Art of Storytelling: Beginnings

Where Should I Begin?

Okay this seems like a pretty basic concept but I’ve read too many stories where this just failed.

First off, I’m really talking about novels or novellas here, and not necessarily short stories, though you still need to know where to start those too.

So why should it matter where you start?  Well your number one job is… drum roll please…  getting people to read your book!  Surely you jest, sir!?  If you don’t hook your reader from the beginning of the story, you’re likely to lose them.  There’s tons of material out there on first paragraphs and every writer should look into it but there is a bigger picture here. 

A lot of times we think of our stories as having a beginning and end.  That’s wrong.  Your book must have a beginning and end of some sort but the story is like life.  Time passed before the point where the books starts and time will continue to pass after the book ends.  You’ve created a world and that world has both history and future even if you never think about it. 

If we can think of our books as sections of a timeline, that forces us to consider back story.  Maybe you write romance or literary fiction which is set in our day to day world.  That’s great!  But your characters have history.  They have parents and grandparents and ancestors.  Maybe that stuff will never make it into the book but, often, knowing that kind of history can really give you insight into their motivations, morals, or view of the world.

So the best place to start that characters story is where it becomes the most interesting.  Louis jokes about this at he beginning of Interview With the Vampire with a reference to David Copperfield, and his story does give some of his life history before meeting Lestat, but Rice’s book starts in the present, with the boy sitting down with his tape recorder at a moment in Louis’ life where he has finally decided to share his tragedies and the existence of vampires with the world.  The bulk of the book is about those tragedies but this is a critical point, not only in Louis’ life but the boy’s life and the Rice’s world.  And it’s just a cool hook.  If you could sit down with a real vampire, what would you ask him or her and would you be prepared for what they said?

A friend of mine, the one who inspired the Heart of Story series, messed around with writing a few times.  He never had the drive to write more than 5 or 10 pages but I so wanted him to because of the opening line below. 

Moonlight shining through the bullet hole in the wall painted a slow trail across the unconscious man’s face where he bleeding on the floor.

I read this and fireworks went off in my head.  Maybe the language could have been a little tighter but that sentence says so much.  It paints a picture.  It creates an air of mystery and intrigue.  Who is the man but, more importantly, why is there a bullet hole in the wall and why is he unconscious?  You get the feeling he’s been shot.  Why?  Where? By whom?

My dear friend Penelope Jones was recently reading my WIP and pointed out that I needed to start with action.  It surprised me because everything else I’ve ever written did start with action.  It made me rethink the whole scene but then I decided that I wrote that scene (3 years ago) to bring character setting and conflict together in one shot and it does end with tons of action.  When I finish I may need to revisit that and may decide she’s right in this case.

But, in most cases, she is absolutely right.  Action is dramatic.  Action is eye opening and creates an emotional response.  Fight Club starts with the protagonist being held with a gun in his mouth at the top of a skyscraper packed with high explosives about to be detonated.  This is just a promise of action, potential energy, a guarantee of violence, and it is so powerful.  Okay, Chuck Palahniuk, now that you’ve got my attention, please, take me back to the beginning and tell me how Jack got into this mess.

What happens if you start in the wrong place?  The worst possible thing could be your reader becomes a non-reader and puts your book down.  They get bored.  They decide that spending $.99 on a book is not too big of an investment to pull out early.  No that’s not a joke for my erotica fans!

Remember that there must be a hook of some sort and there are many ways to do that.  So here’s some pointers for beginnings. 

• Think of your story as a section of a much larger time line.
• Start at the most interesting part of the timeline for the world and, more importantly the character/s.
• For greater effect it must rely heavily on character and the major conflict while telling the reader something about the setting.  None of this has to be in great detail and it's not the time to info dumping.  There will be more on info dumping in another post but it’s basically back story vomit, or worse, diarrhea.
• Must have some or all of the below qualities
• Action
• Drama
• High emotional impact
• Memorability 
• Your writing must be perfect here.  No mistakes, grammatical errors or misspellings and it must be very clear.  This should be true of the whole book but if you’ve earned someone’s faith with a great beginning and characters they care about, they may forgive a misstep in the meat of the book.  If it’s in the beginning, you’re sunk.  You’re just another indie writer who can’t write, in the minds of many readers.

The best thing about beginnings, they can be written, rewritten and re-rewritten until you get them right.

Listening to: Billy Idol- White Wedding   How I miss those 80's videos.