I hail from Arkansas and until now, we’ve been known for the Clinton Presidential Library, the US’s only diamond mine (Crater of Diamonds State Park), and the headquarters of Wal-Mart. But this year we’ll be known for the Arkansas Teen Book Award, established by Arkansas Librarians. (Facebook page.) The reading list was announced in December, 2009 and this year’s winners will be announced in December, 2010.

Two days ago, we looked at opening lines from 100 top novels and categorized them to learn how to open a novel. Yesterday, we looked at the opening lines from the teen novels on the 7-9th grade, 2010 Arkansas Teen Book Award reading list and challenged you to identify the novels. Today’s opening lines are from the 10-12th grade reading list for the Arkansas Teen Book Award.

Identify These Teen Novels from Their Opening Lines, #2

OK, TRY to identify these without any help. They are all 2008 copyright books. Need help? See the tip below.
(Actually, many of these are graphic novels and there’s at least one non-fiction on the list.)

• I look at my fingers again, the ones that trembled and shook just a few days ago at Mr. Bender’s kitchen table.
• Willow Creek Camping Ground, Willow Creek, Montana.
  Daddy?
• Yarlung Tsangpo Canyon, Himalayas – 1938.
  See anything?
• You have never been so hungry; you have never been so cold.
• As with the banking industry, the Russian political system and the romantic liaisons on the Gossip Girl, all is not as it seems in the world of food and drink.
• Time 6:13:10 four minutes earlier…
  Readings look good, Annie.
• No doubt with all those grapes, Aristotle, the world’s first naturalist, passed gas.
• We live in a world where medical miracles and high-tech marvels are almost commonplace.
• In these dungeons the darkness was complete, but Katsa had a map in her mind.
• Needle doesn’t know which way to point.
• twenty-two years later -
  I’m dreaming of the boy in the tree and at the exact moment I’m about to hear the answer that I’ve been waiting for, the flashlights yank me out of what could have been one of those perfect moments of clarity people talk about for the rest of their lives.
• The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don’t got nothing much to say.
• I’m a senior at Cesar Chavez High in San Francisco’s sunny Mission district, and that makes me one of the most surveilled people in the world.
• Henry and I dug the whole seven feet deep.
• The strikers cheered as the tractor dragged the ancient Chrysler Newport in front of the main gate.
• just cause you can’t see, don’t mean aint nothing there. (See comments: Thanks to the author for adding the comment with the opening line!)
• “So I was reading this Vonnegut novel,” I said to Samantha.
• I was born in the United States of America.
• The Cosmic hurricane rips through uncharted space at one
  million miles per hour, gas plumes extending for a thousand light-years
  in any direction.
• Venomous by Christopher Krovatin

Tip No. 1: The Reading List (pdf) can be found here. These are the opening lines for the Level 2, Grades 10-12 list. I didn’t scramble up the list, it just goes down the line.
Tip No. 2: The links will take you to the Amazon page for each book.

Revise with confidence.

I hail from Arkansas and until now, we’ve been known for the Clinton Presidential Library, the US’s only diamond mine (Crater of Diamonds State Park), and the headquarters of Wal-Mart. But this year we’ll be known for the Arkansas Teen Book Award, established by Arkansas Librarians. (Facebook page.) The reading list was announced in December, 2009 and this year’s winners will be announced in December, 2010.

Yesterday, we looked at opening lines from 100 top novels and categorized them to learn how to open a novel. Here, I’m taking the opening lines from the teen novels on the 2010 Arkansas Teen Book Award reading list and challenging you to identify the novel.

Identify These Teen Novels from Their Opening Lines, #1

OK, TRY to identify these without any help. They are all 2008 copyright books. Need help? See the tip below.

