my friends need to be punished

Writing Excuses 21.11: The Cold Open - Action

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-11-the-cold-open-action

Key Points: Starting with an action scene. Demonstrates competence of character. Start in media res? Stakes! A reason to care. Moments of humanity. Establish voice, worldbuilding, and character stakes. Point of view. Prologue or cold open? Prologue means two starts! Go ahead and use your cool technique in the action cold open. Tension! Make the reader like the character. Information and reader emotional reaction. 

[Season 21, Episode 11]

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[Season 21, Episode 11]

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] The Cold Open - Action. 

[Erin] Tools, not rules. For writers, by writers.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And we're going to talk about starting your story with an action scene. There are lots and lots of good reasons to do this. My personal favorite is that a good action opening... A good one, for me, demonstrates the competence of the character you want me to like, and now I'm on board. And one of the best examples of this, I think, is the Pierce Brosnan GoldenEye James Bond, where they begin with him bungee jumping on a dam.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And James Bond almost doesn't qualify as a cold open, because it's not cold. We know we're watching a James Bond movie. We already know he's competent. But the reason, for me, that a cold open is so important, an action cold open can be so important is that I need you to tell me why this character has earned the ability to be awesome, and a good action scene can do that.

[DongWon] Yeah. I'm going to fulfill my role as the show's resident hater, and talk about why action scenes as cold opens are really hard to do well. Right?

[Howard] Yep.

[DongWon] I think there's this tendency to want to start in media res, is advice you always hear. Because you want to start with stakes. Right? You want to start with something exciting, you want to start with something that's going to engage people. The problem is survival is not good stakes. Right? Even deep into our story,  often, like, if the character lives or not, I don't care about that as much as I care about what happens if the character dies. Right? If the character dies, then all these relationships fall apart, all these people will be incredibly sad, but, like, all of those things have so much more chewiness than my connection to the character continuing to exist on the page or not. Right? And so that is compounded by us not knowing the character yet. Right? Part of why the James Bond thing works is we have a serialized relationship with this character. We know who James Bond is, we want him to do these things, we want him to succeed in his mission. Because we like him, and we know him. Right? Or we have a relationship to him, whether we like it or not. And so I think when you are starting a book with a cold open, the biggest mistake I see... Or an action scene as a cold open, the biggest mistake I see over and over again is thinking that, oh, this is a cool gun fight, that's all I need it to be. Right? And instead, what you need to do is give me a reason to care about these characters that goes beyond just the fact of they might die in this scene.

[Erin] I recently started reading a romance novel called Love Hate Relationship, I believe. And it's...

[DongWon] I love, like, a simple descriptive title. Just, like, tell me what we're engaging with. I was thinking of K-pop Demon Hunters too,  which is just like here's the thing...

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] That's what it is.

[Erin] This is what it is. But it is a story sort of a... It was described to me as a Cutting Edge, if you know that old romantic comedy, which also actually begins in an action scene. In the beginning of the Cutting Edge, the movie, you begin with the two leads, one who is a figure skater, a pairs figure skater, and the other who's a hockey player, both doing their score at top levels, and it cuts back and forth between them. And part of what they play with is the contrast between the two sports, which will then come into play when they become a pair together. But in the beginning of this, it really opened with them, with one of the main characters, in the middle of playing hockey. And what was great about it is you get the small, like, things that you need to think about in a sport. So you're getting a lot of micro tension, like, will I get passed the puck? Will I get the thing? But there was a part where the main character looks up into the stands and, like, one of their parents isn't there. Even though they promised to be there.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And though it was only a moment, it gives... It really humanized the person. You're like, this is why it's so important. And they look up again, and they see the scouts that might send them to the college that they really want to go to.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And putting those moments of humanity in allowed me to then really care whether or not they actually made the shot in the end or they didn't. Because I'm already starting to care about them as a character within this action context.

