction or energy and it's going to bore your audience to tears.

I'd say starting in the middle of the quest be pretty good. You get to showcase how your character reacts to danger, what she can do, what her relationships with others in the group are and so on, and you get to skip the boring parts before the Call to Adventure.

The chief problem, IMO, is that in the short time they live, you have to showcase all people on her team so that the audience can empathize with the heroine when they all die and understand why she mourns them, rather than being "alright, paper cut-outs are out of the game, can we get on with the story, please?". In other words, Developing Doomed Characters that are actually sympathetic.

Actually Kakai, the point where the heroine's allies all die, and she's left alone, IS the Call to Adventure. It's the point where her status quo shatters, where her life is turned upside-down, and she has to adapt. Her allies needn't be anything more than cardboard cutouts, if the plot demands they perish before the end of the first act. They're just setting the scene - what matters is what the main character does after that point, and where those initial events propel them to.

That said, this all assumes that the events after the bit-character die-off are tangibly different from the events that came before. If the events that follow after are just the same events, but now the heroine is on her own, then... what's the point of killing off the supporting cast? In that case, all you've done is started the story at the climax of the plot, and then moved straight into the falling action, but without doing any of the dramatic legwork to get the audience invested in your characters or plot. Remember: in medias res doesn't mean you don't have to explain what happened before. It just means you can put off the explanations until a quiet moment in the narrative. If you never actually explain, then it's not In Medias Res: it's just a bog-standard linear narrative.

Also, "the bits before the Call to Adventure" don't have to be boring, and if you insist they always are, then you fundamentally do not understand how stories work. You cannot literally just jump straight into action without at least some kind of establishing sequence. The audience needs to at least understand the broad strokes of what's going on, or else your action will just be meaningless.

Take this opening paragraph, from Jame's Clavell's Shogun:

This is a favourite of mine, because it so perfectly summarises the situation at hand, with the minimum of pomp or fluff. This is the main character, this is his goal, this is what's stopping him achieving his goal, and this is what's at stake if he fails. Notice how the writer doesn't even give the main character a name yet - they don't need to. We've got a perfect vision of who he is already.

And you know what? This is all before the actual Inciting Incident/Call to Adventure. Soon after, the ship is wrecked on the coast of Sengoku Jidai-era Japan, and the main character, Pilot-General Blackthorne, finds himself and his crew held hostage by a local daimyo. Thus begins a tale of struggle and growth, intrigue and deception, as Blackthorne tries desperately to survive amidst the political turmoil and absolutist rule of feudal-era Japan.

Blackthorne's adventure in Japan is the real story, not the struggle against the storm that shipwrecked him in the first place. The two series of events are tangibly different. When Blackthorne's ship hit the rocks, that was when his "status quo" changed, his life was turned upside-down, and he had to adapt to survive. That is what you need to understand, in order to start your story with action effectively.

edited 29th May '16 4:16:04 PM by Tungsten74

Who says that the action prologue needs to involve the main character? Like any type of prologue, it can be disconnected from the main story, only to become relevant later in the main narrative.

It can also be a mini adventure that the protagonist went through before the main events of the story. It doesn't need to be a tragedy.

Also, who says that action scenes need to be meaningful? Especially in the climax, they sort of do. But at the beginning of the story, they can be just light fun. Something fast and short that involves interesting actions. It is only later on when action scenes that don't seem to have any meaning start to look out of place.

Edit: Oops. The person who said that is the OP.

edited 29th May '16 11:00:22 PM by war877

@Tungsten 74

Okay, let me take a crack at answering these.

• What was the aim of your main character's quest? What was she attempting to do, and why? Her and the rest of her team had a mission. To get from Point A(their home) to Point B(the Checkpoint) and survey the surrounding area to see if it would be safe to form a colony.
  • What's at stake if she doesn't complete her quest? Point A is in an area that is running out of resources due to being built inside a giant fortress and away from other settlements. Think something along the lines of the walls from Attack on Titan. They need to find somewhere safe for them to build new colonies in order to build new colonies. These colonies are built to keep them safe from the various monsters that would kill and eat them. Not many merchants or traders come their way due to how far and away they are.

