Fic Talk > General Discussion

How do you lead into a scene?

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Sakabelle:
Dialogue, definitely.  My character are always talking!

Chaos:
I never really thought about it, but going back and spot checking some of my most recent fics, I guess I tend toward starting out with dialogue. However, that said, most of my dialogue is used to convey the setting and/or something major going on action-wise, so it was still hard to pick just one of those things. lol. But the first story I opened up of mine, 4 out of 5 chapters started out with dialogue, and the 5th would have if there'd been a 2nd character in the scene--and the first line was definitely a line that could have been spoken.

I do know that for me it's important to get all 3 of these things in as early in the chapter as possible--without it coming across as trying to get all of these things into a scene as early as posible. To me. it's easiest to do that using dialogue. Example from one of my most recent unposted chapters, the first line of the chapter starts with spoken words, but also establishes the action of the scene and the location:


--- Quote --- “I’ll take this one,” I request as I select the best of the lavender roses.
--- End quote ---

Given, it's not a terribly action-packed scene, but yes, establishes the action(s) of buying flowers and preparing for a date (of sorts). It's also (I think) pretty obvious that the character has to be at a flower shop. From there I continue the dialogue between the character and the flower-shop girl to build the character (it's the first chapter from that character's POV) and to set up his "date" in what I think would be a more interesting way than using prose to describe what he's doing. So the scene does revovle around the dialogue, but it uses the dialogue to drive the action.

Sinara:
Mostly, I open up my scenes with dialogue because through words, you can have them establish the scene. You can have them describe the setting or action they are about to do. You can introduce a new scene. You can do almost anything with dialogue. But I also do a fair bit of the other two, as well. A lot of it depends on the story. The general mood/tone of the story helps to delegate which type of intro I use. If the overall mood of the story is happy, I tend to use more dialogue. If the overall mood is horror or sad, I use more setting. If it's darker or dramatic, I use more setting. It all depends. But dialogue is the most used one for me.

fracktrain:
I also do dialogue first

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