[DongWon] I would argue that there's three things a cold open really needs to do. Right? One is establish voice. Second is establish worldbuilding. And the third is establish character stakes, not just character bolts. What matters about this character? Right? And so kind of what you're describing with Cutting Edge and then with this book is you get a sense of the worldbuilding. Right? This is about skating, here are the values, it's being good at this thing, all of that. There is the voice of it, which hopefully is coming through in the prose in a way that's really exciting. And then there is, why do we care about this character? Them looking up in the stands and seeing that their parent is missing. One of my favorite examples of an action cold open, pulling from film, is the Matrix. Right? The Matrix starts with this thing that is the most vibe-y, the most voice-y thing in the world. Right? Especially in 1999, we had not seen anything like this. And it was just like mind-blowingly, like, cool and interesting, it was such a strong aesthetic. It was such a strong worldbuilding component, because it starts with this idea of like searching for this thing and then you're getting this cool technology, both in terms of how they were filming it and then also the cyberpunky hackery story that's embedded within it. Right? So we're getting that worldbuilding and that voice. The thing that movies can do that books can't do is show you a picture, though. Right? So we actually don't have a lot of character stakes in that scene. And a lot of film examples will have this problem, where you won't have a lot of stakes, because you can replace that with the audience looking at the scene and enjoying the physicality of the scene and building a relationship with the character based on how they look. Right? We like Trinity because she's hot and cool. Right? Like, that is basically what they're relying on, and it works. Right? We like James Bond because he's suave and doing slick stuff. Right? Like, he's jumping out of an airplane, he's, like, shooting guys in an alleyway. Right? These kinds of things work as a cold open. Being able to see the character builds that stake in a different way. When you're  doing a book cold open, you need to give us things to care about that character with. Right? Like, I think of Six of Crows as an example where you kind of start... It's not necessarily an action scene, you're kind of, like, going through this, like, weird prison, but you're following this guard, and then it devolves into action over the course of it. But because you learned so much about him and his interiority as we move through this space, by the time things are popping off at the end, and... Spoiler for the prologue... By the time he dies at the end of that, it feels sad because he's encountered things that are way out of his scope of reality, his ability to manage these challenges, and we know enough about him that it hurts, because we care about this guy and his relationship to the world.

[Erin] This explains a lot to me about... What you just said, in that I think when people are writing, sometimes when you're writing your action scene cold open, you're seeing, like, the James Bond gunfight, but your reader may not be seeing it in the exact same way. And as somebody who can't see things in my head a lot of times, those action scenes can leave me a little cold, because I cannot envision...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Everything that's happening, so the details of how cool the gunfight are, I... Like, a lot of times, they just kind of run past me...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And any emotional moment, any character moment, I will seize on. But if there's none of that, and it's just pow, pow, pow... In a movie, it works because I can see it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But in a book, I find it sometimes hard to track, or to know why I should.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, why should I be tracking it, actually?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And why should I be caring about it?

[Howard] This comes back to a tool that we should all have ready access to in our toolboxes, and that is point of view.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Howard] If you are doing your action cold open in strict first person POV, then you don't have the ability to give us someone else's perspective on the awesome thing that the main character just did. We only get their opinion of what it is that they're doing.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] But we get very quickly embedded in their voice. Which is awesome. By the same token, when we talk about movies, that's... And comics, that's cinematic POV or cinematic third person, where we tend to follow as if it is a third person limited POV, but we're following via a camera that is looking over their shoulder. And so we will be looking at other people. Knowing that that is what movies do can help you understand how to do it with prose.

[DongWon] Yeah. That's what I would say for the action cold open in prose. Think of it as a vehicle for voice and worldbuilding. The thing that you're doing to pull us in is be so voice-y and so interesting and introduce elements of your world in nuanced and complex ways. And then the last thing you're doing is giving us stakes. Stakes are the failure point, but the hook is the voice and the world. Right? When you're doing that. That's why, when we see an action cold open, it's most frequently in isolation from your main story. And that is either by a different perspective or a different place and time. I would love to dig into that more when we come back from our break, though.

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[DongWon] Okay. Before the break, I was talking about one of the things about a cold open that makes it a cold open, I think, is really important is actually kind of isolating it a little bit from the rest of your story. Right? Either through perspective or through time as a flash forward or a flashback. Erin, before we started recording, you raised an interesting question, which is, what's the difference between a prologue and a cold open? Do you have thoughts on that?

[Erin] No, that's why I asked.

[DongWon] The question...

[Erin] That's why I asked you.

[laughter]

[Erin] But I feel like, like, a lot of prologue... Like, some of the things that you're talking about, I often see in prologues.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Which is that they are a worldbuilding delivery mechanism, and what they do is they... They're like, I need everyone to understand that, like, the great shebang is what got this entire thing started. And so I want  to put you in the mindset of a person who was there when the great shebang happened, and then it kills them at the end, so we know we're not following them anymore.

