Don’t confuse your reader in paragraph one
Grounding your scene early keeps readers hooked
What is grounding?
Put simply, grounding is incorporating details about the who, what, where, and when of your scenes. With very few exceptions (more on that later), you need grounding in the first paragraph of every single scene you write. You don’t need to pack everything into those first few sentences, but you should answer at least one of these questions that orients the reader to the physical world:
Who is in the scene with us?
Where are we?
What are we doing?
When is this happening?
But won’t that make my scene openings boring?
So many writing instructors warn writers away from this kind of grounding because they claim it's boring to the reader.
To be clear: I’m not suggesting you open each scene with a description of the weather, what clothes everyone is wearing, the color of the wallpaper, and the exact coordinates of the room we’re in.
But, when you follow the advice to drop your reader straight into the action, you jump in with dialogue and then the reader is completely unmoored. We don't know where we are in time and space. Think about it: Wouldn’t a conversation have different significance if it happened at your dinner table on a Wednesday night versus on top of a mountain at dawn?
Okay, so, you don't want to start with the dialogue because it's disorienting. And you don't want to start with giving us a rundown of the setting because that's boring.
Then how do you put both of those elements together and come up with something that is a little bit more tension filled?
The answer: Give the critical details in a way that’s just as intriguing to the reader as dialogue. I know that’s easier said than done, so let’s look at an example of how to pull this off.
Consider this scene from After You’d Gone by Maggie O’Farrell.
Here’s a snippet of scene’s opening with the grounding removed, just jumping in with the dialogue:
"Where did you learn that song?"
"Um. I don't know. I think I heard it on the radio," [Alice] improvises, nervous. Is she going to get told off?
Her mother continues staring. "It's a song on a cassette that I only bought yesterday. There is no other way you could have heard it."
Ann appears to be talking to herself now.
"I have a feeling, Alice, that you are very musical. My father was a great musician and you must have inherited it." An unusual, effervescent feeling is creeping into Alice. Her mother is smiling at her admiringly.
Now, read the passage as it was originally written:
Ann cups Alice's chin in her hand and scrutinises her face. Alice, unused to this treatment, looks up at her mother, attentive.
"Where did you learn that song?"
Alice had been singing while she searched the garden for flowers for a miniature garden that she was creating in an old shoebox.
"Um. I don't know. I think I heard it on the radio," she improvises, nervous. Is she going to get told off?
Her mother continues staring. "It's a song on a cassette that I only bought yesterday. There is no other way you could have heard it."
Ann appears to be talking to herself now. Alice fidgets, impatient to get on with her tiny garden. She wants to steal some cocktail sticks for a runner-bean row.
"I have a feeling, Alice, that you are very musical. My father was a great musician and you must have inherited it." An unusual, effervescent feeling is creeping into Alice. Her mother is smiling at her admiringly. Alice flings her arms around her middle and hugs her.
Do you see the impact just a tiny bit of grounding can make?
There is only a four sentence difference between these examples, but with intentional and concise details about the characters and the setting, we better understand the relationship between mother and daughter and get a sense of what a typical day in the protagonist’s childhood might look like. Not boring at all, right?
Creating stakes and tension
Remember, you're not just giving the reader documentary camera view of what is happening in the scene. You're also capturing why what is happening on the page matters. The way that you convey setting details is filtered through the character's experience.
Let’s say your character is staring out the window, waiting for her best friend to come over so they can go get a cup of coffee. That’s the “what.”
In one version of this scene, she could see the bare tree branches out the window and notice how the gray skies make her depressed.
In another version, your character might be excited to put on her favorite scarf and get outside into the crisp fall air.
In each of these versions, your reader gets a different understanding of the character’s emotional state going into this coffee date. That’s the “why”; the reason that we are seeing this happen on the page.
There’s an exception to this rule
In general, you’re always going to want some grounding in your scene openings.
But! You may want to skip the grounding at the top of a scene if your goal with the scene is to disorient the reader for dramatic effect.
If the main character is being roused from a dead sleep, we might hear the first words that wake them.
If the scene starts with an explosion, the first line can be a scream.
We’ll want to get some sense of grounding later, but this type of scene opening is appropriate when you want to impart a sense of chaos or confusion.
Grounding: it’s not just for openings
Remember in the last paragraph when I said we can work grounding into a scene later? Let’s talk about it more.
Sometimes writers will start off with solid good grounding and then dissolve into what I call “talking heads” - scenes that could be happening anywhere so they may as well be floating in space. You can tell you’re writing a talking heads scene if 1) there are no breaks in the dialogue or 2) all the dialogue tags are internal (e.g., “She sighed” or “They considered”)
Grounding details need to be woven in through the whole scene. Anchoring your characters in the physical world is also a smart way to incorporate some of the contextual information that would slow down the opening or to break up large chunks of dialogue.
How to add grounding
It’s okay if your first drafts have plenty of talking head scenes. Mine almost always do. When we’re first putting pen to page, we want to capture the beats of our story; what moves us from one scene to the next. The details often fall away.
It’s perfectly fine to go back into your scenes later and bring those floating heads back down to earth - metaphorically speaking. (Unless, of course, your scene is about floating heads. In which case, please send it to me! 😉) I think you’ll be surprised and delighted by how much it adds to your manuscript.
Let me know if this was helpful! I’m always open to suggestions for my future Substack posts, so please comment here or DM me if you have a question or topic you’d like me to tackle!