beginnings

How to Write Story Beginnings

~ Libby Sommer ~ 11 Comments

adult book book store bookcase

I’m trying to write a good solid beginning for my new book. I don’t know yet if I’ll be able to maintain the narrative momentum necessary to complete another book length marathon because what I do best is the short form: short stories, flash fiction, prose poems. I’m a sprinter rather than a long distance runner. However, I do have an idea for the setting of the story, the main character and the situation. But that’s all.

Here are the first few paragraphs of my work in progress. My fingers are crossed that I will make it to the end of the story.

“From the window all she could see was a thick expanse of white. She imagined that beyond the bleached park, bereft of native flora, but sprouting feral Norfolk Island pines, lay the immense Pacific Ocean, its agitated waves unravelling along the distant sand of the beach. A few metres beyond that she pictured the white tower and lantern of the Harbour Light, as pictured on the hotel’s website, silently but steadily showing the way.

It was early winter. The tourists had left, the rates were cheaper, and there wasn’t much to look forward to in this sleepy seaside town. Its residents – mostly retirees – were tucked up at home or on holidays in warmer climates. The thick fog that hung low for days on end and the bitter wind from the sea would disappear in its own time to uncover a totally different scene: seagulls skimming the shore, pelicans at the pier, an outdoor craft market, the intermittent feisty spurt of water from the blowhole, formed from basalt lava 260 million years ago, named “kiarama” by Aboriginals, place where the sea makes a noise.

On the jaunty semi-rural valley to the south were dark red cows, producers of butter fat and protein milk. This was a land of dairy-farming plenty, the place where the mountains touched the sea, leaving only the weather frustratingly beyond restraint.

Kirsten Craig, a writer of crime fiction under a more testosterone-fuelled name, kept standing by the window, as if by sheer force of will she could penetrate the confusing mist. She yearned for clarity, an uncomplicated, black or white, answer. She’d find what she needed: peaceful hotel, good food, long walks by the sea, lack of stress, early nights. She would resurrect her conscientious and work-focused persona and put out of her mind the foolishness that had led to her being in this small town, at this slowly darkening time of the year, when she should have been at home.”

According to ‘How to Write a Good Hook & Start Your Novel with a Bang!’ by BookBub:

  1. Startle readers with the first line. …
  2. Begin at a life-changing moment. …
  3. Create intrigue about the characters. …
  4. Use a setting as the inciting incident. …
  5. Up the stakes within the first few pages. …
  6. Introduce something ominous right away. …
  7. Set the mood. …
  8. Make your characters sympathetic — and relatable — immediately.
  9. Draw in the reader with a strong voice
  10. Start at a moment of confusion
  11. Don’t get bogged down with exposition
  12. End the first chapter with a killer cliffhanger

Author Jerome Stern writes in ‘Making Shapely Fiction’:

‘In the first draft of a story, no rules apply. You write and write, ideas come, characters change, situations grow, dialogues take off, speeches become scenes, and surprises occur. … After this first draft exists, then you can bring to bear some of your critical faculties and see what you can see about your creation.’

‘The Art of Fiction’ author David Lodge asks:

‘When does a novel begin? The question is almost as difficult to answer as the question, when does the human embryo become a person? Certainly the creation of a novel rarely begins with the penning or typing of its first words. Most writers do some preliminary work, if it is only in their heads. Many prepare the ground carefully over weeks or months, making diagrams of the plot, compiling c.v.s for their characters, filling a notebook with ideas, settings, situations, jokes, to be drawn on in the process of composition. Every writer has his or her own way of working.

Hope you find this post useful. Let me know in the comments if there’s something you’d like to add about your own experience of writing a story beginning.

Are First Lines That Important?

~ Libby Sommer ~ 14 Comments

toddler reading book

Opening lines are the most important part of your story.

“There are all sorts of theories and ideas about what constitutes a good opening line. It’s a tricky thing, and tough to talk about because I don’t think conceptually while I work on a first draft — I just write. To get scientific about it is a little like trying to catch moonbeams in a jar. But there’s one thing I’m sure about. An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.” – Stephen King

Some of the best opening lines in literature according to Tony Zeoli are:

1. The Bell Jarby Sylvia Plath

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”

2. Gravity’s Rainbowby Thomas Pynchon

“A screaming comes across the sky.”

3. Cat’s Eyeby Margaret Atwood

“Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.”

4. Blue Nightsby Joan Didion

“In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue.”

5. Fahrenheit 451by Ray Bradbury

“It was a pleasure to burn.”

6. David Copperfieldby Charles Dickens

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

7. The Book of Strange New Thingsby Michel Faber

“Forty minutes later he was up in the sky.”

8. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegasby Hunter S. Thompson

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

9. Middlesexby Jeffrey Eugenides

“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”

10. The Wavesby Virginia Woolf

“The sun had not yet risen.”

11. The Time Machineby H.G. Wells

“The time traveler (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.”

12. Lolitaby Vladimir Nabokov

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.”

13. Slaughterhouse-Fiveby Kurt Vonnegut

“All this happened, more or less.”

14. Sellevisionby Augusten Burroughs

“You exposed your penis on national television, Max.”

15. The Trialby Franz Kafka

“Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.”

16. Anna Kareninaby Leo Tolstoy

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

17. Valley of the Dollsby Jacqueline Susann

“You’ve got to climb to the top of Mount Everest to reach the Valley of the Dolls.”

