Establishing Shot

It's easier to write a scene with an establishing shot.  In film, a few moments spent gazing at rolling hills and a small hut with a tendril of smoke rising and a contented beast of burden outside munching on grass, or the ubiquitous pan across a city's skyline, tells you where you are about to be placed, as a story begins (or a new scene).  Where it once began, The Ax and the Vase spent a few pages introducing characters and a battleground before the opening setpiece, the battle itself.  And even now, opening in an entirely different point in Clovis' life, there is half a page or so of scudding clouds in a milky white vault and a very quiet stockade before we learn that king Childeric, Clovis' father, is about to die.

Thanks to a discussion at Absolute Write (my participation there is nowhere near as great as it is at HFO, but my visitation is exactly as frequent), I'm looking at butterknifing the opening page.

Beginning in media res is tempting.  Some authors can do it, providing all the necessary knowledge, without seeming to "tell" it - expositing so well and in such brevity it's almost painless.

I have a few things to tell, in my opening scene.  Its core is the core conflict both of a prince and a king - the battle between ambition, the desire to inherit, and the impiety of wishing one's own father dead.  This is the first building block in Clovis' character as king, and it is also the curving, circling threat against it:  as he becomes a king with four sons of his own, all of whom will inherit (primogeniture was not the habit of Frankish succession).

This is an incredible tension, the seduction of desire forced against the guilt of its only means of fulfillment.  Imagine living your life with the understanding that you have one purpose ... and that the only means of attaining that is someone else's death.  The intellectual parricide, every day, of *wanting* the throne you know will be yours, the throne everything has taught you to aspire to, the throne that represents - not just power, not just wealth - but the very purpose in your having been born at all.  You can't be fulfilled without gaining it.  You can't gain it without your father dying.

Not all parental relationships, to be sure, are like mine with my dad.  But even so, in the Frankish community, family was the basis of everything.  And there is much reason to suspect that in Clovis' time, at his level of nobility - in him personally, indeed - filial piety ranked high among the personal value system.  His life is an example of this expectation of his own sons, and there seems no reason to imagine he would not have valued his own father, Childeric, very highly.

And so the opening scene - this moment of realization that he is about to become everything he is meant to be ... and how - is emotionally very powerful.

I'm going to give it a go in media res, even though I swore the butterknife was down.  Maybe just for myself, maybe as a real edit.  If I feel it works out, I may post drafts, or the finished scene, as a new excerpt page.  (Those who have been watching carefully may have noticed - I took down all my excerpts about a week ago, except the Author's Note page.)

We shall see.  But I am interested in the possibilities.