• Conner Broekhart was a remarkable boy, a fact that became evident very early in his idyllic childhood.
• The day I broke up with my boyfriend Evan was the day he wrote the song.
• We can hear someone screaming as soon as we get off the elevator.
• They’d stolen a march on the day.
• The best time to talk to ghosts is just before the sun comes up.
• When my father died, I thought the world would come to an end.
• December 14, 2007
  To: Headmaster Richmond and the Board of Directors, Alabaster Preparatory Academy
• Ten minutes after the last class of the day, Lucy got a text message from her best friend Sarah Hebert, “Need u,” it said.
• Pugg Brothers. . .Please report to the principal’s office.
• . . . Gino Michelini on KLS-FM, 92.3 on your FM dial!
• Decatur, Alabama
  August 12, 1993
  Kevin Gardner was not home, even though it was way past his eleven-o’clock curfew.
• Long ago and far away in the land of ice and snow, there came a time when it seemed that winter would never end.
• Some people call me a child-witch,
  but I’m just a girl who likes to watch
  the hands of women
  as they gather wild herbs and flowers
  to heal the sick.
• There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.
• When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold.
• “You won’t believe this, but it’s true. I wrote a story called ‘The Savage,’ about a savage kid that lived under the ruined chapel in Burgess Woods, and the kid came to life in the real world.”
• Mark Twain was born fully grown, with a cigar clamped between his teeth.
• Henry Smith’s father told him that if you build your house far enough away from Trouble, then Trouble will never find you.
• Maybe Mommers and I shouldn’t have been surprised; Dwight had told us it was a trailer even before we’d packed our bags.
• Imagine for a moment that it is early Saturday morning in the United States.

Interestingly, the list includes several graphic novels, but not as many as the grade 10-12 list (opening lines coming tomorrow), which is about a third graphic novels. Arkansas is currently having a big push in schools about encouraging kids to eat right and control their weight. So, both lists include books about eating.

Tip : The Reading List (pdf) can be found here. These are the opening lines for the Level 1, Grades 7-9 list. I didn’t scramble up the list, it just goes down the line. Tomorrow, we’ll do the same thing for the 10-12 grade list.
Tip No. 2: The links will take you to the Amazon page for each book.

Revise with confidence.

12 Ways to Start a Novel

First lines. We all obsess over our novel’s first lines, and rightly so, because from it the rest of the story must flow naturally and without a pause. Here are 10 strategies to use on first lines for your novel. I’ve illustrated them with the “100 Best Lines from Novels,” as chosen by the editors of the American Book Review. The number at the beginning of each quoted line indicates its position in the Best 100 List. This was inspired by an article by Susan Lumenello, “The Promise of the First Line,” (The Writer’s Chronicle, Volume 38, Number 3, December 2005. 57-59).

It was. . .

1. It is. . .
   This is. . .
   These openings give a writer freedom and flexibility because anything can come after these words: abstract images, a synopsis, a setting, etc. To the reader, this opening signals authority. The possible downside is over familiarity with the opening, so that it reads as a cliche.

   	Quote	Author	Title	Year
   2.	It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.	Jane Austen	Pride and Prejudice	1813
   8.	It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.	George Orwell	1984	1949
   9.	It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.	Charles Dickens	A Tale of Two Cities	1859
   18.	This is the saddest story I have ever heard.	Ford Madox Ford	The Good Soldier	1915
   22.	It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.	Edward George Bulwer-Lytton	Paul Clifford	1830
   24.	It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.	Paul Auster	City of Glass	1985
   26.	124 was spiteful.	Toni Morrison	Beloved	1987
   35.	It was like so, but wasn’t.	Richard Powers	Galatea 2.2	1995
   49.	It was the day my grandmother exploded.	Iain M. Banks	The Crow Road	1992
   53.	It was a pleasure to burn.	Ray Bradbury	Fahrenheit 451	1953
   59.	It was love at first sight.	Joseph Heller	Catch-22	1961
   67.	It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.	Sylvia Plath	The Bell Jar	1963
   86.	It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man.	William Faulkner	Intruder in the Dust	1948

Viewpoint on life

2. Some stories open by presenting a “my philosophy of life.” This gives a story an instant structure, because the author must prove/disprove thesis presented. It’s a bit old fashioned in tone, but there are still some quotes here from the 80s and 90s.
   

   	Quote	Author	Title	Year
   6.	Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.	Leo Tolstoy (trans. Constance Garnett)	Anna Karenina	1877
   20.	Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.	Charles Dickens	David Copperfield	1850
   41.	The moment one learns English, complications set in.	Felipe Alfau	Chromos	1990
   42.	Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.	Anita Brookner	The Debut	1981
   44.	Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.	Zora Neale Hurston	Their Eyes Were Watching God	1937
   52.	We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.	Louise Erdrich	Tracks	1988
   54.	A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.	Graham Greene	The End of the Affair	1951
   63.	The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.	G. K. Chesterton	The Napoleon of Notting Hill	1904
   68.	Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.	David Foster Wallace	The Broom of the System	1987
   78.	The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.	L. P. Hartley	The Go-Between	1953
   80.	Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.	William Gaddis	A Frolic of His Own	1994
   88.	Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women.	Charles Johnson	Middle Passage	1990
   96.	Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.	Margaret Atwood	Cat’s Eye	1988
   99.	They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.	Jean Rhys	Wide Sargasso Sea	1966

Mid-action

3. This opening starts right in the middle of some action, the middle of a scene. It assumes that reader will care about the characters. It risks the reader asking “who cares?” instead of“why?”
   

