At Northxeast.com (which features excellent articles about blogging), Leo Babuata wrote an article about the characteristic of a great opening for a blog post, and struck me that the same applies to the opening of pretty much anything--novel, screenplay, article, short story. He says a great lead should:
1. Grab the reader’s attention.
2. Make the reader want to read more.
3. Set the tone for the rest of the post.
4. Summarize what the post is about.
In novels and screenplays and even short stories, the fourth point is really more about coming up with something that somehow encapsulates the nature of the story. In the case of a screenplay, this could be your opening image. In a script I'm writing at the moment, the opening scene is a little girl riding her pony, pretending she's in a horse race. The story is about how she becomes terminally ill and has to race against time to try to do something that will bring happiness to others (yes, it's going to be a three-hankie film...). It can be interesting and instructive to go back and look again at the openings of films you've seen, and notice how often they use their opening images or scene as a kind of metaphorical foreshadowing.
