The NaNo website is back, yay! Now I can post quotes from books that I've found helpful, thought-provoking, or just plain funny. Since I couldn't post yesterday, I'm doubling up today. Now I'm off to begin researching ... ; )
October 1 -- Beginnings
The advice in Alice in Wonderland is, in its own way, unimpeachable: "Begin at the beginning, go on to the end. Then stop." But in fiction that's not as simple as it first appears. Where the beginning is, what it is, and how to do it constantly troubles writers.
In the first draft of a story, no rules apply. You write and write, ideas come, characters change, situations grow, dialogues take off, speeches become scenes, and surprises occur. You aren't deciding where the story begins, where it ends, and where it will stop. It is not there yet. It is being created; it is creating itself. It's hard to know what's happening, and it might be best not to think about it too much anyway. The less critical judgment you have at this point -- the less you let taste, inhibition, second-guessing, and anxiety get in the way -- the better off you're likely to be.
After this draft exists, then you can bring to bear some of your critical faculties and see what you can see about your creation. Then you can try to discover what story you have made, which is not necessarily the story you started out to make. You might find, for example, that you have started telling one story, then another, and then still another.
At this point you have to decide which story you want to tell this time. When you do, you will have a clearer sense of where this particular story should begin, as opposed to the other stories that are in your draft, which might be your stories of the future. The first several paragraphs or pages of a first draft may read like a warm-up. The story really kicks in on the third page. That beginning might simply be abandoned. Or a wonderful beginning no longer suits the story that you've decided to write. Nice as it is, it needs to go. Or you labor miserably over the beginning, believing you must get it right to go on with the story, when the reverse might be true. If you write the rest of the story, then you'll be able to write the beginning.
Remember, begin with tension and immediacy. Make readers feel the story has started. They want to be in your world, not be told about it. Don't preface -- plunge in.
Begin does not necessarily mean starting with the first event in a string of events that leads chronologically to the last event. A story of a shoe salesman's nervous breakdown might have begun when he dropped out of college because he was homesick. The finished story itself might begin with him crying while he is setting up a Thom McAn's "Shoes for the Whole Family" seasonal display.
In fact, short stories usually begin somewhere close to their endings. That doesn't violate the principle of beginning at the beginning, but instead serves to highlight an important distinction. Perhaps the shoe salesman's story really began before he was born. But this particular fiction, this piece of art, begins when he started to cry.
Beginnings are a tough business. They need to be intriguing and energetic. Readers and editors are impatient. They don't read far if their attention is not engaged by the opening page.
-- from Making Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern
October 2 - It ain't soup yet
"I've got the story but I don't have any technique," a student once told Flannery O'Connor. […] "Technique is a word they all trot out," O'Connor wrote, lamenting the cart-before-the-horse approach to storytelling, which characterized her student's confusion about the act of discovery. For although technique can be studied, technique alone will never produce a story. What's more, one can never claim to have a story yet lack the technique for telling it. That's the same as saying I've written the story, now I just have to write the sentences. What O'Connor's student had was the idea of a story, not the story itself, which is inextricable from the "words on the page" used to tell it. And these words, just like Flaubert's innovations concerning omniscient point of view, are discovered solely in the act of writing."
-- Tom Grimes, from The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writers' Workshop
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