Your business-meeting/party analogy is giving me a notion as to where either our tastes or our definitions part company. For me, both kinds of beginning are dropping you into something interesting. There’s the course of the character’s regular life - which, especially in SF, ought usually to be of interest and some kind of value to the reader - and then there’s the plot which, like Bilbo’s Road, ’sweeps them off their feet’ for good or ill, and to return or otherwise. If the standard beginning feels like the introduction to a business meeting, to me it’s failed. That’s the job of framing and incluing, generally.

But if it feels like the early part of a party when one is making a lot of introductions, and the party is going nicely but intangibly leading up to something right up until Wild Man O’Halloran jumps out of the birthday cake and starts beating on his bongoes - that’s what I call success.

In medias res is that approach to the party which prefers to descend upon it only after Wild Man has kicked it up to where it was headed, and of course these party animals will get different things out of it.

My taste usually runs towards coming early, feeling the build-up, and getting to know the people I’ll be dancing with later. Anybody out there who has actually seen or felt my funky left feet in action can shut up round about now.

It’s more like the difference between, on the one hand, going to a formal business meeting (to, say, start negotiations on a contract), where everybody introduces themselves first, giving their name and job and the company they work for, and then the person chairing the meeting reminds them of the list of items on the agenda and says what they’re supposed to be trying to achieve in the meeting, and only then do they get on to the actual business of the meeting, versus, on the other hand, just wandering up to a conversation among strangers at a party, and listening in, trying to work out what they’re talking about (which could be contract negotiations between two companies!)

As Patricia said: in the first case, you get to find out what’s going on, all set out in logical order, but not much happens for a while; while in the second, things start happening immediately, but you have to work out what’s going on. (This isn’t necessarily exactly an intellectual puzzle—you don’t need to get out a notebook and start taking notes … not if the writer has done it properly—but as a reader you do have to make some inferences, and also to not mind being a bit confused about some things at first.)

@Mary’s Mom: however old or young you are, there’s always more to learn!

Also, it’s what Tim and Gray are saying - if you start in the middle, you gain action/urgency, but you often lose those readers who want to know the characters first, or they won’t stay interested. Sometimes, you do it anyway because it’s right for the story (also, you can’t ever get ALL the readers anyway).

Mary’s Mom - Sorry about the delay in letting your comment through. I screen first-time posters to prevent spam, and I only get around to looking at the holding pen about once a day. Anything new from that email should go through with no problem now.

Tim and Gray - Yup, yup, carry on.

(One of these days, in my copious free time, I am going to figure out how to enable comment threading on this thing. Don’t hold your breath, though.)

If it’s emotional/character engagement that grabs you, though, I think you risk several things by just diving in. Firstly, you’ve had no time to get to care what happens to these people, and it’s already apt to be happening big time. Secondly, you’re meeting them at a moment of high stress in a situation you don’t really understand - misjudgements may abound. Thirdly, and slightly differently, it screws with your emotional baseline for them, to which they’re hoping (or fearing) to return… And so on.

Every one of these things can surely be turned to the story’s advantage. I still say it’s generally upping the stakes.

You’ve made me think twice about this, and out of that comes the notion that maybe imr is an especially promising introduction for action-adventure types - characters whose baseline is doing stressful, plot-hustling, hair-raising stuff, because that is pretty much what they are…

Also, does anyone know the term for a story that starts about a quarter through the tale? I am not quite sure, because some of the things that cause the scene where the story starts to happen could be missing, but from there on, the plot takes off…

Any way, very interesting post!

The great gamble the imr writer makes with their audience is: I bet you will care right away what happens to these people. In a familiar milieu, there are a lot of deft and economical ways to make this happen. In an unfamiliar world, with alien characters acting upon often nigh-incomprehensible motivations, this takes either genius or special advantages to accomplish.

One time-honoured solution is to write about settings or characters the audience have reason to know all about. Homer, Virgil, and Shakespeare did this in varying degrees. Lesser makers can do as much. If somebody writes about Hector or Holmes, Sophonisba or Cinderella, then I know why I ought to care about them - or not. Fanfiction gets the same option, usually within a narrower niche. But if the same story starts off with Moonbucket of Shadowheugh or Barack-Sarah Spammersbane #437 in a big perilous pickle for big opaque reasons, they don’t have the same trust capital, and I will probably plonk the book back on the shelf with a feeling of mild albeit vague nausea.

Convince me once that B.S. Bane is worth the reading, and I’ll follow shet through hell and high water and any style of beginning. This won’t work for the first such yarn I run into. Another reason, I suppose, for the Triumph of the Series!

In medias res is all about trusting that the reader cares. The SF writer has the specific handicap of having to persuade the reader that they also care about it in a setting of which they know nothing, before having done any of the customary worldbuilding spadework to earn it. If this gamble succeeds, it succeeds gloriously. But if it doesn’t…!

I lean, more than most, to a rather saga-like style of telling that consciously takes the reader’s secondary belief and interest for granted. It is one of my personal tricks, and it is my personal gamble that I gain on quality and compulsion what I lose on ease of engagement. But the good old in medias res opening? Too rich for my blood, mostly!