   	Quote	Author	Title	Year
   3.	A screaming comes across the sky.	Thomas Pynchon	Gravity’s Rainbow	1973
   11.	The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard.	Nathanael West	Miss Lonelyhearts	1933
   21.	Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.	James Joyce	Ulysses	1922
   23.	One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.	Thomas Pynchon	The Crying of Lot 49	1966
   25.	Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.	William Faulkner	The Sound and the Fury	1929
   33.	Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.”	Gertrude Stein	The Making of Americans	1925
   37.	Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.	Virginia Woolf	Mrs. Dalloway	1925
   46.	Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex’s admonition, against Allen’s angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa’s antipodal ant annexation.	Walter Abish	Alphabetical Africa	1974
   51.	Elmer Gantry was drunk.	Sinclair Lewis	Elmer Gantry	1927
   65.	You better not never tell nobody but God.	Alice Walker	The Color Purple	1982
   70.	Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.	Flannery O’Connor	The Violent Bear it Away	1960
   82.	I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.	Dodie Smith	I Capture the Castle	1948
   97.	He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.	Virginia Woolf	Orlando	1928

Spoken word–dialogue

4. By starting with dialogue, the story signals that this is a of novel of relationships and of truth-telling or its opposite.
   It’s also risky because the reader must immediately care about these characters.

   	Quote	Author	Title	Year
   36.	—Money . . . in a voice that rustled.	William Gaddis	J R	1975
   66.	“To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.”	Salman Rushdie	The Satanic Verses	1988
   76.	“Take my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.	Rose Macaulay	The Towers of Trebizon	1956
   83.	“When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.”	Katherine Dunn	Geek Love	1983

Landscape

5. Some stories open with the setting, especially some description of landscape. This signals the importance of place and how LIKE a particular place their characters are, or how the characters are opposite from that place.
   

   	Quote	Author	Title	Year
   15.	The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.	Samuel Beckett	Murphy	1938
   17.	Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.	James Joyce	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man	1916
   30.	The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.	William Gibson	Neuromancer	1984
   75.	In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.	Ernest Hemingway	A Farewell to Arms	1929
   90.	The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods.	Sinclair Lewis	Babbitt	1922
   100.	The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.	Stephen Crane	The Red Badge of Courage	1895

Set up

6. This is almost a catch-all category, in which the story is set up someway. Sometimes, I put a quote here, because it embodied several of the other types of openings and in the end, it was easier to put it here than repeat it in several places. This is the most blatant story-telling style. It also allows a fast start to a story.
   

   	Quote	Author	Title	Year
   4.	Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.	Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Gregory Rabassa)	One Hundred Years of Solitude	1967
   7.	riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.	James Joyce	Finnegans Wake	1939
   12.	You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.	Mark Twain	Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	1885
   13.	Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.	Franz Kafka (trans. Breon Mitchell)	The Trial	1925
   14.	You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.	Italo Calvino (trans. William Weaver)	If on a winter’s night a traveler	1979
   16.	If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.	J. D. Salinger	The Catcher in the Rye	1951
   19.	I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.	Laurence Sterne	Tristram Shandy	1759–1767
   29.	Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.	Ha Jin	Waiting	1999
   32.	Where now? Who now? When now?	Samuel Beckett (trans. Patrick Bowles)	The Unnamable	1953
   38.	All this happened, more or less.	Kurt Vonnegut	Slaughterhouse-Five	1969
   39.	They shoot the white girl first.	Toni Morrison	Paradise	1998
   40.	For a long time, I went to bed early.	Marcel Proust (trans. Lydia Davis)	Swann’s Way	1913
   43.	I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane;	Vladimir Nabokov	Pale Fire	1962
   45.	I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.	Edith Wharton	Ethan Frome	1911
   55.	Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression.	Flann O’Brien	At Swim-Two-Birds	1939
   56.	I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho’ not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call’d me.	Daniel Defoe	Robinson Crusoe	1719
   57.	In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.	David Markson	Wittgenstein’s Mistress	1988
   61.	I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.	W. Somerset Maugham	The Razor’s Edge	1944
   64.	In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.	F. Scott Fitzgerald	The Great Gatsby	1925
   73.	Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World.	Robert Coover	The Origin of the Brunists	1966
   79.	On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.	Russell Hoban	Riddley Walker	1980
   81.	Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.	J. G. Ballard	Crash	1973
   93.	Psychics can see the color of time it’s blue.	Ronald Sukenick	Blown Away	1986
   94.	In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together.	Carson McCullers	The Heart is a Lonely Hunter	1940
   95.	Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen.	Raymond Federman	Double or Nothing	1971
   98.	High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.	David Lodge	Changing Places	1975

