You’ll often see writing advice about good first lines. It’s important to hook your readers right off the bat, to make them want to keep reading and find out what happens next. It’s important for finding a publisher too. A lot of publishers get hundreds of submissions and they have to sort through them very quickly to figure out which ones they’re going to reject, so you want to have a really strong opening that grabs your reader’s interest and makes them want to know more.
You need an engaging and interesting opening sentence and opening paragraph.
But the problem is that if you spend ages and ages trying to make the first sentence absolutely perfect, you might never write the second one. For me, because of my approach to planning, I often end up having to rewrite the opening to my books. For example, in Shadows of Tomorrow, I initially thought that the main character would be the one who became Cassie, so I started the book there, but I later realised that Gareth was the one making all the important plot decisions. Gareth turned into the real protagonist, so I went back and rewrote the opening to start with him. I could have spent ages and ages making that first scene with Cassie have the perfect opening line only to find that it didn’t need to be the opening line anymore.
Knowing this about my writing style, I generally don’t fuss too much about the opening sentence until the end, until I know exactly how the story is going to end so I can write an opener that ties in with that. When I’m writing my first draft, I will just write whatever fits with the first scene as my opening sentence, knowing I can come back to it later. What I write is good enough for a first draft.
And that’s the point. A lot of the time, you can write something knowing you can come back and fix it later. If you’re not sure how to get a piece of information to a character, you can write a clunky bit of exposition for the first draft, knowing you can come back and fix it in a second draft. I’ve seen someone advise just summarising what needs to happen next in square brackets: [and now the hero does something clever to escape]. There’s a large chunk of a scene that’s summed up by that one sentence, but you don’t have to figure out the perfect escape plan right now. You can keep writing and figure out the details later. I tend not to use this square bracket summary approach – I prefer to just write a clunky version of the scene I can fix later – but I can see why other writers might like it.
The thing I do use though is ??? in place of details. I might want to think of the perfect name for a location, but I haven’t figured it out yet, so I’ll put ??? in every time the name would come up and I can easily find these parts and insert the name in a second draft. I do the same with details I need to research. ??? basically means little detail (usually a word or a name but sometimes a sentence) that I need to add later. It stops me losing my flow of writing to go and look something up there and then. Using the same set of punctuation every time I reach one of these points makes it easy to search through the document later to find the bits I missed.
My first drafts tend to be pretty rough as I’m generally figuring out the plot as I go. I know I will have to come back and rewrite chunks later, so I don’t sweat the details. I can fix these little detail gaps later. I can find the perfect first line when I know the overall shape and themes of my story. I can fix the awkward dialogue exchange.
If you fret about having every sentence perfect before you can proceed to the next one, you’ll never get the first draft finished. So write something that’s good enough for now and worry about making it perfect later. This means writing a second or third draft is critically important, but you can always improve a thing that exists more easily than you can make a perfect creation out of nothing on the first go.
The first character sounds like a villain, the second like a hero. The thing is, they’re both the same person. The character of Colonel Mustang is one of the main characters of the series through its entire run and he is interesting for his depth. He is a very powerful alchemist, capable of causing enormous damage with his power. It’s revealed that during a war that took place prior to the main events of the series, he was a soldier sent in to commit genocide. He and several others of the characters were involved in this fight almost wiping out an entire people. When the fighting was over, he was the first to admit that he and his associates were war criminals.
As for the military coup and teaming up with a mass murderer, both of these are done to take out a threat, a villain who plans on causing a massive loss of life, and through the coup he avoids killing and has his followers do the same. His actions in this case are heroic. I find it interesting that one of the images Netflix uses on thumbnails of this show is an image of Mustang looking thoroughly evil. He is a character who has many of the character traits and goals associated with a villain, and who occasionally starts down a villainous path, but who remains ultimately one of the good guys.
His actions are not forgiven. When he is confronted by the child of two of the people he murdered, he doesn’t deny that what he did to them was a crime. He doesn’t try and excuse it, even though there were excuses he could make. In this instance, he’d been caught up in an attack and just seen his family slaughtered. When he woke up in a hospital, he was disorientated and confused, and saw two people who were of the same race that had been waging war on his land. His instinctive reaction was that they were the enemy. But even though he had this excuse, he accepted that those deaths were wrong. His actions were unforgivable, but he as a person can earn forgiveness and changes. He is accepted by those he hurt and they are all able to move beyond their past.