I recently came across the following list on Amazon:  “100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books to Read in a Lifetime.”

As a fantasy writer myself, I decided to spend the next few years reading every book on this list and record the lessons I learned from each volume on how to be a great writer.

PLOT: Area X has been cut off from the rest of the world for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide, the third in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition.

The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything. – goodreads.com

LESSONS LEARNED: In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t watched the film adaptation of Annihilation before reading the book. Don’t get me wrong, the movie is very well made. It was written and directed by Alex Garland, who was also behind Ex Machina, wrote the screenplay for 28 Days Later as well as the novel The Beach, which was my favorite book in high school. So yeah, I guess I’m a fan. 

All that being said, Annihilation is still a book you should read before watching the movie.

While the book and movie are both very strong works of speculative fiction, they have little to do with one another. The movie contains more of a physical journey as the characters travel across a mysterious, often surreal landscape. The book, on the other hand, is set more or less within the same region. *Pseudo Spoiler Alert* The book actually opens in a geographic location very close to the film’s physical destination. 

So if they have so little in common, why do I wish I had waited to watch the movie?

Between the two, the film has the more “traditional” plot. While there are many mysteries and much of the ending is left to the viewer’s interpretation, the opening follows a pattern that we have come to expect from Hollywood thrillers. A character is introduced, she has clearly been through a series of trials, and the film flashes back as she tells her story. In her story, we learn about the setting and the situation through dialogue and clear scenes. There is even some foreshadowing as to what the viewers should expect.  

The book, on the other hand, drops us smack dab into the situation, so we have no idea what’s going on. The readers know nothing except that four women of various occupations have been sent to a strange and dangerous place. There is no prologue, no literary equivalent of a Star Wars screen crawl. We are simply dropped in and left to piece together what’s happening. Had I not seen the movie, I would have needed to puzzle out the situation as we went along, something the author, Jeff VanderMeer, clearly intended. 

So what can we, as authors, learn from this?

​As I mentioned during one of my posts on The Way of Kings, ​fantasy authors traditionally love prologues or at least opening chapters that ease us into the strange world they have created. And sometimes this is appropriate. The last thing you want to do is confuse your readers to the point that they close the book and throw it off a pier. 

That, being said, sometimes it’s extremely appropriate to just drop us in. We don’t need a great explanation or history of your world, just open the story at Chapter 1 with your characters facing an intriguing challenge. (In the case of Annihilation, the four characters arrive at their designated campsite and find a staircase leading deep into the earth).

In fact consider turning the fourth or fifth chapters of your novel into chapter one. If another author had written Annihilation, the opening scene could have easily been about thirty or forty pages into the book. Just write the most intriguing scene in the first 100 pages of your novel as if it were the first chapter, give us a bit of mystery and fill in the details as you go along. Don’t feel like you have to hold our hands. If the opening is enticing enough you’ll have us hooked.

If this does work for you, I would definitely check Annihilation out of your library. Read it (it’s very short) and then read it again, taking notes about at which points the author gives us vital information. Think of it as you Master’s class in great openings.