[DongWon] Totally.

[Erin] I feel like I see a lot of that sort of setup of world through action...

[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah.

[Erin] And it's difficult... It's interesting. I wonder if you feel like it... How well it works. Because I wonder if the danger is, number one, that people might not be excited about it, they might not be interested in the action.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But, number two, if they get really interested in the action, and then you pull them to somewhere else in the story, are they going to be like, I wish I were further back or further forward in the actual time period that the story is that I'm now having to read.

[DongWon] You really got to... The challenge of it is, you're almost doing two starts to your book. Right? And that's the challenge of a prologue, in general, is you kind of got to start the book twice. Right? And starting a book once is really hard. Now, that said, you can give us two different tonal openings, and that can be part of it. Right? So your prologue can operate as a here's the one vibe, and then your next open, that's the opening to, like, your actual plot is a different vibe. But it has to be interesting on its own terms. So I'm thinking of Fonda Lee's Jade City as an example of this. It's one of my favorite sort of action cold opens, which is, you get these two idiots who are going into a restaurant to try and rob a guy of his Jade. Right? And that scene gives us the worldbuilding and the stakes. We see what kind of world Janloon is. We see the perspective of why Jade matters so much to these people. We get to see what is capable... What people are capable of doing with Jade, because it... Surprise, the robbery doesn't go smoothly. And, we get all this voice of the world and the characters and the vibes and the stakes of these two idiots trying to accomplish this thing, even though we know they're idiots. Right? And so we start with that specific image and that specific element of we're like, oh, this world is so cool. These criminals are so fun. I want to spend more time here. We're getting this very like Guy Ritchie kind of opening in terms of, like, a crime story. And then when we jump to chapter 1, we're getting the perspective of the daughter, whose name I'm blanking on right now. We're getting her perspective as somebody returning to this city. We get this perspective of, like, oh, this prodigal child coming home. And we get a sense of a different kind of story that we're entering into. So, you can lose momentum by doing that. But because we also have a clear entry point to the story, both these two openings kind of work. One is a cheat, in a certain way, to get all the worldbuilding on the page without having to explain it through your main character's perspective, and then you can just enjoy spending time with the main character.

[Howard] It's worth pointing out that the example that I led with, GoldenEye, technically I would say that's a prologue. Because at the end of that scene, when he flies away in a plane, we end that scene, and we do the James Bond music, and then it's 10 years later.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] That feels very prologue-y to me. But it establishes what kind of world we're living in, and it establishes who our final villain will be. Spoiler alert, Sean Bean.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Well, that's that movie ruined.

[laughter... Also... We've ruined a movie... From 20 years ago... He dies...]

[Howard] I want to bounce back to the Matrix really quick.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And draw a metaphor here. The Wachowski's invented the bullet time photography rig...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Howard] Which was essentially looping a set of 100 cameras or something...

[DongWon] Something crazy like that.

[Howard] Around the action so that you could fire them all off at once and create a 3D rotation on film in the pre-digital, pre-CG days. They leveraged that technology in their opening scene. They didn't save it for something later. What is this? Well, it is an establishment of voice. This is a coolness. This is a visual, but it is a cool thing that's going to happen again. And so, when you are writing your action cold open, if there is some cool technique, whether it is using brackets to describe the way aliens yell...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Or whatever, don't be afraid to use it in that opening...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Action scene. Because you are communicating to the reader that this is a thing that can happen again later, and if you do it well enough, like the Matrix did it well enough with the Trinity fight, we're hungry for it to happen again, and you get what is, to my mind, a big win, which is I keep turning pages because I want to read something like that...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] From you again.

