Opening Week: Setting the Scene

Now, here’s the opening passage from Wolfbreed.

In the darkest woods in Burzenland, south of the Carpathian mountains, a knight of the Order of the Hospital of St. Mary of the Germans at Jerusalem, Brother Semyon von Kassel, ran as if he was in pursuit of the devil himself.

Mud smeared his mail, leaves and stray twigs poked out from tangles in his hair and beard, soot darkened his skin, and crusted blood smeared his face. His lips cracked and bled as he whispered a Pater Noster over and over. The scabbard for his longsword dangled empty at his hip, and in his hand he clutched a shiny dagger too ornate for one of his order.

He stared out at the dark woods with eyes wide, shiny, and hard.

Drag marks in the loam of the forest floor marked the trail he followed. Occasionally, tar-like smears of old blood marked a tree or an errant part of someone’s armor. He had passed half a dozen remnants of his brother knights; helmets, gauntlets, boots, all marred by their knights’ blood and occasional shreds of flesh or hair.

Half a dozen signs of his dead brethren Semyon had passed since he had burned a respect for the Lord God into the pagan priest who had bequeathed him the dagger in his hand. Semyon prayed that, in the excruciation of the pagan’s punishment, the man’s lips had been compelled to speak the truth.

The beast he followed showed no impulse to hide its trail. Why would it? What fool would brave these woods against it? To confront a creature that hunted men the way a man would hunt a hare?

The basic formula for an opening (if there is such a thing) is, present a character with a problem, and place them in action in a well-defined setting. There are variants, but almost always you want the POV character nailed in the first two paragraphs, ideally in the first sentence. By the end of the page we should understand what they’re doing and why, and have some clues to where. The reason for this is that readers come with a set of default assumptions, and anything left unsaid risks running afoul of them. A good example is the first person narrator that doesn’t reveal their gender until page ten, chances are at least half the readers get a jolt. This becomes more important the further removed from the reader’s expectations the story is set.

Here we have the reader dumped into 13th Century Transylvania in the first sentence, and by the end of that sentence we’re running with a member of a Medieval military order. And the setting becomes more and more specific as the scene goes on, as does the character of Brother Semyon.