Let’s meet Jack or Jill

7. When the novel opens with a description of a character, or explanation of a character’s actions, it promises a character-centered story from viewpoint of omniscient and opinionated narrator. Unlike “set-up” this approach offers no particular narrative promise, only that it will be about this character. It often signals a morality tale or at least a cautionary lesson: there’s no use meeting Jack or Jill if there’s not point to meeting him.
   

   	Quote	Author	Title	Year
   5.	Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.	Vladimir Nabokov	Lolita	1955
   27.	Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.	Miguel de Cervantes (trans. Edith Grossman)	Don Quixote	1605
   47.	There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.	C. S. Lewis	The Voyage of the Dawn Treader	1952
   48.	He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.	Ernest Hemingway	The Old Man and the Sea	1952
   58.	Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.	George Eliot	Middlemarch	1872
   60.	What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?	Gilbert Sorrentino	Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things	1971
   72.	When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson.	Stanley Elkin	The Dick Gibson Show	1971
   74.	She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him.	Henry James	The Wings of the Dove	1902
   77.	He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.	Joseph Conrad	Lord Jim	1900
   84.	In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.	John Barth	The Sot-Weed Factor	1960
   92.	He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.	Raphael Sabatini	Scaramouche	1921

“Let’s meet Joe, my friend.”

8. Opening a novel by introducing a friend makes it still observational, but from a first-person vantage. It has the advantage of telling the reader about both the narrator and the person described.
   

   	Quote	Author	Title	Year
   62.	Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.	Anne Tyler	Back When We Were Grownups	2001
   85.	When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.	James Crumley	The Last Good Kiss	1978

I AM

9. This novel opening is a variation of meeting a character, except this time, the first-person narrator is giving a summary or a judgment about themselves. It’s often a skewed perspective and should definitely introduce a great voice. This wasn’t one of Susan Lumenello’s original categories, but it’s so 21st century, don’t you think?
   

   	Quote	Author	Title	Year
   1.	Call me Ishmael.	Herman Melville	Moby-Dick	1851
   10.	I am an invisible man.	Ralph Ellison	Invisible Man	1952
   31.	I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man.	Fyodor Dostoyevsky (trans. Michael R. Katz)	Notes from Underground	1864
   34.	In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.	John Barth	The End of the Road	1958
   50.	I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.	Jeffrey Eugenides	Middlesex	2002
   69.	If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.	Saul Bellow	Herzog	1964
   71.	Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.	GŸnter Grass (trans. Ralph Manheim)	The Tin Drum	1959
   87.	I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled.	Robert Graves	I, Claudius	1934
   89.	I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.	Saul Bellow	The Adventures of Augie March	1953
   91.	I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl’s underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self.	John Hawkes	Second Skin	1964

Misleading lines

10. Sometimes a novel begins with a line that is misleading, or lines that need the second, or succeeding lines, to get the full impact. There may be some which belong here, but I didn’t always have that second line to read to decide. No, I haven’t read all these stories, so that didn’t help.
    

    	Quote	Author	Title	Year
    28.	Mother died today.	Albert Camus (trans. Stuart Gilbert)	The Stranger	1942

Alternative Media

11. Some stories rely on other forms to tell a story such as letters, diary, autobiography, schedules, official papers, etc. Gives the author some authority. The important thing is how the form is exploited. Some forms give opportunity for an intimate voice, such as diaries. This was one of Susan Lumenello’s original categories, but I didn’t find any that fit it in this list. It is still a valid way to open a story, of course, but it seems it’s not very popular with literary critics.

