Creating an interesting openining
About me
So, hello everybody. I am quite new here. I'm trying to bring down a story on paper for quite some time now. Funnily enough I'd rather not be writing, but there is this 'tale worth telling' in my head that won't let go and I just want to find the right words to express it. I've once heard there are 2 types of writers, and I am definitively an architect. I can write down a few hundred pages of worldbuilding and chararcters, but I scrap most of my stories after the first chapter, because my writing doesn't live up to my expectations. Normally I try to change some aspects of my plot, try something different or just start at another point after a few failures, but for quite some time now, I am stuck with the same concept and can't even get a proper prolog done, that I deem as interesting enough to even be worth proof-reading ever again.
The Setting
My story is set in an medieval fantasy world. The prolog starts right in a forest, it's autumn and a storm builds up at the horizon. There is a little castle on top of a small hill in this forest. It's more of a ruin than a fortress, but it is in a pretty defensible position. In the forest, covered by the shadow of the incoming clouds, hunderts of Orcs march towards the hillfort, which is held by a small garrison of humans and serves as a prison. The protagonist of this short introduction is a mighty warlord amongst the orcs. His brother has been imprisoned under false allegations and he has mobilized an army to free him. 248
Once he enters the prison he doesn't find his brother, but a secret passage where he frees an immortal being (the true protagonist), who has been betrayed by the self-proclaimed gods of this world, who feared that he might challange their undisputed rule, if they don't stop his sudden rise to power. Unable to kill him, they managed to capture him and lock him somewhere where he should never be found, due to some 'divine intervention' from some of his former allies amongst the gods (which noone should be aware of), the orc sets him free. He destorys the whole hill in his fury and leaves.
My Struggle
I've put quite some thoughts into this prolog. I want it to establish the orcs as an itelligent and strong species (they are supposed to be the descendents of survivors for a thermo-nuclear war, while the humans are descendents of people who fled into space or cryo-sleep and then came back to reclaim their planet, which created an ever-lasting conflict between them and the orcs), who believe to act on a moral high ground. I want to create a recognizable character for the orcish warlord, as he is supposed to reappear later and become an important character for my story and I want to establish my immortal prisoner as a ruthless and embittered anti-hero, who, though once being a kind person, is now purely driven by his wish for revenge.
How to start?
I've tried a few different ways to start this prolog already
* I've tried to start with a "cinematic intro". In my imagination this idea turned into the first few minutes of a movie. An sole eagle flies over an stone tower in the middle of the woods. Covered by the trees there is a small fortress, a strong wind sweeps in dark and mighty storm clouds, the dives in the forest, passes a column of big, grim-looking creatures and lands on the hand of the orcish warlord. In the end I spent waay to much time into describing the situation (I also tend to use long sentences with lots of adjectives), and then struggled to cut to the action fluently, which would discourage any reader)
* I've also tried to start with some kind of exposition-dump. I am big fan of <PERSON>, as he creates a living world right at the start of his books, despite writing half a dozen pages just describing a hobbit hole, but I didn't like the kind of narrator he uses. I decided against it, because I couldn't find a way to build it into my prolog without replacing it completely.
* Many books I've read (I started reading just waaay after school when i learned that books can actually be interesting and engaging, so my bookshelf isn't too full yet) start with a casual conversation (like in asoiaf or metro) as their prolog. I liked that kind of introduction, but I often end up ruining its purpose of a fluid tranistion right into the story by letting my characters talk in expostion-dumps. I've tried this a few times in my prolog, too. 248