YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE Stephen King to start your narrative with something scary. You don’t even have to be writing a horror story. Maybe you just want to grab your reader’s attention right away. Starting with a scary scene or description not only grabs a reader’s emotion—which is a wonderful way to keep them…
WHEN I WAS IN GRADUATE SCHOOL for creative writing, we never talked about craft. Instead, the standard class consisted of reading and critiquing other writers’ scenes. This has its place, certainly; I learned to think (or try to think) as a reader as I was writing and re-writing. Are the characters believable? Is the ending satisfying? Or—and this was a phrase much in vogue then—does the story ring true?
A few years later, I was in a workshop in which the instructor sometimes led craft discussions. She lectured on the variety of ways to start a story: The Cold Open. (There are actual techniques!) This was a revelation. So too, I learned, you could think out the advantages and disadvantages of first person narrative, or multiple points of view, or present vs. past tense. Some of these choices writers make instinctively. But sometimes a little analysis can go a long way—especially at the outset.
As an instructor of creative writing now myself, I like to include craft discussions in my classes. Below are some of my posts on writing topics; click the title to read the entire post.
And feel free to add to the discussion! I’d love to hear your thoughts.
The Cold Open – Begin with a question
WHEN YOU BEGIN your novel using certain techniques—such as “In media res” (in the middle of the thing) or “At the last possible moment”—you are deliberately planting a question in your readers mind. In the first instance, the question is “What is going on?” and in the second, “What will happen now?” These are great…
The Cold Open – Start at the Last Possible Moment
THIS IS THE MOMENT WHEN, in your story world, everything has changed. The stranger has come to town, the father has died, the mother has left, the best friend has announced that she’s moving to Pakistan. Like In Media Res, in which you begin in the middle of the action, this technique relies on triggering…
The Cold Open – in media res
STARTING A NOVEL, writing that very first sentence, is as exhilarating and intimidating as riding a bicycle for the first time without training wheels. Many new writers think they need to explain a good deal more than they need to explain. They think that the first chapter is about laying a foundation so that the…
What? I thought I was done!
IT’S BEEN SIX MONTHS or more since I looked at my last novel, the one that was “done.” That novel is gearing up to go into production now, and I have a few notes from my editors, stuff to change. As I read through the manuscript for places to cut back or to develop a…