Here’s another creative writing prompt for your 750 words, a challenge to write 750 words each day in January to better Think Like a Writer.

Time in a story, a novel is important. How do you show time and the passage of time? This can be done in three ways:

Photo by Dwight Pattison

1. As an exercise in a character’s interior perception of time passing. A character has an internal sense of time. S/he is waiting for something to happen, is in the midst of hurry-scurry activity, or is lounging around doing nothing. Write a scene in which the character goes from resting quietly to frantic activity and pay attention to how you make the time sense speed up. Do you cram in lots more sensory details or skip over them? What happens to the length of your sentences?
2. As an exercise in creating setting details which evoke time:Time could be a season of the year or a time of the day. Setting details are a great way to make these time periods clear: is the sun or the moon rising? Are there Christmas ornaments on the street lights or are the daffodils just peeking out of the soil?
3. Transitions from scene to scene. A final way to indicate time is by use of time word in your scene transitions. It can be something as easy as, “The next day. . .” Or, perhaps you want to be specific: At exactly 8:11 am, John opened his front door. . . Time words at the beginning of scenes orient the reader to exactly WHEN the scene is taking place and it’s always good to keep the reader oriented. It means you are thinking like a writer.

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by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

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Have you signed up for 750words.com yet? Or will you try doing 750 words on paper? I’ve just completed my 36th day of doing 750 words!

If the first task of Think Like a Writer is to observe the world around you, the task of the fiction writer or the novelist, is to create, then observe the world of the story. The exercise is the same, but this time you draw upon imagination. What does your character see, hear, taste, touch, feel as s/he moves around in his/her world?

As a writer you can create this purely from imagination, or you can draw upon observations about places you’ve visited. For example, I spotted this praying mantis on the Great Wall of China.



Thinking like a writer means to notice the small things like this, because often, it is the smallest details that make a story come to life. Yes, I observed the usual things while climbing the Wall, but the praying mantis is one of the special things I remember.

Details of Your Story’s Setting

Today, think like a writer and create the sensory environment of your story. Like yesterday, write out what the characters See, Hear, Feel, Taste, and Touch. Then write a paragraph using those details; don’t feel like you have to use every detail you wrote, just select the ones that work; add anything else that occurs.

Does the story come alive better now?
What writing exercises or prompts do you use to make a setting fresher and more alive?

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Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

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I am thinking about doing NaNoWriMo this year, joining with thousands of others in trying to write 50,000 words–a novel–during the month of November.

You can’t count any words written before November 1, but I know I can’t do this if I don’t work on a plot before the mad rush officially begins. So far, I only have a situation.

What’s the difference in a plot and a situation?

A situation is a single event, a strange combination of story elements. For example, there’s an annual contest called Stuck on a Truck. The idea is for selected people to put their hands on a truck and keep them there. The last one standing–and still stuck on that truck–will win the truck. It usually takes 100 hours for the last ones to drop out. That’s 4-5 days with no sleep.

It’s an interesting situation and one that I’d like to write about. But it’s not a plot.

Transform a Situation into a Plot

For the situation to become a plot, I need to add characters with real problems they must overcome. I am sifting through the ideas for characters, looking for flaws, quirks and a heart for readers to connect with. I also need to add a setting, ground the story in a particular historical period (contemporary, historical, fantasy, etc.), a particular geographical place. And finally, I need to be mean, cruel, despicably unfair to my characters; in other words, I need intense complications that force my characters to make decisions they don’t want to make. Tension on every page.

Fortunately, there are 29 plot templates I can follow when considering options.

Also of interest:

• 30 Days to Stronger Scenes
• 30 Days to a Stronger Novel
• Villains: A 3-part series
• How to Create Whacky, Interesting Character Descriptions that Stick with a Reader
• The Mesh of Plot and Subplot
• 4 Ways to Deal with Narrative Summaries

Need help with something else? Use the Search Box to look for more information. Or ask a question in the comments or send me an email at darcy at darcypattison dot com.

Are you doing the NaNoWriMo? Why is it right for you this year?

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

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More on Starting a Novel

Reading a wide variety of mss, I find this to be one of the weakest areas: openings. Striking just the right note is difficult. What do you include just as the curtain opens on your novel?

Typical advice:

• Start with something exciting.
• Grab the reader by the throat and never let them go
• Jump right in.

Yes, yes. I know.
But what’s missing in many openings is a character to care about. And I am confused about where I am in the story.

Why Should the Reader Care?

