contemplating shipwreck

[marycatelli]

There's a shipwreck.  With my heroine and her companions on the ship.

Now, is it just before the story opens, or does it open the story?

The thing is, the drama of shipwreck may give a false impression of the drama of the story, which will be rather different in tone.  Full of (if only I can pull it off) mysterious questions from their own character to metaphysical foundations.  

Hmm -- unless I manage to slither in some of mysteriousness of latter happenings in the cause of the shipwreck.

And meanwhile, does it really work in the first person?

At least the princess took herself off quickly enough. . . .

Comments

[nodrog]

Okay - you've answered your own question.  What does the shipwreck itself contribute to the story?  Is describing it necessary?  I refer you to Chapt 1 of A Bester's The Stars My Destination:


        The spaceship "Nomad" drifted halfway between Mars and
        Jupiter. Whatever war catastrophe had wrecked it had taken a sleek
        steel rocket, one hundred yards long and one hundred feet broad, and
        mangled it into a skeleton on which was mounted the remains of
        cabins, holds, decks and bulkheads. Great rents in the hull were
        blazes of light on the sun side and frosty blotches of stars on the dark
        side. The S.S. "Nomad" was a weightless emptiness of blinding sun
        and jet shadow, frozen and silent.

        The wreck was filled with a floating conglomerate of frozen
        debris that hung within the destroyed vessel like an instantaneous
        photograph of an explosion. The minute gravitational attraction of
        the bits of rubble for each other was slowly drawing them into
        clusters which were periodically torn apart by the passage through
        them of the one survivor still alive on the wreck, Gulliver Foyle, AS-i
        z8/i 27 :oo6.

        He lived in the only airtight room left intact in the wreck, a tool
        locker off the main-deck corridor. The locker was four feet wide, four
        feet deep and nine feet high. It was the size of a giant's coffin. Six
        hundred years before, it had been judged the most exquisite Oriental
        torture to imprison a man in a cage that size for a few weeks. Yet
        Foyle had existed in this lightless coffin for five months, twenty days,
        and four hours…


Certes, every aspect of that shipwreck would become significant later, but that it had happened was all that mattered now, not the grisly play-by-play.

Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson agreed, if I recall correctly.

[marycatelli]

The danger is that the opening sounds like anticlimax. Especially if I have to do a lot of infodumping in the past perfect in the first paragraphs.