Some stories start with a bang, some take quite a while to get going but gain impact from the run-up to the point of ignition.
These days in both films and novels, the trend is toward starting with a big dramatic incident. Sometimes a book uses a prologue to expose you to that kind of scene and then the first chapter goes back in time. The idea is that the prologue is the promise of action and intensity to come and that it buys your patience.
It's not that one is right and one is wrong, but both have pitfalls to watch out for.
The risk with a long fuse story is that you will lose the interest of the reader before you ignite the central conflict. This means your characters have to be really interesting and you have to foreshadow some of the more active elements to come. At the moment I'm reading the novel, "The Way Home," by crime writer George Pelecanos. Although the first part of the book tells how young protagonist Chris comes to be sent to a juvenile authority prison, I've reached page 97 without being able to identify the central dramatic premise. One of the reasons I continue to read is that Pelecanos skillfully keeps shifting the reader's perception of Chris: is he on the way to becoming a psychopath or is he a kid who is going to find his way out of his funk? (Now that I think of it, maybe that is the central dramatic premise...) That and Pelecanos' skill with dialogue and character descriptions mean there's no danger that I'll put the book aside.
The risk with a short fuse is that a big opening will make your reader eager for more of the same. If you give in to that, you may find yourself losing your grip on the more personal aspects of the story or you may even write yourself into a corner, as happened with the TV series "Lost." There was so much high-profile mysterious action that ultimately there was no way they could pay it off in a satisfying manner. One approach is to reveal, as you go along, more facets of the dramatic incident that starts the story. That way it continues to have impact long after the first few pages.
Some writers like to consider this before they start writing, others just write and think about these things when they get into the rewriting phase. But sooner or later, we have to consider what kind of fuse will serve our story best and how to make sure we hold the reader's attention.
(For more tips on how to construct your plot and create great characters, see my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other online and offline booksellers.)