A helpful book in this regard is Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose. She encourages writers to consider the appropriateness of each and every word. With a class, she’ll often read a novel’s opening and the class considers alternatives to almost every word.

Taking a page from her, here’s a couple openings of my WIP.

“Eliot Winston! Come here.”
That Mrs. Lopez, her voice cut through even the jumpy music from the loudspeakers. I was sure her voice could cut through anything, even concrete. “Yes, ma’am,” I said and steered Marj toward The Voice.

In this opening, we know the main character right away. We assume that Mrs. Lopez is also a main character (incorrect: she’s only a supporting character). We’re in a place with loud music and there’s another character named Marj there, but we have no idea who she is. From the sentence construction (That Mrs. Lopez, her voice. . . ) we get a touch of the character’s voice and understand that maybe he’s jumpy. Jumpy, concrete–these two words are perhaps setting up the emotional context of the story.

The main problem with this opening is that Mrs. Lopez is highlighted too much and it’s unclear where we are. It’s confusing with three characters introduced so rapidly. Where should the reader focus? In spite of the demanding tone of Mrs. Lopez and the questions raised, mostly, the reader is confused.

Ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom.
Standing outside the gymnasium doors, a drum beat throbbed. Yellow light streamed from the second story windows, the ones Toby and I looked out of when we sat at the top of the bleachers. I couldn’t hear the music’s melody, just the drum beat: ba-boom, ba-boom.
The Back-to-School party at Wilma Rudolph Elementary School had already started.

Tension is set up right away with the drumbeats; perhaps the character’s heart is also beating hard, an implication that certainly works. It’s very clear that we are outside a gymnasium at a back-to-school party. There’s a sense of anticipation, of wanting to know what will happen when this character steps into the gymnasium and this party.

It’s a quieter opening in some ways, but the anticipation of entering the party will carry the reader a few more paragraphs. So, I have those paragraphs to make the reader CARE about what will happen.

Toby is mentioned now, and he’s the character’s best friend. It’s better to introduce him indirectly at the beginning than to introduce Mrs. Lopez.

Where Does the Engine Start?

Sol Stein, in Stein on Writing has another hint at what works in writing openings to novels. He asks, where does the engine get started? By this he means where does the reader’s interest sit up and take notice, the point at which “the reader decides not to put the book down.” And often, it’s with a single word or phrase.

On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below. — opening of The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder.

Wow, what a lot gets accomplished in this snippet. Time, location and conflict. It’s the contrast between finest bridge and precipitated that catches my interest. Why did the finest bridge break?

Write the Opening Last

It’s said that Richard Peck, the great YA writer, works on his whole novel, then circles back to write the first chapter last. By the time you finish writing a whole novel, it’s often true that the opening that please you so much at the beginning is no longer appropriate. Sometimes, you need to write or rewrite extensively the opening to match the what the novel has become. Either way, the opening is extremely important and worth several looks before the novel mss is sent off to an agent or editor.

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Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

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Rich Prewriting Enhances Novel

I’m currently researching material for my novel.

Setting. I’ve sort of settled on a setting; often for me, the setting comes first. I’m looking at sequences of events, variations on those sequences, variations in how the setting might look at different times, some of the odd-ball jobs in this setting, etc. I’m looking for something that might ground the scene in the particulars of daily life. For example, is there a coffee shop nearby, or maybe a playground. (Or, is it plausible for me to invent one of those.)

Characters. While I’m thinking about setting, I have to ask myself what a native of this setting would be like: cheerful, discouraged, rambunctious, angry, etc. I might go so far as to go and sit near a similar setting and just listen to the conversations.

Plot. I’m wondering what could take place in this setting. In some cases, that means I need to investigate the logistics of something to make sure it can work.

Doing all that research is Prewriting. When I teach writing to kids, I insist on multiple prewriting activities. They sometimes do up to eight quick activities before they write. A rich prewriting environment means stronger first drafts. I’m figuring that if kids need eight prewriting activities, I need to do even more.

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Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

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A Gold Mine Awaits in Your File Drawers

Take a good look at the files in your file drawers! You could be rich by mining those drawers.

There are snatches of dialogue, character sketches, interesting anecdotes, tons of research and facts on obscure things. For example, from my research for novels, I can tell you about film stages just as movies were going from silent to talkies; I can tell you about flora and fauna of desserts; record low temperatures on the prairies is a fact that is lodged in my brain; the voice of a first grade child in my home town haunts my dreams.

