I usually write short stories but I'm wanting to break into novel writting. The thing preventing me from starting, though, is the beggining. I have pretty solid ideas on plot and my characters, but cant figure out how to write an effective opener. Tips?
I'm better at beginning than ending (a serious impediment) but there's no general rule about it. If I have a story idea, more often than not the seed comes to me in the form of a beginning, not the big picture; that stuff comes later, if ever. As a result, each of my openings are different.
If I were like you and had all the meat planned out already, I'd just write out what I already know and figure out the opening based on what eventually happens. Once I had a feel for the tone of the rest of the story, it might be easier to imagine an appropriate opener.
Like you, I always have a killer plot idea. I usually cannot start it until I think of an amazing sentence to begin with. That's obstacle #1.
Obstacle #2 is writing enough each day to keep me interested long enough to finish. I've started about 2 novels, gotten to page 70 or so, and just quit. Read Stephen King's "In Writing". Reading a chapter motivates me every single time.
Keep trying!
Just start writing it. They call the first copy the "rough" draft for a reason. There will plenty of time for agonizing over every minute detail in the story when you start editing, for now I would just worry more about getting your general story out on paper; This is just how I like to do things though, to each his/her own.
Writing and editing works differently for everyone. Vonnegut would agonize over every sentence as he wrote the story, but the finished story would be perfect, no need for an editor to pick through. I found the word 'stet' in his Hocus Pocus. He's got a simple set of guidelines that work well...but they're also common sense enough to be zenlike. Then there's what seems like everybody else. You could take the 'Blanket' idea Palahniuk proposes and make a kind of mosaic story from your short stories. In a lot of his novels, single chapters can really stand on their own. It gives me the feeling he's cobbled each chapter in a short-story format and knitted the whole thing together with his 'choruses' and other connective tissue.
First lines. It's your hook, but don't get caught in the importance of it. Like Mike said above, you can always come back to it. Just find a different place to start.
You really can start with anything though. "_____ was on a train with her mommy." to "How to destroy Heaven." to "The killer was taking a shit in Minnesota." It doesn't really matter, so long as you can extrapolate a piece of the story from the first line. Even that's not a hard and fast rule, but nothing in the English language is concrete. That's what makes it possible to have prose sound like poetry and vice versa, the purely malleable language we use every day. Only, since it's your first go-round, you may want to follow the rules. You learn rules so you know when to break them.
I had the same problem and Sound this goes for you too,
Start with your plot, map out each scene in small, paragraph long summaries of what happens, don't worry about how pretty it reads yet, just the nitty gritty A happens then B..etc.. Then whenever you wish, pick a scene to work on that suits your emotional state. It's amazing how much you will see your plot and characters develop from that simple outline. I've gotten over 200 pages in using that method and I am still going. Once it's all down go back over and then over again, polishing it.
@Foxy: I like that concept. Especially the "emotional state" idea. Sometimes, the mood your in just bleeds through in your writing. I'll probably give it a try with my next project.
Foxy stole my suggestion. This comes from Connie Willis. She rights a hefty outline (probably similar to what Foxy does), then she writes out of order. She might work on chapter 22 one day and chapter 3 the next. I couldn't do it this way because I always diverge from my outlines, so it would be quite difficult for me to connect them later on.
The other suggestion comes from a writing instructor many years ago. Write an off-the-wall weird first line and go from there, with plans to chop off that first line (or paragraph or couple of pages) later on after you get a flow going. This works for me as I usually don't start my stories in the correct place and usually end up cutting the beginning to get to the place where the story really starts.
let me add a kind of on-topic second question to this:
on the vein of starting a novel: Specifically something like a horror novel, or some genre which is kind of out of your own, but not far enough that you'd need to study a bunch of conventions and world-building techniques that you might in something like science fiction.
How does one do this?
I spoke with Stephen Graham Jones (www.demontheory.net) about this, and he said to find something that scares me, and then find some other thing to wrap it in. And that's good advice, really. But if you're a guy like me who writes short stories by the seat of his pants, and tends to do so in marathon sittings (so as not to have to start and stop) how do you make the leap to noveldom?
"The killer was taking a shit in Minnesota."
I would read this book.
