Opening a New Scene

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When the reader encounters a new scene, the curtain opens on … what? They don’t know until we tell them, or maybe they never know, depending on how badly we messed up. But we don’t want to bore the pants off them through over-description, either. What’s a writer to do?

The most important thing is to nail down the basics, the things the reader must know before they can absorb the rest of the scene. I have a mental checklist for this.

Oh, and everything I say about scene openings applies to chapter openings, only more so.

“First Things First” Checklist

In the first few sentences of the new scene, establish the following (listed in no particular order):

  • Where are we?
  • How much time has passed?
  • Who’s here?
  • What’s going on right now?
  • Who’s the viewpoint character? (If your story has only one viewpoint character, you don’t have to do this except in the first chapter.)
  • How did we get here?

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What Did Chekhov Really Say About “Show, Don’t Tell”?

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Photo of Anton Chekhov

Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
—Allegedly by Chekhov (but not really)

Chekhov never said this. He especially didn’t say “don’t tell me the moon is shining.” That wouldn’t have made sense to him.

This misunderstanding comes from a letter he wrote to his brother Alexander in May 10, 1886, which is known mostly from an ambiguous excerpt:

For instance, you will succeed in depicting a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle flashed like a bright star and the black shadow of a dog or wolf rolled along like a ball and so forth. Nature comes alive if you’re
not squeamish about comparing natural phenomena to human actions.

—Translation by Cathy Popkin, in her edition of Anton Chekhov’s Collected Stories (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), p. 517.

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Using Third-Person Objective Right: The Maltese Falcon

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For some reason, perhaps a hatred of humanity, when people talk about third-person objective (“fly on the wall”) narration, they always lead with Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants. This is a lousy story. It reads more like an exercise, not one of Hemingway’s better efforts at all, so we’ve started off on the wrong foot.

Worse, it’s almost entirely dialog. You can tell a story that’s mostly dialog in any narrative mode, and it’ll come out the same. It’s not a showcase of third-person objective.

We’ll use a better example.

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Do You Need a First-Line Hook?

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Not that kind of hook!

This question came up on Reddit this morning. Here’s my answer:

Like most writing advice, “You have to have a first-line hook” is wisdom-adjacent while managing to be both wrong and imprecise. Does “first line” mean the first printed line or the first sentence? It’s wrong either way, but pointless ambiguity is a hallmark of oft-repeated writing advice.

First-line hooks are great. I love them to pieces. But they’re not essential; let’s not overvalue them.

Let’s reject the “line” part first. The position of the first line break on the printed page is irrelevant. Typography isn’t destiny.

How about the first sentence? I sometimes read a book for the first time and its opening sentence grabs me hard enough that I remember it years later, well enough to quote an approximation of it. This makes the story as a whole more vivid and easier to talk about. And, of course, I have no choice but to keep reading.  I benefit; the author benefits.

A vivid and memorable first sentence is a good thing to have. Does it also have to take the form of a hook? No. “Call me Ishmael” isn’t hooky in the usual sense at all, not in the way that, “I was riding down the old high road and came upon a ventriloquist and his dummy dangling from a tree” is.

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