When to introduce central conflict?

You can delay the arrival of the central conflict, but if you do, you need to build a bridge to get there. That means introducing a series of smaller conflicts that lead to the big one. If you've done that properly, the early events of the story won't seem unrelated, but rather will appear as the inevitable consequences of decisions made (by the characters) along the way.

Does that make sense to you?

Yeah, what Beth said, and as long as you keep it interesting, readers should go along for the ride until you reveal the main conflict.

In my WIP I'm taking the approach BethS describes, building the main conflict over several scenes. I'm trying to make sure the conflict of each scene relates to the previous scene and pushes the story into the next scene. Well, that's the game plan anyway.

I originally tried to present the main conflict immediately but it felt forced and completely off.

If you're not introducing the central conflict until chapter 5, then you should use those first 4 chapters to also make the reader care about whatever will be at stake later on. For example, in Lord of the Rings, we spend a fair bit of time in the Shire before the ring comes into it. We learn about how lovely the place is, so when the place is threatened by the imminent uprising of Sauron, we have special reason to care about Frodo.

RightHoJeeves said:

If you're not introducing the central conflict until chapter 5, then you should use those first 4 chapters to also make the reader care about whatever will be at stake later on. For example, in Lord of the Rings, we spend a fair bit of time in the Shire before the ring comes into it. We learn about how lovely the place is, so when the place is threatened by the imminent uprising of Sauron, we have special reason to care about Frodo.

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This is pretty much spot on in my opinion.

Many writers say that you should "get to the point."

I don't agree with that fully.

Take the time you have to make the reader care about your characters.

Make them care about what could happen if the conflict ends in a negative manner.

FantasticF said:

Take the time you have to make the reader care about your characters.

Make them care about what could happen if the conflict ends in a negative manner.

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Just remember that, even as you're taking this time to establish things, something ought to be happening. The "day in the life" setups that some authors default to often fail because they lack tension. Nobody cares about young Hero Bill wandering around Nowheresville greeting his neighbors. People might care if Bill's greedy stepmom forces him to sell his horse, but he decides to run away instead, or he comes up with a plan to make money and hide the horse so she doesn't know he defied her; in the process of things happening, Nowheresville is introduced, so the reader cares when the Dread Dragon descends on the town square in Chapter 5. As Bill's small-time problems play out, a good author can weave in hints of bigger things to come, even if they don't seem to connect to Bill's life at first.

I believe in getting the story started, and establishing character, in the first five pages. On page one, if possible. This does not mean the central conflict has to start then, but it does mean it has to be foreshadowed. I want readers to grasp what the story is, and where events are headed, even if the conflict hasn't yet occurred.

Brightdreamer said:

Just remember that, even as you're taking this time to establish things, something ought to be happening. The "day in the life" setups that some authors default to often fail because they lack tension. Nobody cares about young Hero Bill wandering around Nowheresville greeting his neighbors. People might care if Bill's greedy stepmom forces him to sell his horse, but he decides to run away instead, or he comes up with a plan to make money and hide the horse so she doesn't know he defied her; in the process of things happening, Nowheresville is introduced, so the reader cares when the Dread Dragon descends on the town square in Chapter 5. As Bill's small-time problems play out, a good author can weave in hints of bigger things to come, even if they don't seem to connect to Bill's life at first.

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Maybe I should have said what I said a little differently.

In a nutshell, what I meant was this.

Give your readers the possibility of a conflict, even if there isn't one yet.

And if you're 5 chapters in, you have plenty of time to make them care about the characters as well.

Of course, this is just my opinion.

Jamesaritchie said:

I believe in getting the story started, and establishing character, in the first five pages. On page one, if possible. This does not mean the central conflict has to start then, but it does mean it has to be foreshadowed. I want readers to grasp what the story is, and where events are headed, even if the conflict hasn't yet occurred.

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I agree with James. Heck, I want it in the first sentence.

For what it's worth:

I was unable to start with the central conflict without skipping over a first contact with an alien race, and I wasn't able to get to the first contact with an alien race without skipping over the new technology that made that contact possible.

Could have skipped those things. Didn't want to.

So my first draft started out with the new technology and went to the first contact.

And it was boring enough to make a reader cry if he was forced to read it.

Because it all went really smoothly. So I thought, what if the new technology doesn't go so smoothly? What if it causes an incident that causes a crisis? So I did that.

And then, what if the first contact causes a major problem that quickly threatens a resolution of the central conflict?

So I did that too.

Don't know if I did it right or ham-handedly. But, for what it's worth (or not), this is what I did.

