The theme for this week is simply beginning:
- how do you start
and
- where do you start?
In fact, as we’ve seen, free writing is one way to get started. You start with a prompt (that I give you, or you find yourself – in a newspaper headline, for example, or an overheard phrase, or a single random word like ‘blue’) and you just write to/ about that prompt for 5 minutes (or more if you can). You do this often and regularly. You read over what you’ve written and consider whether any of it can be used in some way (you like the sound of a word or phrase; you have a clear image of something you’d forgotten; you recognise a theme you’re interested in; you can hear the beginnings of a style or voice you didn’t know you had; there’s a place that keeps coming back to haunt you…etc.)
What you get from your free writing is entirely unpredictable – and personal.
But, whatever, free writing gets you writing.
To get you started on a story (any story) this week, I suggested that you think about your journey to this class: did something strange happen? Could it constitute a story? Now, of course ‘strange’ can be interpreted in various ways, and, if you really think about it, almost anything can be strange or unusual. And once you get the hang of it, you can come up with weird and wonderful happenings just by exaggerating something that did actually happen or by following something through that didn’t…). My example is this,
On the way to class this evening I parked my car as usual in my trusty parking spot – trusty because no one else would dare to park on such a steep slope. I left the car in reverse – just in case.
As I was walking down, thinking about what I would say to you all, I saw a woman coming towards me. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her. She was looking the other way, so I looked at her profile more intently. Then, just as she turned her face fully towards mine I realised I was mistaken: I didn’t know her at all. I walked on but then I was stopped in my tracks by a shout,
“Loretta!”
I turned around. It was the woman, calling me.
“Excuse me, aren’t you Loretta? (she asked, in Italian of course)
“No, no, I’m not Loretta…”
“Aah…I’m so sorry…I was just convinced you…you look just like a colleague’s…I’m really so sorry…”
She was obviously acutely embarassed by now.
“Oh, don’t worry”, I said (also in Italian) “I just made the same mistake as you in fact! I thought you looked very familiar! Then I realised I didn’t know you at all…”
I don’t know if this made her feel better. She gave me a puzzled look and hurried on.
Strange, eh?
And could surely be developed into a story…eg. was one of us (them) lying? Why?
So, that’s an example of how to start (and now I guess I’ll have to challenge myself to transform that into a story. Okay, I’ll try. Watch this space.)
Next I wanted to consider, literally where to start. Even though stories seem to have beginnings, middles and ends, authors don’t alway choose to start telling the story at the beginning. And indeed, sometimes it’s really not clear what the beginning is.
For example, in the story I just told you I could have left out the bit about parking my car. Does it add anything to the story? Maybe some tension? Maybe it reveals something about character? But I could have started lower down (literally!) on the slope. Or I could have started a couple of years earlier when I first started thinking about teaching a course on the short story…if I decided that the fact of my teaching a class that evening was the real subject of the story…rather than mistaken identity.
Again, even once I have made a decision about what point the story starts, I can still make choices about what to tell the reader first – I don’t have to start telling my story at the beginning. So, in the same example, I might beging telling the story with:
Loretta was Diana’s best friend. She hadn’t seen or heard from her for five years. Nobody had.
Woah! That’s given me goose bumps – had no idea that was going to happen – but I hope you see what I’m trying to say.
Anyway, here’s a handout Beginnings with some beginnings of short stories written by famous authors.
Read them through, think about what strategies they use to catch your interest. Think about where they choose to start the story.
What do you already know?
What do you already want to know more about?
Which of these extracts do you really like?
Which do you want to continue?
Can you borrow any strategies for your own writing?
