Today’s message is a simple one: start writing your story.
Worrying too long and too hard about how to start a story can make a writer freeze up. Stop worrying. Stop overthinking. Start writing.
There’s a difference between a work’s beginning and starting to work. –Twyla Tharp
I mean, it matters immensely how you start. But also, it doesn’t matter at all how you start.
It doesn’t matter because that you start writing is the most important thing, and it doesn’t matter because, no matter how you begin your story, there’s a good chance you’ve got it wrong. The beginning of your story is probably going to be awful. Get comfortable with that. Make peace with that. Learn to soak in that.
It’s a blessing you won’t realize how dreadful your beginning is until you finish your first draft and come back to the beginning to revise. That’s okay. You’ll fix it in rewrites. For now, get your story down on the page. And then steel yourself. It’s going to be bad. Or at the very least, not good.
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying. –Anton Chekhov
Around this time last year, I sent my mentor, Tod Goldberg, the first 118 pages of a novel I’d started. Halfway down page 58, Tod told me. That’s where my story started. Halfway. Down. Page. 58. The first 57.5 pages had to go.
That is an extreme example that I won’t go into. I’ll save it for another time. Suffice it to say, I made a lot of mistakes. But you don’t have to repeat them. It doesn’t have to be that bad.
Don’t really start just any old place. Keep the following things in mind and try to start in the right place to save yourself some effort and some tears down the road:
- The best place to start is generally in medias res–in the middle of things. Start in the thick of the action. Immediately engage your readers and pull them into your story.
- Along those same lines, avoid “throat clearing,” that tendency we have to start a story with lengthy, boring backstory and descriptions of characters and places. If you need to write all that for yourself, to get into the story, by all means do. Then ruthlessly delete it from your next draft.
- Once you’ve gotten a full draft down on paper, go back and spend a lot of time perfecting that beginning. Write a killer opening paragraph–you’ll be amazed at the details, descriptions, and backstory you can sneak into an interesting and engaging opening paragraph when you put the work in. Your opening paragraph can do so much heavy lifting if you’ll only let it. But it has to be engaging to read all the same.
- Spend even more time crafting an opening line that takes a reader’s breath away. Try this one, the opening line from Jill Alexander Essbaum’s novel Hausfrau: “Anna was a good wife, mostly.” Six words. So good the publisher put it on the book cover. How often does that happen? Or this one, the opening line from Tod Goldberg’s Gangsterland: “When Sal Cupertine was going to kill a guy, he’d walk right up and shoot him in the back of the head.” Sold! Any reader worth their library card has to keep reading. As a writer, that’s your job–give your readers a reason to keep reading.
- Get a friend you trust to tell you where your story starts. My friend Jackie DesForges is the story beginning whisperer. She instinctively knows where a story should start. When her friends can’t kill their own darlings, she will happily kill them for us.
“Cut this. And this. And this.” Slash slash slash. “Your story starts here.” –story whisperer Jackie DesForges