Clarity of Voice

The issue of voice is the issue on which all other beginning-issues hang. Let me simplify what I’m talking about when I say “voice”. Here’s a question for you: Who is telling this story and why? The who AND the why are going to provide the necessary filter you need to properly narrate your book. That narrative filter is going to guide your point-of-view, your language and diction choices, where the story begins, and the entire experience you give your reader.

We’ve all read work in which the narrator sounds vaguely like the author, and in fiction, the narrator should never be the author. Story beginnings in which the writer hasn’t nailed down the voice will suffer from a lack of clarity and purpose.

If you’re writing creative nonfiction, you’re not off the hook. Even in memoir you still put on a mediating persona, a voice that might be jaunty, reserved, self-assured, indignant, etc. Voice is the necessary filter through which you will establish a connection with your reader.

Right Starting Point

Besides figuring out the events of your story, you have to make decisions about the order in which those events will be revealed. There is no one perfect starting place, but your reader is going to need characterization, setting, and a potential problem asap. Of those three, invoking character reigns supreme. In fact, the way your narrator conveys the setting and potential conflict should be infused with some aspect of character.

Oftentimes writers fall back on sort of lax and default beginnings—they struggle to get past the throat-clearing stage because they have not made a clear decision about where to begin. Wherever you decide to start, your beginning must be setting up your inciting incident, the event that will set your main character on a path from which they cannot turn back.

You might want to start in media res, in the middle of things. Jumping right into scene can work great, as long as your reader isn’t missing important context which will cause them to be lost by the second page. And one of the traps we can fall into when we are focused on providing context is relying on flashback.

Flashback beginnings are often a recap of facts that, frankly, are dead on the page. If your flashback beginning is informational rather than something that the reader can experience, it risks being dull. And if your flashback is as compelling as what’s happening in the present, you might consider making it part of the current action. Yes, stuff has happened before the story starts. Let that be the wind at your characters’ backs, the force that propels the story forward. You can weave in the backstory later.

Grounding and Grab

I know a writing professor who bans his students from beginning a piece of writing with the weather. Also, one of my favorite novels begins with the weather. Why would someone ban it?

Because sometimes writers fall back on what is safe—not unlike the way we resort to the weather in small talk. We haven’t yet decided how to create an adventure for our reader so we stick to what we know: character ages, dates, cities, the color of the sky (oops, I’m back to weather).

Any of those things can work in the beginning, but they often don’t work because a writer doesn’t have a strong purpose in mind. The beginning of your story conveys to the reader the nature of the story they are about to experience. The last thing you want to convey is that this story is going to be data-filled, aka boring.

No matter what content you choose to convey first, make it atmospheric, immersive, surprising. Think about giving your reader a sharp sensory moment like William Faulkner does in “Barn Burning”:

         “The store in which the Justice of the Peace’s court was sitting smelled of cheese.”

Think about how you might set the stage and raise expectations. Your beginning establishes the emotional grounding for your story, so think about how you want your reader to feel when they read it. 

Trustworthy Prose

The beginning must not only be as polished as the rest of the work, it must be near perfect (no pressure). The style can be simple or more ornate, but your beginning is going to be the least forgiving place for slack writing. You might be able to bury a flabby sentence on page 57, but it will stand out on page one.

Your beginning breaks the silence. It offers you an immediate opportunity to garner the attention of your reader and lets them know they are in good hands. One of the best ways you can pique a reader’s interest is through the use of unusual or interesting language. In Stein on Writing, Sol Stein uses the opening from Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run to teach about beginnings:

“The first time I saw him he couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old, a ferret of a kid, sharp and quick. Sammy Glick. Used to run copy for me. Always ran. Always looked thirsty.”

Not only do we have characterization and tone-setting here, but look at the way the words “ferret” and “thirsty” stand out. Ask yourself what possibilities an unexpected word-choice might offer.

Fancy prose isn’t the goal. You’re not trying to impress, you’re trying to entice. The goal of page one is to get your reader to continue to page two.

Study What Others Have Done

Maybe this isn’t a must, but you should do it. Your bookshelf is full of story openings for you to learn from. Pull ten books off your shelf and read the first pages. Note what the author is doing. If they start with setting (or weather) how do they do it to good effect? Who or what gets introduced right away? How are they establishing voice? How do they use language to set a tone of apprehension, mystery, or playfulness? What groundwork is being laid for the inciting incident?

Ask yourself if any of those techniques could work for your piece. It’s important for you to know what, specifically, you want to achieve in your story beginning, but let me help take the pressure off a bit. Getting your opening right is hard, and you can labor over it until you start losing enthusiasm for the work. If you get to this point, put it aside and move on with your story. You can come back to the beginning later. It’s possible that a scene you write for the middle of your book ends up being the one you want to start with. Sometimes the beginning is the part that gets finished at the end. 

KIM LOZANO is an editor and creative writing coach from St. Louis. Although she loves to travel, her heart and writing are always calling her home to the Great Plains. Her own work has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Third Coast, The Iowa Review, North American Review, and many other publications. You can find out more about her coaching at kimlozano.com.

You can also find her on Facebook and Twitter.

The post #5onFri: Five Musts for Writing a Compelling Story Beginning appeared first on DIY MFA.