Randy Lee said:

For what it's worth:

I was unable to start with the central conflict without skipping over a first contact with an alien race, and I wasn't able to get to the first contact with an alien race without skipping over the new technology that made that contact possible.

Could have skipped those things. Didn't want to.

So my first draft started out with the new technology and went to the first contact.

And it was boring enough to make a reader cry if he was forced to read it.

Because it all went really smoothly. So I thought, what if the new technology doesn't go so smoothly? What if it causes an incident that causes a crisis? So I did that.

And then, what if the first contact causes a major problem that quickly threatens a resolution of the central conflict?

So I did that too.

Don't know if I did it right or ham-handedly. But, for what it's worth (or not), this is what I did.

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You don't have to skip such things. You can blend them in with the story itself. Boring isn't just the lack of something happening. You can have a crisis, five explosions, an asteroid impact, plus a circus marching down main street, and the reader will still be bored to death unless they have a reason to care about the central characters and the story these character are involved in.

It 's typical for new writers to write two chapters that simply aren't needed. Try going to chapter three. Have a friend start reading right there. I'll bet it's the place the novel should start. If not, go to chapter four, or even chapter five.

Get to the story, get to the character, and blend everything else in as needed. Backstory upfront kills, even if there is a crisis.

Jamesaritchie said:

the reader will still be bored to death unless they have a reason to care about the central characters and the story these character are involved in.

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I agree completely with this part. The rest is generally good advice, applicable to many.

So thank you.

There is no one-size-fits-all way to start a story and build it. The only dependable rule is Get the reader interested right away and Keep them interested.

The protagonist walking around doing ordinary stuff can work just fine. There’s no need to foreshadow some great conflict. But it WILL be harder to do it this way. Readers may love the character, but they usually expect them to do things.

The classical pattern for stories was described in Aristotle’s Poetics. It describes a story as having three parts, a relatively short getting acquainted section, a short resolution section, and a longer development section in the middle where the MC meets and defeats or avoids obstacles between her and some goal. The end of the setup is when the MC decides to go for some goal, maybe a very ill-defined one.

I prefer to have that decision in the past and start the story in the middle of the action. But that’s a personal preference. Plenty of bestselling novels have long meandering setups. But I suspect only virtuoso writers can do that successfully; I have no such confidence in my work.

I go with as soon as possible. People dont have much patience for meandering, and they might start to doubt your storytelling skills if you dont at least hint at what the story is going to be about in relatively short order.

The general consensus in the market, as far as I've seen, is that getting to the point as soon as possible is the best route.

If the beginning of the book gets the reader invested in your character and introduces a plot which braids into the central conflict, the core problem can appear later. My suggestion would be to run it past some betas, and then get them to tell you what happened in the story without looking at it. Their memory will select the highlights and skip over the slow parts by default. That might give you a better idea of the level of tension.

Sometimes the central conflict isn't the central conflict.

What I mean is if you started, say, a novel about the assassination of Lincoln, you might not get to Booth loading his gun until pretty near the end. You might spend a great deal of time with actor's ambitions before you get to a hint of a plot to kill the president. But if that's the first time any conflict begins, you are in trouble, and in hindsight it should probably inform how you got to that main conflict.

Plenty of books end feeling like they're about something different from what you thought they were about when you started reading. Some jump the tracks every couple chapters. But that doesn't mean there shouldn't be _a_ conflict since page one.

Just make sure it's compelling from the very first paragraph even if you don't know where it's going. It doesn't matter how important to your really great central point the first bit is if the only reason you'd sit through it is to fill in back story to that conflict, because the reader doesn't care yet. But if they do care about what's happening in the first four chapters, it doesn't matter if something in chapter five blows the roof off of all that and sets things on a new course that you care about much more.

Might be helpful to remember that what the characters know and what the reader knows does not have to be the same.

At some point you might add a prologue that can introduce the dire situation to the reader but not the characters. Your making a promise that with a little patience things will kick up a notch. Of course the writing of the characters and setting has to be good enough to give you that time. The book the 'Thousand Names' by Django Wexler did this well. Tells you a war is coming in the prologue and then has time to introduce you to the characters and the situation over the next bunch of chapters. And of course he was a good writer with a firm grasp of his story and characters so it was a pleasure to see things unfold.

Or you can do things out of order. You can jump back and forth in time. Maybe the first few chapters are alternating between introducing the characters and who they are while the alternating chapters show them all shortly into the future where they run into the conflict that introduces the central conflict.