[Erin] I will say it's interesting, because it creates... I'm always interested in... When stories are creating a different Journey for the reader than they are the characters. And so if you're telling the reader, wow, there's this really cool thing that could happen in the world. A lot of times in fantasy prologues, or cold opens, you'll see, like, the use of a really extreme version of magic or a technology, often a mistake...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Ruins everything. And then you'll go forward and it's like people rediscovering that magic or trying to figure it out. But in the... But they don't know. They're like, oh, I'm just trying this new thing. But in the mind of the reader, they're like, I know what this could do, both positively and negatively. And so it's like you're waiting for the other shoe to drop the entire time. Which is a really fun way of creating tension in a reader, even in a low stakes time for the character when they're just playing around, because you know that, like, Hiroshima happens in 3 days, so this lovely, like, meal that everybody is happen... Is happening around their table isn't just a meal, it's one of the last meals. Or it's leading to something like [garbled]

[DongWon] Well, The Matrix, again, is a great example of this. We see Trinity do the cool bullet time Jump, and then the rest of the movie is when does Neo get to do that? How is he going to go on his hero's journey, to call back to an episode a while back, but how is he going to get to the point where he is able to do the thing that she does. So we get sort of this magic system moment early on of, like, here's how she can break the reality while inside the Matrix. And then he's going to build his way up to doing that. Right? So we get that tease of a possibility. But, also, it is so... Howard, you're absolutely right. Where the Matrix is a primarily voice forward opening. Right? And if you think about all of the Cinematic tools being put on display there, from the technology to the costume design to that horrible green palette that everything has, is this idea of like... They're using voice to pull us in. Right? And so, I'm going to disrupt the idea of this episode a little bit at the end here, which is think less about whether or not you're starting with an action scene, and think more about what tool you're deploying to pull readers in. Right? So, I think action openings are often voice openings, and I think that the Matrix opening has more in common with, for example, the start of the movie Alien, which again is establishing a voice, establishing an aesthetic, and a technology, and pulls you into this incredibly slow pan through the ship, as it shows you the soundscape, it shows you the slowness of things, it shows you the way the technology looks and feels in this movie, which is going to matter a lot more than where the story ends up in the craziness at certain points.

[Howard] I want to enumerate some things, kind of summarize a little bit. DongWon, early on, you ticked off three elements you wanted an opening to do. You wanted...

[DongWon] It was voice, worldbuilding...

[Howard] Voice, worldbuilding...

[DongWon] And stakes.

[Howard] And stakes. And, Erin, you mentioned tension as something you want the reader to feel. And I've said I want the reader to like the character.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Howard] I see these as parallel categories. There's the informational category, I'm giving you information about voice, about world, about character stakes. And there is the reader reaction emotional category of I like the character, you are making me tense, you are... And I'm going to add one just because I want to have three... You are making me interested enough to keep turning the pages. As you are crafting your openings, you need to be thinking about doing all of those jobs...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Howard] With your words. And that's the part that's so tricky.

[DongWon] Yeah. And just to explain a thing, for me, stakes is tension. They're the same thing in my mind. Character stakes is what introduces and maintains tension, and that is also tied up with how you feel about the character in terms of liking them. So I think we're all agreed and kind of saying something very similar. I just wanted to be clear about that.

[Erin] Yeah. And I just wanted to say that something that I've found is that in working with students who are really used to visual media...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] They're used to playing games or used to watching things, is that a lot of that work is happening in ways that are not explicit. So a thing that's explicit on the screen is the action. Like, this  guy shot that guy in the face. That is a thing that we know happened. But the, like, I like this guy because, like, after his first three attempts to, like, shoot the guy didn't work, he found another way to do it with, like, a stapler, and, wow, that was really ingenious. Made him seem really competent, made me like him. I understand the stakes because all these different things that we're talking about. And so something that I would challenge people to do is when you're looking at action scenes, if you're patterning a written one after something that's visual, actually go through and look at an action scene and write down all the things that are happening in you. The things that you are thinking, the things that you are doing to fill in the gaps between the actions. Because those are the things that you're going to have to put on the page that the  cinematographer and the actors and the music do when you're in a visual form.

[Howard] And I would just like to lean in and say, damn it, Erin, that's the homework I was going to give. Like. literally...

[DongWon] You just gave the homework.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Word for word. Very nearly word for word. Okay. And so, fair listener, I'm sorry. I'm just going to repeat what Erin said in my own words. It's homework time. Okay?

[Howard] Take an action cold open from a movie, and sit down and write the things that are happening in it, in terms of worldbuilding, in terms of setting stakes, in terms of defining characters, in terms of how it makes you feel, with regard to tension, with regard to liking the characters. Make notes about all of those things that happened and how they were done. And then, attempt to write a version of that scene that does the same things using words.

[DongWon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.