On jumping in with both feet versus building a foundation

[Britva415]

One absolutely solid rule of thumb is to not pollute the first several paragraphs with excessive, ideally not even any, past-perfect tense statements.

"Had had had had had haddy hadhad" makes me nope out early and often.

Mostly for the reason I described previously: Nothing is happening while one backfills around the present scene and occasion which they ostensibly began the story in.

"It was a dark and stormy night" is the here-and-now, so, to immediately and repeatedly and persistently remove the reader from what was just established is to stop storytelling. Nothing can happen if you rewind and flash back to stuff that's over.

There are better ways to establish some previous fact and sometimes it's better to just not even do it at all. But if one must, I prefer finding a way which uses past-perfective extremely sparingly if at all.

And I'm not just talking about using a single past-perfective statement to establish the frame of a previous time and place, and then proceed to narrate a whole scene of stuff which still is removed from the present scene. That's just a grammatical trick. The whole aside is still something that's over and done with.

Something like this in the first scene of a story just strikes me as clumsy, and makes me not confident about how the remainder of the story will come off.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

There is room for both, but in the Lit world jumping right in makes more sense to me.
When a reader clicks on your story they have VERY little invested at that point. A thousand other stories are 2 clicks away. You need to make them want to keep reading, to start making an investment of their time.
If the first two or three sentences aren't interesting I'm hitting the back button and looking for something else.

Since Larry Niven came up, look at the start to Ringworld.

"In the nighttime heart of Beirut, in one of a row of general address transfer booths, Louis Wu flicked into reality."

That makes you think, WTF is happening here, what's a transfer booth? Flicked into reality? Even the name seems a little odd, a very western first name and an eastern last name, which makes me wonder who this guy is?

I've got questions that need answering, so I'm going to keep reading.