Writing a good sentence certainly isn’t a matter of imitating one particular style. Who would want to put a spare Joan Didion sentence against a more opulent one from Donna Tartt? There’s room for a myriad of artistic fashions when it comes to styling sentences.

But not paying attention to the specific functions and effects of our words will result in weak writing. I’m going to jump right over the usual suggestions to scrutinize your adjectives, cut your adverbs, vary your sentence lengths, and offer some advice that will take your sentences beyond Writing 101. 

1-Choose better words

Seems obvious, right? Well, it may be, but it’s certainly not easy. Sometimes the first word that comes to mind doesn’t end up being the best word. Ask yourself if your language is fresh, vivid, and precise. And rather than going for a fancy or unexpected word, see if you can use an expected word in an unexpected way. 

Most of us are less likely to choose an incorrect word than we are to choose an inexact word. For instance, what’s the difference between poured, gushed, surged, and cascaded? It’s the small variations between words that present a challenge, and the distinctions matter. I recommend revising with a good writer’s thesaurus close by (I own a well-used copy of the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus).

“Use the right word, not its second cousin,” said Mark Twain. Now that’s a quote to pin above your desk.

2-Prune Your Prepositional Phrases

Prepositional phrases are useful, but they’re also overused. I’m so sensitive to this one that when I come across words like of, with, since, after, and to, my editorial radar flips on. Which doesn’t mean that I’m going to cut something. But every prepositional phrase needs to be questioned. 

When you’re deciding what to cut and what to keep, ask yourself if you’d lose any clarity or meaning if the phrase was gone. If it’s needed, see if you can fold in the information more efficiently. A business owner from a small town could become a small-town business owner.

What if William Goldman had written, My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die [on this rocky cliff]. The prepositional phrase would not only be unnecessary (the setting should already have notified us of the cliff), it drains away some of the emphasis that should fall on the word “die”. Be aware that unnecessary prepositional phrases love to sneak in at the end of sentences. Which brings me to…

3-Finish strong

Words in a sentence should be arranged in a logical progression, in a natural order that moves from broad to specific, from less vivid to more vivid, from less important to most important. The first and last words of a sentence carry the most weight, and of those two spots, the last words are the most significant.

Writing teacher Stephen Wilbers calls this last spot in the sentence the “V.I.P Parking” spot—only the most important words can park there. Consider this simple sentence: My foot has a blister the size of Oklahoma, I’m hot, and I’m tired.

Can you see how the parts are in the wrong order? A blister the size of Oklahoma is the most specific element, the most impactful, and should go last. Reordered it reads, I’m hot, I’m tired, and my foot has a blister the size of Oklahoma.

4- Go for sequence over simultaneity

This problem comes up so often in my writing classes that I have to include it here. Writers often fall into the trap of starting a sentence with a present participle phrase. Let me give you an example and explain why this is problematic. Consider the following sentence: Slamming her drink down on the table, Erica left the restaurant.

That sentence implies that Erica slamming her drink down and her leaving the restaurant happened at the same time. It implies simultaneity when in fact those two actions are sequential—one thing happened and then the other. Better to write: Erica slammed her drink down on the table and left the restaurant. 

Readers process one idea at a time, and any sentence that presents actions happening simultaneously, when those actions are actually happening in sequence, can confuse your reader. Even if they know what you mean, it will come off as sloppy writing. Search your manuscript for any “ing” words that come at the beginning of your sentences and make sure you’re using them properly.

5-Tighten the voice

When a reader begins a piece, the first thing they wonder (whether they realize it or not) is Who is speaking and why? They are quickly assessing style and tone and content. The “voice” you employ is what is going to give your reader not just information, but an experience. Once you press down on the voice gas pedal, you cannot let up.

Tightening the voice in your sentences involves applying every technique I’ve mentioned so far and then some. Whether the narrator is you (as in memoir) or whether you’re writing third-person fiction, you must have a clear conception of your story world and your narrator’s attitude toward it. 

You must know whether your tone should be formal or informal. You must understand why a character would use one word rather than another. You will be able to inhabit the world of your story when you understand the deep truth of what you’re trying to convey. And then your language can reveal it, sentence by sentence.

Precision, clarity, and artful effects don’t happen by accident and they often don’t happen in the first draft. Many of your newest sentences are going to have things wrong with them. It’s good to know this so you don’t slow yourself down by trying to sculpt your sentences when you should be dumping onto the table that lump of first-draft clay.

Once you’ve got your draft, then go back and underline any words that don’t seem spot on. Bracket the parts of your sentences that might be serving as clutter rather than providing clarity. Scrutinize the ends of your sentences, knowing that the ending carries the most weight.

Upleveling your sentences is hard work and there’s no way around that. But it’s worth it. In the words of William Zinsser, in his classic book On Writing Well,—“Both you and the reader know it when your finicky labor is rewarded by a sentence coming out right.”

KIM LOZANO is an editor and creative writing coach from St. Louis. Although she loves to travel, her heart and writing are always calling her home to the Great Plains. Her own work has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Third Coast, The Iowa Review, North American Review, and many other publications. You can find out more about her coaching at kimlozano.com. You can also find her on Facebook and Twitter.

The post #5onFri: Five Ways to Uplevel Your Sentences appeared first on DIY MFA.