Screenplay (or Graphic Novel)

12. Likewise, this was one of Susan Lumenello’s original categories, but it’s not on this list. It starts a novel by tag lines such as date, place, time. It’s a minimalist way to start a story, but it can establishes immediacy and imprints reader with a moment or image. Interestingly, as I looked at some graphic novels, this is the way some of them start.

Disclaimer

I have made decisions about how to categorize each quote, but it wasn’t easy. For example, “Elmer Gantry was drunk.”
This could be an introduction to the character, or it could be starting in mid-action. I categorized it as mid-action, but if you argue the other, I’d agree. Feel free to disagree: the point is that these are successful ways of starting a story, not whether I categorized them right! But hey, you can also straighten me out in the comment section – please do!

TOMORROW: Opening Lines from Teen Novels.

Revise with confidence.

What to Write Next?

I’ve just wrapped up a few novel project, or else they are cooling down. It’s time to swim around and hope that I find some interesting bait and get hooked on the next novel. In fact, I’m eyeing two bits of bait right now and trying to decide if either will do. The problem is that ideas for novels need to be developed and filled out. I’m wondering if I can cut down the development time by combining two ideas?

Idea #1. One is an idea for a short chapter book (about 12,000 words), in which there’s a MC, her best friend, and her grandmother. The conflicts will be small, mostly school oriented events which are appropriate for 2-4 graders.

Idea #2. The second idea has a central event around which everything happens; the stakes are much higher and the character emotions will be deeper. And the audience could go much higher, even up to high school or adult audiences, depending on how old I make the characters.

Both ideas have the potential to keep me interested for the long-period of time it would take to write, revise, edit (REPEAT until satisfied). I may eventually write both. But which project should I try next?

Combine Story Ideas?

So, I’m wondering if the two can be combined in ways that will enrich each other. The big stakes event would take on smaller, family conflicts and feel cosier. The short chapter idea would be enlarged and feel more universal and affect a reader in deeper ways.

But you see the difficulties. For one, I would have to give up the idea of a short chapter book. Someday, I want to write for that audience!

The Big Event story has possibilities for some deeper emotions, but only if it’s for a teen audience or upper middle grade. So, if I tried to move the story to, say fourth or fifth grade, it might work as a happy medium, but would I be happy with it? Would it be the worst of both stories or the best of both?

On the other hand, both stories need enrichment and I do see how this meshing of plots could make for a stronger story.

It Comes Down to Voice

In the end, I may have to write some samples and see where it goes. Can I create a believable and interesting voice for the combined story, or does each story demand a different voice? Exploring options like this takes time, but I think it will be time well spent.

Revise with confidence.

Stealing from Life: You Can’t Make this Up

I was talking to my friend, LFP, and he told me about a funny thing that happened on the way to work.

It started with a retriever. LFP reads electric meters in a rural area, driving a company truck from house to deer camp to trailer to house. Yesterday, a retriever started following the truck, just keeping them company. The roads were clear, but ditches, fields and driveways-in-the-shade still retained some ice from last week’s winter storm.

Retriever PLUS. Driving along, retriever following, LRP drove up to the next house. It was a nice house, with a two-car garage which was open. Chickens roamed freely in and out of the garage, and as you might expect, the retriever bounded after them. Now there was squawking chickens and a barking dog making a ruckus while LFP tried to get the meter read without dying of laughter.



Retriever Plus Chickens Plus. But wait. One of the chickens, trying to dodge the retriever, dashed into the garage. The dog leapt after the chicken and hit a patch of ice and slid, not stopping until he hit a large trash can full of aluminum cans to recycle. Can you hear it? Chickens squawking, dog barking, cans clattering.

Retriever Plus Chickens Plus Clattering Cans Plus. Oh, but it gets better. Now, a man, dressed only in boxer shorts, dashes out of the house. He carries a broom and starts swatting at the dog, protecting his precious chickens. Swat, squawk, bark, clatter.

Retriever Plus Chickens Plus Clattering Cans Plus Boxer Shorts Plus. Oh, yes. The man suddenly hit a path of ice. Off balance from swatting at the poor retriever, who was just having an adventure, the man slid, lost his balance, dropped the broom, windmilled his arms, and flipped neatly, landing on his boxer shorts.

Thump, swat, squawk, bark, clatter. And now laughter. LFP said it was the funniest thing he’d seen in months.

Writers Listen to Life

What does a writer do with something like this? Laugh.
And file it away for reference.

Because my imagination couldn’t come up with something that good. The slapstick humor, the way the scene and event builds — what a great model for a scene in my next novel. Times like this I’m reminded how important it is to listen to real stories about what’s happening around me.

