Setting the Scene: Zoom Out Before You Zoom In

By David Griffin Brown

One common misstep I see in novel openings, chapter openings, and even new mid-chapter scenes is the tendency to zoom in too tightly, too soon. Writers often begin in the midst of action, focusing on a minute detail or a single character's immediate experience. While this approach aims to thrust readers into an exciting moment, it can inadvertently hamper immersion.

When a narrative starts with a narrow focus, readers naturally fill in the blanks, often imagining a quiet or isolated setting. So when subsequent sentences reveal a bustling scene or additional characters, it forces a mental reset. The initial image shatters, and we must reorient ourselves—a jarring experience that disrupts immersion.

To ground readers effectively, it's crucial to establish two key elements upfront: space and occupancy. Space: where is this scene unfolding? Occupancy: who or what is present? Beginning with a slightly wider lens offers an immediate sense of the environment and the actors within it.

Alternatively, starting with an abstract concept or emotion—without sensory details—can also work if you gradually illuminate the scene in the sentences that follow. This is akin to starting your readers off in the dark. There is nothing yet to picture, and so there is no way for the reader to be led astray.

For example, if you opened a story with the statement, “Jimmy always liked cats,” you aren’t yet inviting readers into a specific time and place, so there is nothing for us to mis-imagine. But when you do finally turn on the lights, the same principle applies: give us space and occupancy as soon as possible—don’t let us jump to any incorrect assumptions about either.

Another example of opening with darkness is leading with a line of dialogue. Keep in mind, this can be tricky to pull off. The problem with dialogue is it demands a scene, even if we can’t yet see it—there is a speaker and assumedly at least one listener. If you answer the first line of dialogue with a second, the reader has no sensory reference point, and they might get annoyed in a hurry. Still, anything can be done well.

Zooming In Too Quickly

What image blooms in your mind as you read this? Do you picture a woman alone in a car, driving in a high-speed chase? What if you learned in the next sentence that the vehicle is actually stopped, and her white-knuckle grip is because she just hit a pedestrian? Or if it turns out she’s driving a school bus, and her rage at a hoard of unruly children is the cause of her strain. Or the wheel in question is actually the helm on a sailboat in treacherous seas.

It's possible that the second sentence will provide the necessary clarification of space and occupancy, but consider whether it’s prudent to give your reader uncertainty for even one moment. This is especially true for the very first line of a novel or story. For the opening line of a new scene, readers are likely to be more forgiving, especially if they already have some context from the previous scene or chapter to guess at where the focal character might now be.

Ideally, your opening sentence should offer readers a helping hand so that we can step into the focal character’s experience without any bumps or snags.

You might assume the focal character is running on a track in a sporting event of some kind. But what if he’s in fact racing through a crowded marketplace, dodging shoppers and stalls as he tries to escape a murderous pursuer? Or he’s running through the forest, trying to reach his daughter who, moments earlier, let out a terrifying scream. Or he’s running on an elaborate treadmill in a spaceship medical facility in an effort to prove he is still fit enough for duty.

Again, the scene’s space and occupancy could be clarified in the next sentence, but it’s important for that clarification to be zoomed right out. Zooming out slowly to incorporate more characters and unexpected action a bit at a time can set your readers up for an expectation gap—a sure way to jolt us out of immersion.

Famous Opening Lines and Why They Work

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.

In The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, we begin very zoomed out, with a note about the weather/season, a pervasive mood, and the fact that the narrator is in New York.

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.

Hunter S. Thompson’s opening in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas gives us another example of a wide-angle opening shot: somewhere on the edge of the desert, but a desert in the United States, as well as a general mood with the drugs kicking in. And while occupancy isn't totally clear, the "we" in this case suggests two people or a small group. It's open-ended enough to give readers a wisp of a scene which the narrator can build upon in the next line.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

George Orwell's opening line in Nineteen Eighty-Four is so zoomed out as to be almost in the dark. We have the sensory input of light, cold weather, and a time of year, and the mood-establishing hint that something about this world is different than the one we know, with the unlucky number 13 adding a splash of tension.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

The opening line of Kafka's Metamorphosis starts a bit more zoomed in, and yet Gregor is waking up in his bedroom, so right away we've got space and occupancy. It's possible there is someone else in bed with him, but "his bed" suggests he's alone. We've got the mood of his uneasy dreams and the horror of the realization that he's transformed into an insect. In other words, it's very specific, and it's not so zoomed in that the next sensory detail will derail our mental image.

By contrast, if it turns out that his bed is a bottom bunk in a massive dormitory, readers will likely have imagined something different, so an immersion-breaking double-take will ensue. This opening line wouldn't work for such a setting. It anticipates and relies on the reader's assumption that this is a quiet bedroom with nothing else going on apart from Gregor's frightful awakening. 

The opening line of Melville’s Moby Dick works wonders for a couple reasons. It tells us what we ought to call the narrator (and not necessarily his name), which immediately hints at unreliability, and it also establishes a voice and reader address that will persist throughout the novel. No scenic detail here. We're starting out in darkness. Just keep in mind that you don’t want to keep your reader in darkness for too long. That all-important immersion requires sensory detail.

In Conclusion

As Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, "First sentences are doors to worlds." That is true whether you’re writing the first line of a novel, chapter, or scene. The way you design your story's doorway determines whether we can trust where you will take us next. By grounding us with a clear sense of space and occupancy, you light the path into your story's world. Starting too zoomed in, without enough sensory context, can set readers up for the unpleasant jolt of a mistaken mental image. Instead, ease us across that threshold—invite us into the world you've crafted with clarity and instant immersion.

David Griffin Brown is an award-winning short fiction writer and co-author of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. He holds a BA in anthropology from UVic and an MFA in creative writing from UBC, and his writing has been published in literary magazines such as the Malahat Review and Grain. In 2022, he was the recipient of a New Artist grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. David founded Darling Axe Editing in 2018, and as part of his Book Broker interview series, he has compiled querying advice from over 100 literary agents. He lives in Victoria, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.