The Play That Started in the Dark
The most common problem in opening chapters is also the fastest to fix. It’s not your dialogue. It’s not your voice. It’s not your plot. It’s something so fundamental that you probably can’t see it on your own — but a reader notices it immediately.
Let me explain with a hypothetical.
Imagine a play where the actors start talking before the lights come up.
The dialogue is sharp. The conflict is real. You can tell something important is happening between the characters. But in the dark, you spend the first two minutes trying to figure out where you are. What’s the setting? A kitchen? An office? Are the characters sitting or standing? Are they close together or across the room?
What do they look like? What’s their body language?
By the time the lights finally come up and you can see the stage, you’ve missed a big part of the opening scene. You’ll have to backtrack in your head to connect what you heard with what you’re now seeing.
Make sense?
It only takes a few seconds to catch up. But those few seconds have a big cost on the experience of the opening — the part the playwright had probably worked hardest on.
I think about this all the time when I’m reading opening pages.
A writer will send me a first chapter with sharp dialogue, a compelling character voice, real tension in the premise. All the elements are there. But I can’t fully engage with any of it because I don’t know where I am yet. The lights aren’t on. I’m assembling the stage in my head from scattered clues while the scene is already underway.
The fix is almost always simpler than the writer expects. It’s not a rewrite. It’s not a structural overhaul. It’s usually a sentence or two — a few grounding details moved to the top of the scene that answer the basic questions: Where are we? What does this place look like? Who’s here? What time of day is it?
Once those details are in place, everything the writer already wrote starts working better. The dialogue lands harder. The tension registers. The character becomes visible. Nothing changes about the content — just the order. Lights on first, then the play begins.
Here’s the thing, though: this is almost impossible to see in your own work.
You know where the scene takes place. You know what the room looks like. You know who’s standing where. It’s all so vivid in your head that you don’t realize it hasn’t made it onto the page yet. Your reader is sitting in the dark, and you can’t tell because from where you’re standing, the lights have always been on.
This is one of the most common things I find when I read a writer’s opening pages — and one of the fastest to fix. It doesn’t require months of revision or a complete rethinking of your story. It requires someone who isn’t inside your head to read your opening and say, “I didn’t know we were in a car until page two” or “I couldn’t see her until the third paragraph.”
Fifteen minutes looking at your first few pages with a second set of eyes can change how your entire opening reads.
If your opening chapter isn’t landing the way you want it to — if you’re getting feedback that it’s “hard to get into” or “confusing at first” or if beta readers seem to engage more with later chapters than the beginning — this might be why. And it’s exactly the kind of thing I help writers sort out.
Here’s what a consult with me actually looks like: we get on a call, you share what you’re working on, and I read your opening pages with you. I tell you what I see — where the lights come on for me as a reader, where I’m still in the dark, where your writing is already doing strong work that you might not recognize yet. We talk about what’s happening at the sentence level and what to focus on next. It’s not a pitch. It’s not vague encouragement. It’s a specific, practical look at your writing with someone who reads developing work every day.
Most writers tell me afterward that they walk away knowing exactly what to work on — sometimes for the first time. That alone can save months of spinning.
To be clear: this isn’t a sales call. It’s a real look at your writing. If you find it helpful and want to explore what ongoing coaching would look like, we can always book a second call to talk about that. But the consult itself is just about your pages and what I see in them.
I’m setting aside time this month to do ten of these calls. If you’d like a second set of eyes on your project, book a consult call here.
P.S. If no times are showing on my calendar, check back in a day or two — or just email me and I’ll find a time that works.
