The Art of the Cold Open: What Fleabag Can Teach Every Writer

By Tomas Elliott

The Craft Bootcamp

In our regular bootcamp dedicated to the craft of literature, we'll be getting writing fit with some specialist exercises designed to hone your literary muscles. Each week, we take a brief look at an example of writing by a master of their craft — whether in prose, poetry, drama, film, or TV — and follow that up with a challenge for you to practise on your own.

This week, in keeping with our theme of romance, we look at the craft of openings with an example from one of the modern masters of romance writing: Phoebe Waller-Bridge. We'll examine the first lines of the first episode of her TV-changing series Fleabag.

1. Playing with Genre

Note how, immediately, this opening manages both to establish some generic conventions and subvert them — a hallmark of the rest of the show. In reading the opening description we might imagine ourselves in a horror movie: a woman's heavy breathing; fast cutting between a character and their POV; a night-time setting; tousled hair and smudged makeup. Almost as soon as these conventions are established, however, they're twisted upside down by Fleabag's first line, as she turns to the audience and breaks the fourth wall. The sudden shift in tone — what's known in literary studies as 'bathos' — transports us from high-climactic tension to the low-stakes and vulgar world of a bawdy sexual comedy.

2. Marrying Form with Content

One of the major themes of this scene — and the show as a whole — is intimacy. Fleabag offers her audience access to her thoughts and life that is rarely seen on television, particularly when it comes to female TV characters. How better to begin to explore that theme than with a scene that is quite literally about letting someone in? The genius is that the scene signals that our access as audience members is even more intimate. We begin inside the home, with even more privileged access to Fleabag's thoughts and mind. Content and form are perfectly combined: opening the series means opening the door.

3. Preparing the Payoff

What is so remarkable about this scene is that even in showing us how she lets a 'handsome man' into her home, Fleabag also simultaneously reveals that this is all an act. When letting someone in to your home and your life, the most important thing you have to do is pretend. In the opening lines of the first episode, Fleabag sets up the final payoff of the whole series: that the very act of letting us inside her head was not a genuine way of sharing her thoughts, but really a way of protecting herself and shielding the truth. Intimacy itself, Fleabag suggests, is a performance. That's the ultimate payoff of the show — and it's all there in the opening few seconds.

Craft Challenge: Subversive Openings

Give it a go yourself by trying out a subversive opening in whatever form you're writing in — prose fiction, screenplay, stage play, creative non-fiction, even poetry.

1. Choose an everyday or familiar setting and try to introduce us to it with all the stereotypes and clichés of a particular genre.

2. Now, write your character's opening line or interaction as if in a totally different form or genre. Can you subvert the reader's expectations? Try to set your reader up for something and then immediately knock them flat!

Aim for one-to-two hundred words, or about a page of a script or screenplay. Leave a comment letting us know how it inspired you!

The Craft Bootcamp is run by Dr Tomas Elliott, Assistant Professor in English and Creative Writing.