Revise with confidence.

Do you make these 5 plotting mistakes?

1. Are you too nice to your characters?

   Low tension. Give characters large, overwhelming obstacles to overcome. Of course, you love this dear fellow you created and like any good parent, you want only the best for him. But if you want readers to read and care about Fella, you’d better give him an interesting problem.



2. Do you start one story, but finish a different?

   Rambling story. If you story starts with a character wanting to make the basketball varsity team, then you must answer the question at some point: does s/he make the team? Yes, there is the idea that some plots spin off into a different direction at about the midpoint of the story. This is the idea that what a character wants isn’t what a character needs. When the character fails to make the team, then s/he turns instead to photography.

   In this case, the story question is really larger: can a character learn to accept his own interests, rather than be ruled by others’ opinions? (Or some variation of this.) Learn to phrase your story question is larger terms, so that you can provide a twist in the middle and still keep telling the same story.

   Example: “The Lion King” starts with the question of what Simba will do when his evil uncle takes over the pride. For part of the story, Simba hides and goes after the good feelings, the good life. But the story question is larger: how can Simba take his father’s place? At first, the answer is to avoid the question entirely by banishing himself to a happy place; but as Simba grows up, he realizes he must go back to the pride and defeat his uncle.

3. Do you connect the dots?

   Disconnected narrative. Can you point to a series of scenes in which the character’s emotional arc changes slowly? Can you point to a series of scenes in which the main action of the story progresses through conflict-failures toward the last major confrontation? Have you built in the possibility of success at the end? (Or failure, if you’re writing a tragedy?) Can you physically put your finger on these places?

   I’m emphasizing pointing and putting your fingers on these scenes, because too often these scenes are still in our heads! The dots aren’t connecting because you didn’t write the connection, you only made the connection in your head. Make sure these are on paper.

4. Is every action/reaction appropriate for the audience, genre, and story you’re writing?

   Appropriate events. Check again and again, if the story events are right. Maybe this is too simple or too complex for your target audience. Maybe you’re writing a love story and you’re throwing in too many scary scenes and spilling over into horror. Keep reminding yourself of your reader.

   OK. Some writers don’t like to do that. “I write for myself,” they say.
   I’ll give you that on the first draft, where you’re just finding out what story you want to tell. But on the revisions, you do need to consider your audience – if you expect to sell your story.

5. Is your story predictable?

   Boring! How can you use what an audience expects but turn it upside down? Before I start a new chapter, I often ask myself, what does the audience expect next. And I try not to give it to them. They expect a cat fight? Well, maybe I’ll give them a tiger/jaguar fight; our characters go to a circus and the big cats get loose from the cages. It’s still a cat fight, but not the house-cat fight they expected. I acknowledge, whenever I can what an audience expects, but then try to turn it around, twist it, serve it up in a different package, set it in a different place, etc. Change something! Do not be–

   Well, give your reader a slight thrill, a chill. Be different. They’ll stick with you better. And when you’re plotting a story is the time to plan for this.

Revise with confidence.

I’ve taken a look at my statistics and here’s the top posts on Fiction Notes for 2009, in order of popularity. Five of these are the first page of a series of posts on a certain topic. The other five are individual posts.

1. Novel Writing. 30 Days to a Stronger Novel. 30 one-minute creative writing tips to improve your novel. After the First Draft is the Ebook version of this post. If you’ve just finished NaNoWriMo, this is for you!



2. Book Trailers. 43 Book Trailer Sites to Inspire, Instruct and Share. More information about book trailers for novels, for high school students, for kids and trailers in general than you really want to know.
3. Characterization. 15 Days to Stronger Characters Character description, character development, stronger characterization, names and more.
4. Revising a Novel. Novel Metamorphosis: Uncommon Ways to Revise This novel writing and revising workbook is based on my Novel Revision Retreats and includes many ways to rethink, rework and rewrite your novel.
5. Writing Picture Books. 30 Days to a Stronger Picture Book. Improve your children’s picture book in just 30 days. Creative writing tips, plot, characters, pacing and more. How to Write A Children’s Picture Book is the Ebook version of this series.
6. Characterization. Villains Don’t Always Wear Black. This 3-part series talks about characterization of villains: how to describe the characters, names, and more.
7. The Writing Life. One of the first posts I wrote on this blog continues to be popular: Hope Helps You Through The Writing Process. This five part series on the psychology of the creative writing process, especially revising, is one of my favorites I’ve written.
8. Creative Writing. 4 Times to Stop Revising. Do you do endless revisions on your novel or picture book? How do you know when you’re done?
9. Writing tips & techniques. Flashbacks Can Deepen Stories. This in-depth discussion of flashbacks discusses when, where and why to include a flashback.
10. Character Description. How to Create Whacky, Interesting, Character Descriptions that Stick With a Reader. Now this one was just plain fun.

