Latin for “in the midst of things.”
Good stories don’t wait around. They don’t ease you in with pleasant descriptions and context. They drop you straight into the conflict — into the moment where something matters.
This is in medias res. It’s the difference between “Once upon a time, there was a man who worked in web agencies and one day he decided to leave” and “In 1997, I had a temper tantrum and founded a web agency.” The second one doesn’t ask for your attention — it seizes it. You’re already wondering what happened.
The classic example is Homer’s Odyssey. We don’t start with Odysseus’s childhood or his reasons for going to Troy. We start with him already lost at sea, already ten years into wandering, already desperate to get home. Tension creates attention. And tension can only exist if something’s already wrong.
Here’s the principle: your ordinary world is boring. It’s the moment the ordinary world breaks that people lean in.
You can think of in medias res working at different scales. At the story level, it’s where you begin. At the sentence level, it’s the rhythm — “REEF! REEF!” doesn’t announce the reef is approaching. It throws you into the moment it matters. At the pitch level, it’s why you don’t begin with “I’m a business consultant” — you begin with a story that makes them understand what you actually do.
The rule isn’t “never give context.” It’s “don’t waste your reader’s attention on the ordinary before you’ve shown them why the extraordinary matters.”
Start where something’s already broken. Make them wonder what happens next.