By Andrea Lewis //
When opening a book/short story/narrative, we put a lot of thought into the first pages, doing our best to capture the attention of our readers. Beyond the stylistic decisions that we make during this process, there is also a physical, organizational one—the structure of our work: at what point do we, as writers/readers, enter the lives of our characters, learn from and about them, witness their stories, till we decide it is time to part ways?
In “The Art of Slow Writing,” Louise DeSalvo refers to the method that Alice Adams, author of the series To See You Again, employed when writing short stories. “She often used […] an ABCDE formula (action, background, development, climax, ending). It’s one way of structuring a narrative and an excellent structure for a beginning writer to learn. Begin with an action that is compelling,” she writes. This will prompt showing what was going on before the opening of the story, develop the characters, and let the drama unfold from their desires, actions, and everything else.
“In most narratives, the beginning of the story isn’t the beginning of the narrative,” DeSalvo adds. “The beginning is that moment telling the reader everything needed to introduce the world of the narrative. A writer’s obligation is to make the reader fall in love with the subject, character, setting, or writing. […] And, no, a reader can’t wait for the good stuff. Study the first pages of the books you love. They’ll teach you what you need to know about how to begin a book.”
Having read DeSalvo’s view on where and how to start the narrative, I felt the need to verify theory against real-life practices.
What I found, though, was not that much different.
On her blog This Itch of Writing, Emma Darwin, author of fiction and creative nonfiction, invites writers to think of the journey of their story/novel—”the chain of important causes-and-permanent-effects, the into-the-woods-and-back-again.” And once they have understood the journey, “[…] things like instability, promises, and bodies on page one come in: what makes us want to get into the car, and what starts the engine?” For that reason, she advises starting as near the end as possible.
Members of The Lake Forest Writers’ Roundtable shared their practices when I turned to them:
Larry Dunlap, author of Night People and Enchanted, advises that it is “best to start in an action scene and fill as necessary to keep the reader informed. […] The point is to involve the reader in at least one of the primary characters’ dilemmas as soon as possible. Starting a story is much the same as starting each scene. Write the scene as you see it, and on your first rewrite, see how far you could move the beginning ahead to get to an action point. The same applies for an entire story.”
Elizabeth Torphy, author of Finding Jane, due for release in the fall, confesses that her story “begins at the beginning sentence! But that sentence may be the middle of the book. I don’t write from beginning to end. I write as the story is given to me. My plot… which I am not a thriller or murder-mystery person, can begin at any point because I am not leading up to one event. I have subplots going on.”
Quoting one of her beta readers, Billie Kelpin, author of Falling Idols, also due for release in the fall, emphasizes that “the story does not have to be perfectly linear. It doesn’t have to start at “in the beginning” and go straight through “happily ever after.”
Techniques to Find the Best Beginning of Your Book/Narrative
Now that we know the theory, how do we find the beginning?
DeSalvo says she always thinks of the reader—what makes the reader become engaged in the narrative. Then, she turns inward: it is when she finds herself “in the midst of something fascinating, something unexpected, something that leaves me questioning, but leaves me satisfied, too,” she adds.
Knowing from the start
Although rarely, it may happen that writers will know where to open their story the moment they sit down to write. DeSalvo recalls one time: when writing “Old Flame” for Ploughshares about an old boyfriend. She heard a line in her head in that case. Most of the time, though, the beginning is “buried somewhere in [the] jumble of pages,” she writes. Finding the beginning comes during the process of “turning the pages into books,” she adds.
Drafts
Dunlap introduces the concept of “rewrite,” which resonates with Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts” in Bird by Bird, Some Instructions on Writing and Life, where she writes, “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. […] The first draft is the down draft—you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft—you fix it up. […] And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.”
When I asked paranormal romance writer and O.C. Writers’ community director Barb DeLong, she confirmed: “I work and rework at getting my opening ‘just perfect’ until my fingers bleed.”