• Who are the other members of her party? Why are they following your main character on her quest? What's their interest in all this? The other members of her party are basically her underlings. She's suppose to be the Captain of a Military-Ish group. They follow her because it's their job, just like how surveying Point B is their overall job.
  • How does your main character know the other members of her party? How does she feel towards them? Our hero feels as though it's her personal responsibility to make sure they all get out of this alive and return home. She only knows one of them personally, enough to address him by his first name. However, she does her best to try and get her team through the mission the best she can.

• After the tragedy strikes, what does your main character decide to do then?
  • Does she still attempt to complete her mission? Does she give up all hope? Ultimately, she decides to return to Point A. There's no point in trying to reach the Checkpoint after the tragedy, knowing that the Monster that wiped out her team without much of a fight prowls the area.

All action scenes should be meaningful, because they are nothing more than "normal" scenes played out via different means. They exist to move the story along, to introduce characters and conflicts, and to develop those characters and resolve those conflicts, same as any other scene. If they're not doing that - if the scene exists solely for the sake of action, with no greater story goal in mind - then it is superfluous and should be culled.

I can almost guarantee that any opening action scene that you thought was "just a bit of fun", was actually pulling double-duty as an introduction to the story's world, its characters and its main conflict. Because that is how good writers roll.

EDIT: Okay, so, what's the story after this point? What's the main conflict? What's our heroine's overarching goal? Does our heroine return home in disgrace, and struggle to repair her reputation? Is that her goal; to clear her name and get some respect again? That could work. Or is the journey home the story in itself, with our heroine hounded at every turn by the monster that slaughtered her colleagues? A simple tale of Man Against Nature, where our heroine's only goal is to survive? That could also work.

But if her overarching goal is "find new habitable lands for my people", then you are approaching it in completely the wrong way. The Call to Adventure/Inciting Incident ought to be the point where our heroine's superiors (or whoever) realise their resources are running out and they need to find new lands, with our heroine volunteering for the job, not the immediate aftermath after her first expedition went awry. If you want the audience to care about whether or not our heroine finds the lands she seeks, you need to lay the groundwork for it. You need to introduce us to her world first, then show it going awry, and forcing her to take action.

If I was doing this, I would start the story with the main character defending her homeland from the monsters that plague it. I'd introduce our heroine, her skills, her personality and her values, and also her team and their relationships, as they backed her up in her fight. If I wanted to make our heroine and her team seem strong and secure, I'd show them winning a solid victory. If I wanted to make our heroine and her team seem weak and outclassed, I'd show them winning a pyrrhic victory, or engaging in a fighting retreat, with many Redshirts getting cut down in the process. Either way, I would open on establishing action: this is our heroine, this is what she does, this is why she does what she does, this is her situation at present, et cetera.

Then I would move on to our heroine returning home, and speaking with her superiors/advisors, who tell her about the resources issue. This would prompt her to take action to solve this new issue, and the story proper could begin from there. Then she could form her travelling party and go out on her doomed expedition, and the audience would be 100% on-board because they would completely understand the situation at present.

edited 30th May '16 3:19:47 AM by Tungsten74

Tungsten, regarding what you've said before - I did understand that the event we're talking about is the Call to Adventure, and the "boring" part was, perhaps, a bit cheeky. I meant "boring" in that they serve to set up the scene rather than propel the plot forward, and I know this is necessary and can be done interestingly.

I'd argue that one can start the story after the first expedition goes awry. If we have the situation set up already, with the characters confident that they are going to find this habitable land and it's going to be fine, then the monster attack both serves as an inciting incident and raises the stakes. If the interactions between the team establish that the situation is dire - that's part of those "boring bits" - then the monster appearing works well. And Establishing Character Moments for the characters are, IMO, important, if only to utilize some sort of Worf Effect when the monster appears (I know, I know you shouldn't write tropes but plot, but they're tools for a reason).

