Writing the Opening of Your Story - the TaDa Moment!

Your story starts with the first chapter.

I take that back. Your story starts with the first page.

Oh wait, I mean, your story starts with the first paragraph.

No, sorry, my mistake. Your story starts with the first sentence.

The first SENTENCE. Okay, that makes more sense.

Your first sentence is your "hook" to luring the reader to pause all that they are doing and read your book.

Your hook from the first sentence widens into the first line, the first paragraph, the first page, and the first chapter. All very important in gaining confidence in your writing and success in ensuring your reader.

According to Noah Lukeman, in The First Five Pages, "... the job of the hook is to set the tone for the book..."

Lukeman cautions that the "Hook" is more than a marketing tool. "It can establish a character, narrator or setting, convey a shocking piece of information."

Priscilla Long writes in The Writer's Portable Mentor, "Often a good opening consists of a small sentence that concentrates into its short little self the essence (sometimes the central dramatic conflict) of what follows.

Long lists various ways to use the first sentence:

• Begin with an aphorism.
• Ask the central question of the piece.
• State directly what the piece is about.
• Establish your protagonist's connection to the subject matter at hand.
• Begin with a telling anecdote or quote.
• Rely on the reliable What? When? Where? Why? Who?
• Begin with a good title.

Long suggests that writers collect openings written by others. Keep a sentence book and collect these passages and study from them, learning from them.

K. M. Weiland writes in Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding
Story, "The hook comes in many forms, but stripped down to its lowest common denominator, it's nothing more or less than a question. If we can pique our readers' curiosity, we've got 'em. Simple as that."

Writers want readers to ask, "What's going to happen?" Or, as K.M. Weiland writes, "Readers have to understand enough about the situation to mentally form a specific question. What the heck is going on here? does not qualify as a good opening question."

Your opening to your story must sell the story. You can have the best darn ending ever written but no one will ever read it if they're not hooked in your opening.

K.M. Weiland outlines the traits and parts of a good opening:

• Don't open before the beginning of the story. Don't dump your backstory in your opening.
• Open with characters; preferably the protagonist to connect your character with your reader.
• Open with conflict. Without conflict, you have no story.
• Open with movement. Keep your characters moving.
• Establish the setting to ground your reader in the physicality of the story.
• Orient readers with an establishing shot by presenting the setting and characters' positions within it in a sentence or two.
• Set the tone the reader to understand what type of story they are reading.

Openings give you the best and first opportunity to make a profound statement about your story. It should include as many of the following five parts as you can:

• Inherent Question
• Character
• Setting
• Sweeping Declaration
• Tone

Work on your opening lines. They should introduce your story’s character, plot, setting, theme and voice and send the reader on an unforgettable adventure.

James V. Smith, JR., outlines what a great opener might contain, in The Writer’s Little Helper:

•      A great first line
•       Excitement: high action, high drama, high anxiety
•       An intro to the heroic character
•       An intro to the worthy adversary
•       Problems that stand in the way of the heroic character achieving a worthy goal
•       Your best writing style, to set the tone and to show you can write: action, conflict, imagery, dialogue, irony
•       A feel for the story’s setting and atmosphere
•       Foreshadowing of things to come
•       Above all, a single overwhelming central problem that will only get worse until it appears incapable of being solved, a problem that will defeat the heroic character unless she defeats it in the Closer

A final word of caution from Smith, “Don’t press too hard with these opening words. Just as in trying to meet someone you admire, it’s possible to go breathless and appear needy if you try too hard. You’ll be tempted to overwrite an overwrought opener if you’re not careful. Be cool. Be natural. No matter how hard you have to work at it, make it look easy.”

REFERENCES:

The Writer's Portable Mentor by Priscilla Long

The First Five Pages by Noah Lukeman

Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story by K. M. Weiland

The Writer’s Little Helper by James V. Smith, JR.

August Writing Challenges: Day 20 - Moral Dilemmas

August. The summer is nearly over. Kids are going back to school. You now have some time on your hands.  Okay, you still have a list of chores a mile long, but let's put writing at the top of the priority list, okay?

I am going to challenge you with a writing prompt every day this month. Are you up for it? I hope so.

The writing challenges will be about a variety of topics and hopefully cause you to dig into your writing toolbox to complete with emotional skill.

Watch out, I just might throw in a fun one, well, just for fun!

For the twentith challenge we're going to dig into moral dilemmas.

It's not enough for your characters to have simple opinions. Each of us also has deeper philosophical ideals and values. Our values come from our families, religions, and cultures. They shape our morals and the decisions we make.

People are complex. What we believe is right or wrong changes when we find ourselves in real situations. Consider an honorable character who believes that one's highest loyalty is to his or her family. Then, that character learns his/her brother is a serial killer. Does he/she turn him in? Testify against him? Stories get interesting when characters' morals are put to the test.

We all know the knight in shining armor should risk his life to save the damsel in distress. If he doesn't, then he loses his status as hero and becomes a coward. What if the knight is forced to make a more difficult decision? What if his true love and his beloved sister are both in distress but he only has time to save one of them?

Here is your challenge:
For this exercise, you will put a character's morals to the test. Below, you'll find a short list of moral dilemmas. Write a scene in which a character faces one of these moral dilemmas and has to make an agonizing decision.