I usually fall apart in the second act, but I've always found a great way to start is to introduce the main character doing the thing that introduces him to the main problem of the story. If the villain's going to take his girl and boarded a train to Moscow, show him getting out of the cab at the train station, fighting with his girl over her stupid southern Mediterranean in-laws that always smell like hummus and donkeys. The story should start picking up from there.
The worst thing I can do is try to describe events that are prologue to the story. They're fun and informative, but I find it almost impossible to make the jump to the main plot when the time comes.
Here, I'll write it for you:
'I usually write short stories but I'm wanting to break into novel writting.'
Boom, done, now you do the rest.
You don't need to write an effective opener. Save it for later.
Thanks for all the help everyone! I'm starting on the novel tonight, and when I get enough points I'll put up the first chapter so you guys can check out what I came up with.
You don't have to write the first chapter first. Write the parts you have a good idea what happens, and a lot of times when you get into it you'll see what needs to have already happened.
"You don't have to write the first chapter first. Write the parts you have a good idea what happens, and a lot of times when you get into it you'll see what needs to have already happened."
This is an extremely good point. The last two projects that I did were actually started with content that ended up in the middle of final product.
I usually come up with a good first line and just start writing. Wherever it goes, it goes. I never write out of order, not with the first draft, because so many things come out without me thinking about them. I will make a few notes, but otherwise, it's wherever the keyboard takes me.
I'm more like Jack. I'll take lots of notes, and maybe write a small section or two that I know I'll end up fleshing out instead of just taking them down as notes, but mostly I write chronologically, and this is because I outline absolutely nothing and put no contraints on the story before I start writing it. I like to be surprised, and I like my characters to surprise me. I usually have ideas about where things will go, but I want the freedom for changes in character to drastically alter the direction of the story.
When I start, I just start. I pick a point that seems interesting, where the machinations have already started their engines. Sometimes it turns out not to be interesting enough, sometimes it's great. You can always play with it later.
Do you guys usually have a story question in mind when you start (i.e. Can [main char] acheive [story goal] in spite of [story obstacle])? I guess that is a question mainly for Seat of The Pants writers, which I am. And also, in your first draft, does the writting all seem like just a bunch of babble with some decent stuff mixed in sometimes? Is that why you polish and revise after the first draft?
When I write my short stories, I usually edit as I go, but with this first novel I'm attempting, I really just want to try and pump it out. I've read that when you write in the SOTP paradigm usually you just write whatever comes to mind and dont look back. That's what I'm tryin to do but I feel like its all just a bunch of crappy nonsense. Is that ok for the first draft as long as the story is coming out?
However you want to write it is exactly how you should write it.
Just try it. Go back after you've gotten 20k words down, or 15k, whatever, see what you think. If you hate it, try something else. If you're undecided, keep going.
I rarely write with a "story question". I'm a situational writer. If I have any kind of question, it's "What if <xxx>?" Often this idea directly involves the main character, it's usually narrow enough in scope. So I tend to have a main character in mind before I've even gotten any further. Then I just start writing the scenario, and whatever happens, happens.
However you want to write it is exactly how you should write it.
Right on. It's what you like and what sounds right to your ear. If you're reading and writing enough, you should have that ear. What looks like shit on the page is shit. Don't worry about your story questions. Make your characters suffer. Throw all kinds of bullshit at them. Some of my favorite writing involves well-drawn characters and they unfold in the book. The key element to what makes me happy is surprise. I laugh at inappropriate times because something unexpected happens. It's delightful. Kill your main character halfway through. Do something exciting. But if you dick around with style like nonlinear storytelling, make sure it serves your story and you're not just doing it because it's hip. Think of Pulp Fiction. There was no reason to go nonlinear other than to show Vincent get his spine blown out of his back, then explain why it happened by showing him ignoring the 'divine intervention' that Jules saw. It enhanced the characters by altering the story chronologically. It had a purpose. Here's the bit of advice you really need. Get off the internet and start writing. Do it now. Just go and work. That's what you need to do and all you need to do. Get your sounds right in the rewrite. I'm gonna go work myself.
I've seen people stall in a novel because they couldn't think of the next chapter or the opening chapter. I usually tell them to write the next part they know. Worry about filling in the blanks when it's time to fill in the blanks. You might even make it better that way, because you'll be able to go back and throw in hints about things that happen later.
