This is going to sound silly... I discovered that I can write openings that are interesting and grab the reader. Trouble is, they're not the opening of my own stories. Given a character sketch, a vague idea of the story, I can write an opening that works. However, when it comes to writing an opening for an actual story that I have written, I can't. I think it is because I want to tell too much about the characters and the milieu in the first lines. Or, to put it another way: I know the theory, but practice sure is hard. Anyone else have those problems?
Posted by benskia (Member # 2422) on :
Pretend that I wrote all of your stories and then write the opening for them.
You can carry on the pretense once the royalties start flooding in too if you like.
Posted by mikemunsil (Member # 2109) on :
before you do anything else, you might want to look within your story to see if the hook is buried there. if you find a 'hookish' few lines near the opening, then you might try revising the story to start at that point instead. then find a way to weave the opening information (that preceded the hookish lines) back into the story, or simply delete them.
Posted by djvdakota (Member # 2002) on :
Sit in the library for an hour, take books randomly off the shelf and study their openings. Take notes, jotting down the elements that seem to be consistent throughout most of them AND that work. Now, make a conscious effort to write your openings using those elements.
Posted by MaryRobinette (Member # 1680) on :
Silver3, I'm curious about your process. How do you write your stories without writing the opening? And what do you do with the openings that you write to stories that aren't your own?
I've only had that happen once, where I an idea for an opening and then no story to go with it. I put it away for awhile and treated it the way I do The First Line challenges--which I now realize is similar to the process that we just went through in Boot Camp--anyway, I try to think of "Why" the situation has occured, and I keep asking "why" until I get something that interests me. Then I start asking "What happens next" until I've got a story. And then, after the quizzing, I start writing the rest of the story.
Posted by Silver3 (Member # 2174) on :
Well, put it this way. I have a story of which I have only the bones ("Fortress of Tigers", which I posted on the board a few weeks ago, is one such). That is, I have a vague idea of the characters, of where the plot is going, but I have not written the story yet. I think about openings, and then I write something that works (at least that works better than my standard openings). But it's just an opening, with nothing attached to it. If I try to write the story that goes behind it, it doesn't feel right to me.
But when I get down to actually writing the story, opening and all, the opening gets back to normal and rambling. Even if I go back to it afterwards, I am incapable of making it short and sweet and gripping.
Posted by Spaceman (Member # 9240) on :
I can't even start writing until I know the end. Once I know the end, it's much easier to set everything up (including the opening) to get to that end.