I suffer from a very common affliction of novel writers … getting stuck on opening scenes. I work and work at the first chapter, trying to create the seed from which a great story can grow, and eventually the clay gets dry (he said, mixing his metaphors) and the whole thing falls apart in my hands.
While trying to come up with a solution to this a year or so ago, I happened to be re-watching Breaking Bad. As I binge-watched, it struck me that a potential answer was right there in front of me. I’d always enjoyed those amazing opening sequences to each of the episodes, when we see the main characters in some dreadful fix, and we just can’t imagine how they got there or how they’re going to get out of it. It always made me wonder if the writers literally set themselves a challenge by putting the characters in the deepest hole they could think of before pulling out all the stops to create an explanation and a solution.
Who cares whether the Breaking Bad writers did it, I thought, why not give it a go yourself? And I did. The result was a revelation. I created a novel outline that I was truly pleased with for the first time since finishing my creative writing MA.
I suppose you could say that the scene I initially imagined was a sort of midpoint – to use the terminology of screenwriting gurus like Save the Cat author Blake Snyder. It was an apparent epic defeat for my hero – an event for which I initially had no background in mind and no idea how the hero could turn it around. What I found was that the challenge forced my imagination to dig deep. It gave my unconscious something to chew on, and within a few days I’d pushed out from the midpoint in both directions to create a complete three-act plan
So, if you’re stuck on your opening scene, vainly striving for perfection before you’ll allow yourself to move on, maybe give this technique a try.