The outsider's perspective is that writing is easy—that it must be natural for an author to churn out thousands of words a day; that deep within us lies an overflowing wellspring of inspiration and ideas; that we are content to sit hours at a day filling page after blank page.
It is rarely so effortless.
A blank page—like what I started with as I sat down to write this post—is one of the more daunting aspects of writing, especially as a perfectionist. I want it to be good the first go around, but it almost never is. Knowing that it's okay to have an abysmal first draft doesn't make it any easier to let it be that way.
So, in an effort to mitigate the dread, I don't start with the beginning. Oftentimes, the middle comes first, or even the end. In fact, the first thing I ever wrote for the Stormbringer Saga was the epilogue of the last book in the series. Not only did that allow me to release that pent-up excitement of a new idea that had been brewing for months, but it also showed me a clear image of where my story was heading, where my characters' journeys would end.
That light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak, is what guided me the whole way through drafting and editing Unraveled. I knew my story had an end; therefore, the beginning had to exist somewhere in my jumbled ideas.
I do think there was a bit of whiplash from writing this full epilogue in the context of a story that had yet to actually exist. Seeing my main characters at their fullest potential, then circling back to their humble beginnings was a bit of a wake-up call for how much work lay ahead of me. A trilogy was the original estimated length of the Stormbringer Saga; now, it has stretched into five books. It could grow to be more, depending on how the rest of the books flow.
"This man wasn't dying fast enough."
—first line of Unraveled.
The opening scene of Unraveled didn't come to me until five or six drafts in. I remember feeling simultaneously drawn to and repelled by "tips and tricks for new writers," because I'd been writing for several years. I was by no means new to this process, but for some reason, I still wasn't finding an opening scene that really clicked with me. I needed help just as much as I refused it.
What finally stuck—what you'll read in January, if you purchse my book—came unintentionally. I opened with a dragon fight, a high-action scene in a crowded space, rife with heightened sensory details. I actually wrote that scene with the intention of attaching it to a "build-up" that I would write later; it wasn't until I let it flow into the second chapter that I realized that there didn't need to be a build-up to this scene. This was my beginning.
Using Unraveled as an example, here's what opening with a dragon fight does for the reader (spoiler free, I promise!):
Establishes the existence of dragons, therefore cementing the reader in the fantasy genre;
Characterizes the narrator:
How does she feel about dragon fights? Does she love them? Hate them?
Why is this dragon fight worth her time in the first place?
Introduces conflict through a power dynamic between dragons and humans;
Foreshadows the narrator's own encounter with a dragon later in the book.
So, without overwhelming the reader with pages of exposition and world building, I've managed to provide all the information they need to be able to follow my characters into the next chapter. It was tempting to regurgitate the history of the world or my characters in the opening chapters. These were places and people that I'd come to love so much; how could anyone not feel the same? But what helped me exercise restraint here was realizing that my readers deserved to discover this world just as I did: piece by piece, a slow revelation of its inner workings and connecting threads.
As a reminder, all of this is still subjective. Some readers prefer high-energy openers; others take to quieter, gentler approaches. I've found that the types of story openers that work for me—as both a reader and a writer—are the ones that drop you into the action or conversation as they're happening. From the reader's perspective, it might feel like you're hitting the ground running, but as the writer, I have the context of knowing where my characters were before they ever existed on the page. It's then my job to slip in context clues to help my readers walk in stride with these people they've never met, whose names might be unfamiliar or strange, and whose world is wholly unlike the real one.
The takeaway is that there is no right place to begin. All that matters is that you start somewhere.
Comments