They identified the moment when Maartje’s life changed, and brought us into it with her. To find the right moment for this cold open, the team behind 99% Invisible looked for an inflection point, or what fiction writers call an inciting incident. Which brings us to another piece of oft-recited wisdom for you: get into your story as late as possible. But for a cold open, we don’t need to know all that. Later in that same episode, when we’ve established more about where we’re going, we’ll hear about Maartje’s childhood and how she came to be in that apartment at that moment. That mother, Maartje, is going to be the protagonist of our story, so we start with her at home with her child, about to witness a tragedy. The episode is centered on how the Netherlands became a biker’s paradise, but it begins with the story of a young Dutch mother witnessing a car accident. You want the person you’re talking about to feel vivid and specific, and having them doing instead of being passively described will help with that.įor instance, check out this 99% Invisible cold open.
I have a complicated relationship to the adage of show, don’t tell, but in this case, showing is key. And ideally, you should let us see them in action. Who’s in this scene or moment you’re depicting? If your story has a main character, you want them on the page (and in the story) as soon as possible. If you want some more objective criteria to keep track of, consider: Characters As I research and conduct interviews, are there particular quotes that strike me as being especially interesting, surprising, or insightful? Is there a scene I keep returning to as being at the heart of the story, or just an anecdote that I consistently relate to family and friends when they ask how work is going? Elements of a good cold open So I start keeping an eye out for cold open material as soon as I start work on a project. Something that’s attention grabbing and interesting, but not overly confusing. Something specific that also gestures toward the general. You need to find the exact right moment: something small that still manages to encapsulate all the big themes of your episode. This is at least half the work of writing a cold open.
Writing a good cold open is more art than science, but there are a few steps you can take to write the best cold open possible. Because it doesn’t require a lot of lead-up explanation, a good cold open hooks the listener from the get go and leaves them wondering how we got here and what will happen next. Here are my top tips for writing a cold open that will hook your listeners from the jump.Ī cold open is the opening scene of a podcast (or a film or TV show) that drops you right in the middle of the action. Which means I know a thing or two about how to compose an attention-grabbing, scene-setting cold open. But I also write scripts for podcasts, including Scamfluencers and Even the Rich. Hi, I’m Zan! I regularly write for Creator HQ about the how-tos of content creation. Okay, we’ll dispense with the meta-bit here. Hundreds of thousands of workers like her are wondering… where’s the money going to come from next? What was once a flourishing industry is increasingly thin on the ground. This is the spring of 2023, in the wake of the shuttering of BuzzFeed News, and Vice declaring bankruptcy. Zan is especially worried about her next paycheck, because working in digital media has been precarious lately. She orders another coffee, and sits down to refocus. She can’t come up with any compelling scenes. Zan is a professional writer, but this morning, her mind is blank. It also introduces the theme and tone of the episode you’re about to hear. A cold open is usually a scene that grabs a listener’s attention: it dunks you right into the story.
Zan has a job to do: she’s been assigned to write about how to compose a podcast’s cold open. Like everyone else, she’s looking at her laptop. Outside, the sky is the kind of damp gray that makes it extra-hard to concentrate. She fits right in with the crowd here: it’s populated by creative class professionals with messy hair and expensive denim. Zan Romanoff is sitting at an east LA coffee shop, trying to relax her jaw.