Good luck!

For further reading, check out my posts Writing Tip: A Change of Pace and Writing Tip: To Plot Or Not To Plot.  And to make sure not to miss anything from Libby Sommer Author you can follow me on Facebook  or Instagram.

Writing Tip: Endings

~ Libby Sommer ~ 10 Comments

pen writing notes studying

Beginnings and endings are the hardest part of creating a successful story and the most important. More important than plot and character, in my opinion, especially in short stories. “Conclusions are the weak points of most authors,” George Eliot remarked, “but some of the fault lies in the very nature of a conclusion, which is at best a negation.”

“As Jane Austen pointed out in a metafictional aside in Northanger Abbey, a novelist cannot conceal the timing of the end of the story (as a dramatist or film-maker can, for instance) because of the telltale compression of the pages.” – The Art of Fiction

The closer and closer you get to the ending, the more weight every word has, so that by the time you get to the last several words each one carries an enormous meaning. A single gesture or image at the end can outweigh all that has gone before. Choose each word carefully – even simple words like dark or down, light or up drastically affect the sense of the ending and therefore the entire story. Anything revelatory or portentous at the end of the story is very heavy indeed. Heavy-handed, in fact, is the way it’s likely to come out.

In beginning the story certain tensions, ideas, and characters have been launched. These themes then fly in intricate formations. The ending doesn’t have to provide a surprise. All it has to do is land safely. – Jerome Stern, Making Shapely Fiction

I’m rather proud of this ending to my short story Jean-Pierre, first published in Quadrant in July-August 2016. It’s the last page of a 5,000 word piece.

During that last day she thought of nothing but Jean-Pierre as she packed and cleaned out her little apartment.

‘What do you do, you have a stopover in Dubai?’ Jean-Pierre said, standing next to her at the taxi rank in the early morning chill.  A bitter wind blew from the mountains.  He had come over to carry her bag down the stairs.

‘I go straight through.  It’s three hours on the ground in Dubai, so I walk around the airport then read my book.’

Jean-Pierre looked directly into her eyes.  ‘I’ve bought you a little gift,’ he said.

‘You have?’

‘Don’t unwrap it until you’re on the plane.’

She smiled.  ‘Okay.”  Then she looked at his face, to place him clearly in her mind.  He was wearing a white t-shirt and blue jeans under a padded coat.  She kissed him on the lips, then got into the taxi.

‘Something to take with you,’ he said, leaning in the window.  In his hand he clasped a small gift-wrapped box.  The sun, still low on the horizon, cast an amber glow on his precious face.

‘Thank you,’ she said.  She reached for his hand through the window and then put on her seatbelt.

And she thought about this all twenty-four hours of the journey across the Indian Ocean.  She would keep opening the little box to admire the marquisite earrings he’d given her.  She would catch a taxi from the airport and at home notice the house smelt musty; she would open all the doors and windows to let the air move through, the curtains blowing and air coming in and out.  From a far-away-place, and at night, he would ring to say, resignedly, ‘My mother is living with me now.’  His gift, when she’d take the earrings out of their black box, would remind her of something that had happened to her once.

She felt like someone who she had always known, that old friend of herself, grounded in home, decisions already made, and behind her somewhere, like the shadow of an identical twin, her other self, who must remain in the far-off distance,  never to be exposed to the light.

Copyright © Libby Sommer 2016

For further reading, check out my posts  My 3 Favourite How-To-Write Books and Why Do You Write?. And to make sure not to miss anything from Libby Sommer Author you can follow me on Facebook  or Instagram.

 

 

Fortnightly Story: JM

~ Libby Sommer ~ 2 Comments

empty park bench on grass overlooking lake

I’ve never told anyone.  To think about it makes my hands sweat and nausea rise from my stomach.  It happened the year I turned eighteen on a sunny late afternoon in February, on the top floor of a building in Double Bay.  I was recently engaged to be married and the wedding was booked for the end of June.  We had gone to the photographer’s studio to have our engagement photos taken.  The photographer was a good friend of my future brother-in-law.  I had met him several times before and had thought of him as old, as my parents seemed to be old, but he can’t in those days have been more than fifty.  He was tiny like a jockey, his trademark cravat tied at the neck beneath a tailored shirt.  His accent, foreign but very English.  His shirt covered the numbers branded on his arm – a childhood survivor of the holocaust.  Continue reading →

At the Beginning, Pen and Paper

~ Libby Sommer ~ 4 Comments

wordpresspens

When I used to teach classes to beginning writers, it was good.  It forced me to think back to the beginning to when I first put pen to paper.  The thing is, every time we sit down and face the blank page, it’s the same.  Every time we start a new piece of writing, we doubt that we can do it again.  A new voyage with no map.  As people say, it is like setting off towards the horizon, alone in a boat, and the only thing another person can do to help us, is to wave from the shore.

So when I used to teach a creative writing class, I had to tell them the story all over again and remember that this is the first time my students are hearing it.  I had to start at the very beginning.

First up, there’s the pen on the page.  You need this intimate relationship between the pen and the paper to get the flow of words happening.  A fountain pen is best because the ink flows quickly.  We think faster than we can write.  It needs to be a “fat” pen to avoid RSI.

Continue reading →