The 5 Things Every Great Opening Has to Do

Edit: People, go find the openings, edit your threads and drop them in so we can all see them!

Just wrapped the new members call. Talked through the 5 things I look for when I open a script.

Every one of them has to show up in your first few pages. Usually not because you planned them on page 1, but because you did the real work everywhere else. The opening is one of the last things you write. You launch out to sea. You find your way back. Then you build the opening that earns it all.

Here they are.

1. Voice

Not showy. Not clever. Confident.

The reader needs to feel, inside a paragraph, that you know what you're doing. That you didn't research this world, you lived in it. When you read Tim's script, the machinery is dense at first. Helicopters, gear, procedure. And then you settle in and think: oh, this guy is the real deal. That's voice. It's the subconscious trust you build with a reader who's looking for any excuse to stop reading.

2. A Great Character We Can't Look Away From

Someone with a primal drive we recognize. Even if they're working against themselves.

Woody is jealous. Marty Supreme is a con man. Rick in Casablanca is closed off and cynical. Shrek is a bachelor hiding in his man cave. The moment we meet them, something hooks us. Usually because the character is in conflict with themselves and doesn't even know it.

External obstacles bore me. Internal contradiction is where the good stuff lives.

3. A Fresh Premise

Usually a familiar genre with a surprising angle.

Signs is every alien invasion movie ever made, but tiny. One house. One widower. A crisis of faith. Shrek 2 was pitched to us as Meet the Parents, only Fiona brings home Shrek. Take something that feels done. Give it a perspective nobody's seen. That's the job.

4. A World That Feels Lived In

Specific details tell the reader a real person lives here.

Page 1 of Signs. Graham walks into the hallway, picks up a balled-up pair of sweat socks and a kid's sweater from the floor, drops them in the hamper. He's a parent. That one beat does more than five pages of dialogue ever could.

Same opening. The sun-faded outline of where a large Catholic cross used to hang. One image. We know something about this man's grief before we've met him. Before the word God is said. That's commitment to the world.

5. A Situation About to Break

Tension. Something in your opening has to feel like the pin is being pulled.

In Signs, it's a child's scream and a sign pressed into the cornfield. In Shrek 2, it's Fiona's parents waiting to meet her new husband, and two ogres step out of the carriage. We feel the crack before the break.

If your opening isn't doing all 5, it's not always the opening that's broken. Usually it means you haven't finished the work downstream. Write the messy drafts. Get lost. Get scared. Find the gold. Then come back and build the opening that sells it all.

Homework

Drop a comment with a movie opening you love. One you can watch over and over and learn from every time.

Tell me:

What movie
What about the opening pulls you in
Which of the 5 does it nail

I want to build a list. Next call we go into the weeds on a few of them. How they were written. What's on the page. What we can steal for our own work.

Ready when you are.

1:02:11

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