Revise with confidence.

Find a Working Method that Works for You

My current WIP novel is at a curious stage. I’ve finished two drafts and now have feedback from two readers. I collated all the critiques onto one printout and have made even more notes on these pages.

So, the creative writing problem has been how to proceed from here.

Retype. At first, I started retyping everything. While I’ve suggested this as one way of doing a drastic revision, I’m not ready for this yet. It did force me to reconsider every word, but it was too much at this stage.

New File. Next, I tried starting a new file for the revised version and just adding one chapter at a time. But I found myself afraid to revise in this file. I didn’t want to make mistakes in this new file, and the writing suffered from my aversion to trying new things.

Temporary File and New File. Finally, I started copying the next chapter into a temporary file and making revisions there. Only when I’m happy with the chapter will I copy it into the new revised file.

It may seem cumbersome to you, but I had to find a working method that would foster the creativity and freedom needed in this novel revision, while still keeping me moving steadily forward. The temporary file and new file combination just works.

Revise with confidence.

Picking up the threads of a story is difficult after a holiday. Here’s four suggestions for making it easier:

Read. Read through a couple of chapters just before where you’ll start. Read slowly, letting the characters, the voice, the tone overtake you again. Remember what you were thinking or doing when you wrote the chapters.

Mark up. While you’re reading mark up the chapters for line editing. For me, line editing is a way to make myself pay even closer attention to the writing, which helps me get back into it.

Free write. Another method I’ve used is to free write something from the point of view of the narrator. Write about a memory of a holiday, or of a sports game or of a song once heard that lingers on. Be specific, grounding the scene in specific sensory details. It doesn’t matter if you eventually use this scene, the point is to get back into the story’s voice with something that may or may not get used.

Type. Retype a chapter. Again, this is a simple technique to force you to read every word in the story, and not skim. You need this kind of in-depth re-immersion into the story in order to pick up the same voice.

How do you get back into a story after a break?

Revise with confidence.

UnBlinded: Revising the Second Draft

419 Specific Comments

I’ve just gotten back two critiques on the second draft of my WIP novel. 419 specific comments. I’m excited.

• Larger concerns. Each critique was accompanied by a letter with larger concerns. Both are still concerned that the characterization needs work. One would like a stronger opening and one thinks a subplot is off-kilter. Those will get my attention first and foremost in this revision. But after two drafts, this third draft needs attention to the finer details.



• Specific comments. One critiquer was kind enough to say my sentences were beautifully written. But she still had hundreds of specific comments:
  • Characters weren’t believable in what they said or did.
  • Motivations were unclear.
  • Motivations were clear, but a bit more detail would help make it even clearer.
  • Awkward wording.
  • Actions needed clarification.
  • Continuity questions – if this happened on p. 12, then why this on p. 23?
  • Minor spelling and grammar typos (of course, not errors! Just typos!)
  • Suggested deletions.
  • Suggested rewordings.
  • Character questions to me, the author. Does this character really care about this?
  • Asking for more reaction from a character.
  • Needs better grounding in the scene – where are we? On foot? In a car?
  • Questions of logic.

Different from an Editor’s Revision Letter

One friend reminded me that this is SO different from an editor’s letter requesting revision.

• Argue. For one thing, I am free to argue with, question, or ignore the critique’s specific suggestions. She’s great at letting me argue, until she says something a different way and the light breaks through my thick skull. I know it’s common for critiques to be set up NOT to allow arguing, but I need it. Simply telling me what’s wrong doesn’t help; I need to understand WHY it’s wrong, weak, ineffective.
• Over the Hump. The second way it’s different is that this critique is designed to get me over the rejection-hump into editorial territory. An editor would reject the story if I sent in this second draft. I knew that, or I wouldn’t have sent it for a critique. Hopefully, this third draft will be a cleaner, sweeter, story, ready for an editor’s 419 specific comments!

Revise with confidence.