• In the novel Sophie's Choice, a young Jewish mother and her two children are taken to a concentration camp. Upon arrival, she is forced to choose one child to live and one to die. If she doesn't choose, they both die. Write a scene in which your character must choose between the lives of two loved ones.
• A single woman is close friends with the couple next door and has secret romantic feelings for the husband. She discovers that his wife is having an affair. Normally, this woman minds her own business but now she sees an opportunity to get closer to the man she wants.
• Some countries have strict laws regarding drug possession. A family has traveled to one such country for vacation. Upon arrive (or departure), one of the teenager's bags is sniffed out by a dog. The bag is opened, the drugs are identified, and the guard asks who bag it is. Both parents are considering claiming ownership. Everyone in the family knows the sentence would be death.
• Your character gets to travel through time and face this classic moral dilemma: The character find himself or herself holding a loaded gun, alone in a room, with a two-year-old baby Hitler.
• A plane crashes into the sea. Most of the passengers escape with inflatable lifeboats but they do not board them correctly. Your character ends up on a lifeboat that holds eight people but there are twelve people on it, and it's sinking. Your character can either throw four people overboard and eight will survive or they will all die expect your character, who will get rescued after the others drown.

Remember, during the scene, the character should agonize over the decision and reveal his or her reasons for the choice that he or she makes.

TIPS: Search online for "lists of moral dilemmas" to get more scenarios.

If you don't want to write a scene, you can come up with more moral dilemmas of your own.

The moral dilemmas force you to put your characters in situations that are deeply distressing, thus creating conflict and tension.

Good Luck!

How to Write a Short Story

What is a Short Story?

A short story is a work of fiction or imagination that is usually written in easily understandable grammatical structure with a natural flow of speech. Short story is meant to be read at single sitting and therefore should be brief and as direct as possible. A typical short story has very little action and hardly any character development.

Basic Elements of a Short Story

Short stories have six basic elements that they share with longer works of fiction. The basic elements are: setting, conflict, plot, characters and character development, theme, and point of view. All stories have some version of all of these elements although not necessarily in the most literal manner.

1. Setting – A story’s setting is more than just its physical location. It includes the time in which the story takes place, whether it’s the span of an hour or a lifetime and whether it takes place in modern times, the future or the distant past. Setting refers to the world the characters inhabit, which includes such as weather, architecture, social expectations, and legal practices.

2. Conflict – Generally speaking, all stories have some sort of conflict. Some conflicts are more blatant than others, clearly pitting characters against each other, against society in general, or against nature or some external force. Other conflicts are more subtle, taking place mostly within a characters own mind: their view of themselves, their view of the world, their morals, and their emotions. The conflict in a story is generally what makes it interesting or compelling. If nothing is at stake, a story will not typically be very interesting, even if the writing itself is good.

3. Plot – A story’s plot consist of all it’s events, laid out in chronological order. Plot is often broken up into five basic sections. Most stories will follow this structure. The first is the introduction, when the characters are introduced. Next comes the rising action, when the story’s conflict is revealed and it really starts moving. Sometimes, this happens at the very start, essentially combining the introduction and rising action. The climax of the story is its most pivotal point, when the conflict could swing one way or the other and the characters are tested. Some stories have multiple smaller climaxes. The fourth section is falling action, as the conflict is either resolved or left open. Finally the last section is the denouement, or the end, when the final outcome is explained – or left for the reader to wonder about, depending on the story.

4. Characters – Most stories have one or more protagonists, whish in another way of saying “main character” (or characters). Some stories have clearly defined antagonists, or villains, whereas others no not. Sometimes the line between protagonist and antagonist is blurred, as in the case of an anti0hero. Characters can be either round or flat. Round characters are fleshed out like they are real people. The reader is given many realistic details about the character. Flat characters are less complicated and stereotyped or caricatured. We don’t see them from more than one angle, either because they aren’t centrally important or because the narrator is only concerned with one aspect of their personality of because the narrative mode is satirical or ironic. Characters can also be either dynamic or static. Dynamic characters change as a story progresses. They learn new things, change their minds, grow as people, mature, have breakdowns, insights, or epiphanies,. Static characters stay pretty much the same throughout a narrative.

5. Theme – Theme is the most abstract of these basic elements. Theme is, essentially, what the story is about. This is not to suggest that all stories are about only one thing or that once you have figured out the theme of a story you have somehow cracked the code or solved a problem. Themes can be complex, and the important thing when analyzing literature is not what the themes are but how they are created and developed. All stories have themes. Themes can include death, redemption, challenging gender roles, overcoming fears, prejudice, hatred or the shortcomings of language. Most stories can be shown to have more than one theme.

6. Point of View – Point of View is a question of who is telling the story and how. In a first-person story, the narrator is a character that uses the pronoun I. Sometimes, the narrator speaks in first person, but the real protagonist is another character. In a second-person story, the narrator uses the pronoun “you” and addresses the reader directly and if he or she is a character; this point of view is quite rare. Third person refers to all of the characters as “he” or “she” – the narrator is not part of the action. Sometimes, a third-person narrator is omniscient, meaning he knows what all the characters are doing and even describes what they are thinking. Other times, the narrator only shoes things as they would be seen or heard but doesn’t go inside the character’s heads; this is knows as “limited” third-person point of view. There are many ways to experiment with point of view, and different stories may employ very different techniques, including switching narrators or modes of narration.

Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Essential Tips for Short Story Writing

According to Mr. Vonnegut, there are only eight tips you need to craft a good short story. These tips were originally compiled in his 1999 book, “Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction” but were made available later.

1.      Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the tie was wasted.

2.      Give the reader at least once character he or she can root for.

3.      Every character should want something; even it is only a glass of water.

4.      Every sentence must do one of two things – reveal character or advance the action.

5.      Start as close to the end as possible.

6.      Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them, - in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7.      Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, you story will get pneumonia.

8.      Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches east the last few pages.

Writing a short story is nearly like writing a novel, only condensing the words and elements.  

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