The Opening Promise

As a writer, you must know what promise your story or novel makes. Your reader will know. She may buy your book because it belongs to a genre that promises certain things (romance, science fiction, horror, political thriller). Or she may come to your story without preconceptions, in which case she'll form them pretty quickly from your characters, tone, plot and style.

By the time she's read your opening, your reader knows what you've implicitly promised. A satisfying middle is one that develops that promise with specificity and interest. A satisfying ending is one that delivers on the promise, providing new insight or comfortable confirmation or vicarious happiness. Even when it's surprising in some way, the ending feels inevitable, because it fulfills the promise of the story. And-this is important-the ending feels satisfying only because the beginning set up the implicit promise in the first place.

In your first scene, however, your main goal is to keep your reader interested. You do that through focusing not on overall meaning but on the four elements that make a first scene compelling: character, conflict, specificity and credibility.


Beginnings, Middles and Ends by Nancy Kress