Arts and crafts
In most cases, it is a work of printing the manuscript, laying it out, and moving pieces around—a hands-on method of reorganizing written work for a better flow.
For instance, DeSalvo advised her writing partner, Edvige Giunta, to employ the steps below when Giunta was writing a memoir on her childhood in Sicily:
- Print out the manuscript.
- Separate the chunks of the book and organize them by parts—first, second, third, etc.—and not necessarily chronologically, but in circles of meaning.
- Give each chunk a name (“tag name”) so that you can refer to it and locate it.
- It may be necessary to print everything out for visualization then sort through and determine what else needs to be written.
Dovetailing on DeSalvo, Lamott describes going through a similar process with her second novel: “There was a huge, dilapidated living room in the house where I lived, and one morning, I took the three-hundred-page manuscript and began to lay it down on the floor, section by section. I put a two-page scene here, a ten-page passage there. I put these pages down in a path, from beginning to end, like a horizontal line of dominoes, or like a garden path made of tiles. There were sections up front that clearly belonged in the middle, there were scenes in the last fifty pages that would be wonderful near the beginning […] I walked up and down the path, moving batches of paper around , paper-clipping self-contained sections and scribbling notes to myself on how to shape or tighten or expand each section in whatever necessary way.”
Criteria for Choosing the Beginning
Chronology vs. Energy. In “5 Ways to Start Your Memoir on the Right Foot,” author of You Don’t Have To Be Famous, Steve Zousmer, compares the possibilities of starting a book with a restaurant menu—“you need to be aware of your choices.” According to Zousmer, writers should ask themselves this question: “Other than a chronological start, what other ways of beginning can I think of?” Zousmer advises writers to “remember that excitement is contagious […] If you aren’t stimulated by the start, forget about stimulating anyone else. […] If there’s a single quality that’s critical to a good start, it’s energy in any form.”
Attempting to create energy and hook the reader with the first few sentences, DeLong says she follows “the words of editing guru Tiffany Yates Martin.” These are Martin’s tips that DeLong has taped to the wall beside her desk:
- Give readers a reason to relate to and invest in your characters.
- Create a conflict, obstacle, friction, challenge, etc., that jolts the character from her status quo.
- Create strong momentum that builds throughout the story.
According to Martin, “I usually advise writers to open as close as possible to the story’s inciting event—meaning the thing that sets the character on her journey, makes it inevitable—while still accomplishing all three of the above key elements.”
The first dramatic event. K.M. Weiland, in “Where Should You Begin Your Story” on http://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com, advises that writers find “the first dramatic event in the plot.” She adds, “Nine times out of ten, this will be your best choice for a beginning scene.”
The life-changing event. On his blog Writing Good Books, author of science-fiction, fantasy, and horror Jason Bougger advises writers to write in real time and refrain from opening with a back story or a flash back. Rather, have the story begin “with an event that changes ‘normal life’ for all involved,” he writes. “This could be something as small as a teenager seeing her boyfriend kissing another girl, or a baseball player looking up and seeing a saucer the size of the stadium hovering over the city.”
One of my favorite openings of a book is Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on The Pacific Crest Trail. The prologue shows the main character losing a boot then tossing the other over the edge of the mountain on the Pacific Crest Trail. Although the first paragraphs describe the minutes before losing her boots, it is on page two that we are introduced to her story, which begins long before that moment on the mountain in California: “In the years I pitched my boot over the edge of the mountain, I’d been pitching myself over the edge, too.” From here, we learn why and how she started hiking the Pacific Crest Trail and what happened after this journey ended.
After gathering the information for this article, a lot of organizing came into play. It involved printing, laying out, visualizing the material, cutting and moving paragraphs around. It may not be perfect, and probably needs another draft. It may not be a narrative, but it implied the same process.
What is your process of establishing the opening of your narratives?
ANDREA LEWIS lives and writes in Huntington Beach. She was born in Romania and moved to the United States at the age of 34, after meeting and marrying her husband. She writes memoir and personal essays, with a recent attempt at freeform poetry. Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times.