Your reading experience...

[spectre]

Perhaps not strictly your experience with this scenario in reading, but when watching a movie, or even pondering your own novel, I wondered if anyone felt it unnatural or irregular to begin a story with a cliffhanger? To me, Anime is the most infamous for doing this early on in the telling of the story and I was considering such a plot to open my novel instead of the political scene I had planned on (finding it might fit more nicely later in the book). So generically, do you think an immediate cliffhanger puts you off the story?

 

[Penpilot]

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by cliffhanger. Cliffhangers, to my understanding, are when a story ends while leaving usually the protagonist in peril.

If you're talking about where the story starts with a flash-forward, showing the audience a glimpse, leaving them with a question as to how things will turn out and then goes back to the beginning and lets things play out, that happens all the time. It's a tool that sometimes gets used to help out a story that has a slow or weak beginning.

Personally, I don't find it off-putting or unusual.

 

[BronzeOracle]

I remember the beginning of Mission Impossible 3 which had a gripping cliffhanger. You just think 'how is he going to get out of this??'. It immediately created dramatic stakes and its effect continued through the film as the cliffhanger featured the hero's wife and when they are together you a remembering what is going to happen.

 

[Mythopoet]

Do you mean a flash forward, in the style of many anime, where at the very beginning it shows a quick scene that will happen much later in the story before the regular beginning?

If so, I don't mind them. Though I have noticed that if the flash forward is too generic, with too little information for me to comprehend what's going on, then I often end up totally forgetting about it by the time I get a few episodes in. Then later on when it shows the scene from the flash forward again within the context of the rest of the story I'll go "oh yeah, I vaguely remember that". Example: Gurren Lagann. I freaking love that anime. But to be honest, the brief flash forward that shows older Simon on some kind of space vehicle gave me so little to go on and had so little connection to the next scene where Simon is a kid digging for survival under the earth, that it made virtually no impression on me and I totally forgot about it long before the story got there. So that would be something to beware of.

Questions to ask yourself: what is the purpose of putting this scene at the beginning? What information do I want it to convey to the reader or what experience do I want it to give them that will prime them for the main story?

One thing that I have started to get annoyed with is when an episode, generally of some story in one of the thriller or mystery genres, shows a high-tension scene that gets you on the edge of your seat and then cuts away while the screen says "7 hours earlier" or "2 days earlier" or something like that. It just seems like a sort of gimmicky way to ratchet up the suspense without actually having to build it through the narrative.

 

[Feo Takahari]

Count me as a vote against. It's not something that will get me to stop reading a story, but it's often pointless. The one story where I felt it was necessary was The Gone-Away World, and that's because it's spec-fic and has no spec-fic elements for the first half of the novel--it had to open with a fantastical world to show that there was eventually going to be fantasy somewhere in the book. (And other stories do that way more elegantly, like how Jurassic Park sets up the dinosaurs by having some dinosaurs escape at the beginning--no chronology break necessary.)

 

[TWErvin2]

What it appears you're describing is a variation on a frame story, a structure which has been around for centuries.

 

[Trick]

I have done this in my current WIP. The MC is writing his memoir and he begins with the moment where he promised that if he survived, he would write about is life so the world would never forget him (which was a fear of his, obscurity). He is very spontaneous so throughout the book he keeps jumping back and forth with the continuation of that scene and it provides a kind of theme. The funny part is, at the time he is writing, obscurity is no longer a fear he has because he is very famous. It's a bit cliche but I like it. Hopefully other's do too.

 

[spectre]

What it appears you're describing is a variation on a frame story, a structure which has been around for centuries.

I know of this kind of work mostly through movies. I loved it in some, then when it became common usage I of course grew tired of the style. Insofar as my own writing, I don't intend to use a style like this exclusively, but it would offer an opportunity to put in place a change of pace or strategy in the writing.

Do you mean a flash forward, in the style of many anime, where at the very beginning it shows a quick scene that will happen much later in the story before the regular beginning?

No, definitely not a flash forward. This sounds more like Prologue/Epilogue material to me, I have seen it used a lot as well (in Anime of course, or espionage and mystery stories, true.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by cliffhanger. Cliffhangers, to my understanding, are when a story ends while leaving usually the protagonist in peril.

Well to me a cliffhanger can be an ending where there is peril or a non-definite resolution, but when I think cliffhanger I just think of bringing the story to one climax, then cutting off the reader at least for a while .

My intention for a cliffhanger isn't so dramatic, since it's the beginning of the book. I am taking advice from reads of my prologue which weren't too raving some finding the events boring, or too much fluff and info dump. I don't want to set a generic climax where some random event is how readers walk into the story, I want to put them into the story immediately, for a time, even if I have to go east to get west while writing later. I was thinking of putting a character who is met later in the story at a point where the story has already unraveled for them more than for the MC's, kind of like Gandalf in LoTR. He has this knowledge of events and plans for it that the Hobbit is unaware of, and that power over the journey is inherited by Stryder and takes on it's twist with Boromir's offer.

There was some comparison to an alternative beginning chapter I was writing to an old movie 32 Samurai or something like that, I forget the exact title. It was completely unintended and unbeknownst to me, I also didn't intend to have my entire story be aroused by the fate of a little village against a superior foe, petitioning for help from outsiders but nonetheless, I am striving for a great amount of originality in how my story unfolds both in progression, presentation, and material. I thought I'd see how people felt about being left with questions after the first chapter rather than introduced to a story in the first chapter that progresses; I wanted to present a main story element and then make readers ask the question what is going to happen so that they are immediately tasked with guessing the course of the story. versus being brought along for the ride. I'm looking for a hook to engage readers right off the bat.

Thanks for your input!

 

[K.S. Crooks]

The police tv drama Flashpoint always began with a cliff-hanger. They would show a dramatic/perilous scene from about 40 minutes into the show, then go back to a time that led to the events that were seen. I think this can work in a book as long as the events shown are memorable enough that the reader will not forget reading about part of it already.