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I’ve Heard that Story Before

I read a lot of book manuscripts, and I’m here to tell you there are some story openers in danger of being used more often than “once upon a time.” Here are some beginnings I see frequently:

• Character waking up
• Character looking out a window and thinking about the weather
• Character thinking about the setting, reviewing the objects in a room
• Character thinking or saying out loud, “This isn’t happening.”
• Character pondering her life, her appearance (while looking in a mirror), or the day ahead in inner monologue
• “When [name] woke up that morning, he never imagined by the end of the day, he would end up [fill in the blank]”

I bet you think I’m going to tell you not to write one of these frequently used story openers.

I’m not.

What I want to emphasize is that they’re oh-so-common.

Unless you want to blend into the crowd, if you’re going to use one of these openings in your final work, you’ll want to make sure you’ve executed it effectively—in an uncommon way.

Starting a novel with a cliché (“It was love at first sight”) worked out well for Joseph Heller in Catch 22, and the waking-from-a-dream opener (“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams…”) made The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka a classic.

But here’s something else.

Did you notice that all the openings I listed have a character sitting and thinking alone? I have a theory about that. What’s the person who is writing doing? Sitting and thinking alone! Maybe that’s why these openings occur to writers so easily.

Here’s a suggestion.

Write the sitting and thinking opening—if that’s what comes to you immediately—to get your writing pump primed. It’s a way for you to get started, a way to initiate your flow of words and ideas. It’s a way to begin solving the problems that writing a story present.

Getting it right the first time isn’t important. Getting started and getting in the groove are very important.

Confession: I didn’t know what I was going to say in this post until I wrote—and re-wrote—it. It’s likely you can’t write your “real” beginning until you know for sure what your story is about. And you probably won’t know what it’s about until you’ve worked through to the ending in your first draft.

Eventually, during revision, I’ll bet you’ll find where your story really begins. And I’ll bet you find it begins at some point after all that sitting and thinking.

Follow Mary Ann de Stefano:

writer, editor, website designer

Mary Ann de Stefano is the editor of The Florida Writer, the official magazine of the Florida Writers Association and the Monday Muse. She is an independent editor with 30+ years' experience in publishing and consulting. Besides working one-to-one with writers who are developing books, she organizes writing workshops and designs author websites. Mary Ann does business at MAD about Words, named as a play on her initials and love for writing. Visit her website.
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2 Responses

  1. David Edmonds
    |

    A sitting and thinking opening is a sure way to put this reader to sleep. I’m yawning just thinking about it.

    Thanks, Mary Ann.

  2. KENNETH R. MCCLELLAND
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    I seldom know what my story will be about until I start writing. I generally have a concept of what I want, but not the beginning middle or ending. For example, when I started writing The Jade Lion, the only thing I had in mind going in was that I wanted to write a fairy tale that’s never been told before. It seemed to me that many fairy tales seem to be regurgitated versions of the same central theme. I started the story out with: “Inside an old weathered barn, three palace guards stood between a dozen frightened villagers and the King of the Northern Province. The largest of the three men was breathing hard and his nostrils flared with each breath as he looked from the King to the villagers. Unable to look at his subjects any longer, the King turned away, his gray hair spilling onto the gold laced robe draped over his shoulders. A handsome man for his age, he looked quite stately on most days, but this was not such a day, for the King was troubled and it showed on his face…”

    Again, I had no idea what I was going to write about, but the more I wrote the more the story seemed to come together until before I knew it, it was complete and had an unpredictable ending. I also left room for a sequel – just in case the book was a hit. It’s due to be released sometime before the spring of 2016.

    Another book of mine; The Slave’s Diary, also came to being in the same way, as have many other books I’ve written or started on. The point of my comment is to just write rather than sitting there thinking about what you’re going to write, and see if perhaps the story will begin to develop on its own.