I guess it's a different take on 'write what you know', but in this case it means 'write the parts you know'.
"Do you guys usually have a story question in mind when you start (i.e. Can [main char] acheive [story goal] in spite of [story obstacle])? I guess that is a question mainly for Seat of The Pants writers, which I am. And also, in your first draft, does the writting all seem like just a bunch of babble with some decent stuff mixed in sometimes? Is that why you polish and revise after the first draft?"
I am like Michael. I usually start with a situation. The scope of the situation usually helps be decide whether it is a Flash, Short, Novella, or Novel. Sometimes, though, I don't even start with that. Sometimes I start with a single line that occurs to be and figure out a situation that fits it. Once I get the situation though, I think along the lines of what could happen next.
I generally save "Can [protagonist] accomplish [story goal] in spite of [antagonist]?" for re-writes. I find that I naturally plot along those lines whether I consciously think about it, or not. If you've read a lot, especially if you have read some theory stuff in the past, you are going to do all that subconsciously. When I re-write, I'll find those issues and bring them out more.
You will end up with some babble, but since I write chronologically based on what happened in the previous chapters, I don't end up with as much as you think. I am more likely to end up with scenes that I won't use later, or scenes I will have to write in later because I mention something I should have done earlier, but I wouldn't call any of it babble, really.
If you are a seat of the pants writer, you are going to have to polish and revise quite a bit. I think it evens out, though, because we don't spend all the time thinking about a story idea and outlining it like some writers do. My girlfriend calls first drafts "zero drafts" but I'm sure she didn't come up with that. I like it though because it implies that the story isn't complete till I make those first cuts and additions to tighten the story.
You just have to find out what works for you. I prefer to write the whole thing and then revise later. Part of that is necessity. I generally write first drafts on an Alphasmart NEO word processor. There is no way to edit as I go because I can only see a few lines at once. Part of it is that I don't want what I did before to be distracting me from what I should be doing now.
I think I tend to do 0.5 drafts. Mostly because I do some editing and revision as I go, but not a lot, not enough to iron out all the kinks, but more unconsciously just because I can't help myself. If I go more than a day without working on whatever thing I'm focused on, I'll usually reread the last bit to remember what I was doing, and I'll edit that as I go. And sometimes during periods where I'm not actively working but have a chance to mull things over, or after I've reread a bit, I'll do a little revision, switching scenes around, trying something out, whatever. By the end I usually have better than a zero draft, but not quite a "true" first, either (especially since I write in pure text, so I have formatting to go fix in a real editor, and then stuff I tag in brackets that needs to be fact-checked or fleshed out after further research that I don't have access to from where I'm writing).
I never know what the thing I'm starting will be, though. The novel I've got almost 60k on now started as what I thought would be a short story, an idea for one scene. The last novel I was working on that I've more or less given up on was the same way, a short idea for a scene that just kept going when a character that I thought I was going to kill off didn't die like I'd planned (this is why I don't outline or plot much). Sometimes I think I might do something longer and it ends up feeling fine after a scene or two, though I think I usually start with smaller ideas that grow larger. I have a novella that's probably in 5th draft or so, maybe 15k, I forget... and that started just looking at a single piece of art by James Jean that I thought would be a fun exercise to write from.
I pick someone I love, a fictional character who is like family to me. A flawed but decent human being I can't help but get behind. Then I try to drive them to suicide.
In more detail I have a very vague outline "Darius is becoming a political leader, and Anne just wants to have some babies." From there I'll get a idea for a place to start writing. That may or may not be the beginning of the story. As I go stuff will 'reveal' itself to me. "The supporting character Victoria would set herself on fire for Darius or Anne." Boom, there's a chapter that fits in someplace. Why is she setting herself on fire? How does she feel about it. So on. For me if feels more like discovering a story then writing one if that makes sense.
Absolutely, Dwayne. I always feel more as if I'm observing something and writing it down than creating anything. My poetry, on the other hand, tends to provide me with a strong feeling of something wrought. I don't know why that is.
I always liked Stephen King's description of it in On Writing, where he talks about using tools to unearth a fossil or some such, trying to eliminate the dirt and stuff that obscures it without damaging any part of the thing itself, and never knowing exactly what it is that lies hidden.