So in other words - I'd start the story with some action sequence to show what the dead men walking are capable of, and only then, when they're sure of themselves (and reader is sure they're a Badass Crew), pull a bait-and-switch with the monster.

Yes, but where do you go from there? What's the heroine's goal after that point? The expedition was just to find habitable land, yes? But oh no, now there's an unstoppable monster there, what does she do? According to Hydra Gem, she... goes home again, with nothing to show for her efforts. From there, she... uh?

I don't get what the overall arc of the story is. If her goal is to find habitable land, does she succeed? Does she fail? How? Does she have to fight the big monster for it? Does she learn that there's some other way to live besides fighting the monsters? Does she nobly stand up to the monster, and die anyway?

Or, does she even fight the monster at all? Maybe she just keeps going out on expeditions, with disastrous results? Perhaps the core conflict of the story is our heroine's attempts to keep her people's spirits up, and convince them to support further expeditions?

Seriously, I don't get it. What's the point of this story? Hydra, you've given a lot of info about how the story starts, but nothing about how you plan it to end. Without that info, it's hard to get a grip on what the middle of your story is supposed to encompass.

edited 30th May '16 6:46:53 AM by Tungsten74

Hm... I must concur. HydraGem, what is the story about after that attack? If she just goes back and starts over again, the monster attack works as a Batman Cold Open or a flashback, but otherwise the story should probably start earlier, as Tungsten says.

The 'finding resources and habitable land' is suppose to be nothing but a backdrop, a sort of framing device to get the adventure going. I'm going to admit, though, that this is a pretty hair-brained idea the more I think on it and that a story of just trying to find more land and resources for her people would probably be the better story. (Or, maybe just getting rid of the resources and habitable land all together thing and just saying their Adventurers trying to get gold or something and giving her companions more than just one chapter before croaking.)

The overarching plot is that she's just trying to return home to inform her superiors of the failed mission. The encounter with the monster, however, caused the Hero to move further from home and she has to travel down an entirely different route to get home. The act of getting home to report is the adventure, because she has to deal with more monsters-just on a smaller scale than the one that attacked her-and other people-let's say, Villains-who terrorize others, which is suppose to force the hero to act. She can't get home unless she helps others because their problems are obstacles in her path.

Okay, first off, you're using the term "framing device" wrong. A framing device is a means of nesting a narrative within an outside narrative, such as by having a character start telling a story, which then serves as the primary focus of the narrative, before returning to the storytelling character towards the end. The idea is not only to justify a particular stylistic choice (who cares if it's not realistic - it's a story!), but also to reflect the personality and worldview of the storyteller.

What you are describing is an Inciting Incident; the very concept I've been discussing for the past several posts. It is some great shift in a character's fortunes that necessitates a change in behaviour or outlook, and motivates them to take action and achieve their goals.

That aside, your story premise sounds okay, but it's still missing a vital ingredient: an arc.

See, stories are about change, right? They are about the passing of time, of growth and regression. If the state of your world and its characters are the same at the start as they are at the end, what was the point of showing the time in-between?

So we've established that our heroine wants to get home: that's her big, over-arching goal. She'd probably like to kick the ass of the monster that got her stuck in the first place too, but that's of secondary importance. Now, what's stopping her from going home? Well, there's the sheer distance she's got to travel - that's a pretty big deal. There's also the fact that there are monsters and baddies in her way, which she cannot ignore or avoid, both because they're attacking her and because they're hurting innocents, which she will not stand for.

Now, here's where things get interesting. You need an arc, right? Well, what about an arc for your main character? Maybe at the start of the story she can't beat the big monster, but over the course of her adventure to loop back around, she finds the strength and allies and finally kicks the monster's ass. Tie the physical journey to your heroine's inner, personal journey, so that she's a better person at the end than she was at the start. Tie her victory over herself to her victory over the monster. You don't have to be blatant about it - just make it clear that it was the journey that gave her the ability to defeat the beast, once and for all.

That is how you make a compelling story.