I love Prologues and Opening Scenes!

As I sit here, struggling with working my way through the heart of my current work-in-progress, “ISTEN KARDJA: The Wizard”, I find myself wondering why some parts are easier to write than others. I can sit down and create the introduction, introduce characters, build their backgrounds, make them interesting, and set them on their adventures; other times, I feel like the magic is gone and that the story is predictable. Aspiring authors read a lot of advice about writing styles and classic composition, that say a story has to follow a certain pattern / story arc for things like character development, rising action, climax and resolution. 

After a lot of reflection on this (and by reflection, I mean sitting on the couching watching TV…) and I realized something. I was flipping through a selection of different movies and while I judged a lot of them to be classic but boring, I realized that there was one thing I enjoyed more than anything else, and it most readily apparent in action movies: 

-	I enjoy the opening scenes of most movies, more so than watching the middle sections, and sometimes even more than the endings.

I can turn on ‘Independence Day’ and watch the mystery of what is sending the radio signals, slowly moving across the shadow of the moon before breaking into earth’s atmosphere in a blaze of glory; the stunned amazement of realizing that something big is about to happen – whatever it is, is still a mystery -  but it’s going to change the world.

Then I watch the opening of the ‘Day after Tomorrow’, and see the dramatic effects of climate change breaking off the ice shelf, and a hail-storm killing people in Japan. In ‘2012’, the tremors, earthquakes, and whatever it was that was causing all that water in the mine in India to start boiling, then racing to the White House to raise the alarm! 
Those openings that introduce you to the protagonist for the first time; that give you a hint of what the danger is that is lurking around the corner, and the sheer scale of the mountain they must climb if they want to have any hope of saving themselves or the world!

I love that build up. That mystery.

I hate the cliché endings – the ones where they’ve made the bad guys so immensely powerful that the only way to wide them out is a kill shot to the head that also happens to be incredibly undefended for such a critical weak point (killing the queen to destroy the hive-mind).  So many times I’ve been in awe of the challenge created for the heroes that, only to have the writers crap-out on how they will ever get themselves out of this mess (Anakin blowing up the command ship and all the droids suddenly drop; Independence Day, again with the command ship; and let’s not forget Game of Thrones, wiping out the army of the dead that could only grow and grow with each new death, suddenly erased with a single dagger).

I will turn on some movies that I’ve seen a hundred times just to watch the opening scenes, then turn to the channel to something else. I love the build-up. And I hate getting disappointed with the lucky-shot that gets them out of it. I understand that movies don’t have unlimited time to take us through the messy clean-up that it would take to see the heroes slug it out with the enemy in real time, and it’s easy to wrap things up quickly, neat & tidy with a nice bow on it, but still…

Anyway, I guess the whole point of this is to explain what I enjoy most in my own writing: the rising action; the opening scenes; introducing the characters – who they are and what they’re like, and why they’re doing this. And maybe that is what is making Book 3 of my series the hardest one to write – the one that wraps everything up and places a neat & tidy bow on it.

Or maybe I won’t… (…leave it neat & tidy, that is!!)