Use Old Stuff to Write New Stuff

What do you do with all that? As someone said, a writer’s brain is a “cess pool of trivia.” Use that trivia to make some money, some cash, some moola!

Freelance articles

• List what you know. As you flip through files, list what you know. Look for topics, themes, ideas, time periods, cultures, etc. that fascinate you.
• Market research. Then try to find magazines or online publications for which you can write an article.
• Pitch and write freelance articles. Yes, this takes time researching and querying, but it’s an income stream that you could be mining with some regularity. Yes, you want your income to come from your novels, your fiction. But it doesn’t happen overnight and in the meantime, you must eat. Use your file drawers to freelance. Try to streamline your research and writing, so you develop consistent markets and you don’t waste time in searching for new markets.
• Start now to build a readership! It’s also possible that becoming a nationally known expert on a subject will help you sell your fiction when it’s published–read E.O.Wilson’s story.
  
  
  You’ll probably wind up writing for a small number of publication because that’s where your passion lies; building a career in fiction can piggyback on your expertise in an area.

  For example, I met a writer in St. Louis last week who is passionate about dogs: she trains them for various types of competitions and even judges those competitions of obedience, field trials, etc. She could easily turn her passion and expertise into articles as a freelancer; and develop an audience for her novels featuring kids and dogs.

Speeches. If you don’t like freelance writing, perhaps you like public speaking, another lucrative freelance career. For this, you would turn your old manuscripts and bits of story into speeches. Often an undeveloped anecdote will not work in a story, but is perfect for a speech. This could be an acceptance speech for the Newbery Award, or just a story you tell kids during a school visit.


Strip it. Oh, yes. Strip out all the “good stuff” from a previous story and ruthlessly use it in your new story. It might be closely observed details, snippets of dialogue, specific and quirky character traits or a way of using language that creates a great voice. You won’t ever revise that old story. Right? Admit it. You won’t. And reusing your own material isn’t plagiarizing. So–go for it. Use it.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

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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.

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Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

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Last week I was wondering if I could combine two plots into one. One idea was for an Event and one for Characters. While I still think they could have meshed, the character story took off on it’s own into a short story.

Now the question is what to do with the Event idea, how to enrich it into a full blown novel idea. Here are some ways to enrich an idea that I’m going to try.

Setting. For me, The setting make a huge difference to a story. This is both a when and a place. When does the story/specific scene occur? What historical time period, what time of year, what time of day?

Medieval England is far different from 3030 Mars. Winter is far different from spring. A lake is different from downtown New York City. Think hard about what the setting means in terms of characters: who would be there? What are cultural norms in such a place? What could happen here and what could never happen here?

Also, what conflict is inherent in the setting? An ice-covered lake becomes dangerous during an early thaw – and you’d be a fool not to take advantage of it. A board room implies conflict in a power play.

Family. Another way to enrich all plot/story is to look to family situations. This could be anything from a blended family to a strong matriarchal family to adopted kids. Included in this could be any of a wide range of betrayals, misunderstandings, etc. I try to put this together with my original idea. Given A, what is the worst thing that could be happening in the family relationships? Depending on the audience, can you include this in the story, or some variation of it?

Backstory. I like the idea of building in connections between characters in the back story. Characters met at a previous job, went to the same school, had the same kind of dog – anything.

This will also build in possible conflicts: the dog likes A better than B, resulting in jealousy. Or A passed a test by copying off B’s paper.

By looking at the setting, the family and the back story — something every story already has — and making the most of these, my plot will grow. Of course, I’ll have to throw in some twists and unexpected things, but it’s a start. Here’s hoping the plot develops this week.

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Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

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Does your Scene Pass this Checklist?

1. Where/When. (Setting) Did you orient the reader at the beginning of the scene? Does the reader know where this takes place: room in house, city, state, country, etc? Does the reader know when this takes place: time of day, season of year, place within chronology of story? If the answer to where or when is no, do you have a firm reason for leaving the reader disoriented?


Do NOT Pass Go Until You've Passed this Check List

2. Stakes. Are the stakes of the scene goal clear? If the protagonist fails, do we understand the consequences? Are the consequences substantial? Can you put more at stake, or make it matter in some way?
3. Structure. Is the structure clear, with a beginning, middle, pivot point and ending? Is the chronology of the scene clear (did you use transitions such as then, later, before, after, etc.)?
4. Actions. Are the actions of the scene interesting, and told with active verbs and great clarity?
5. Emotions. Are the emotions clearly stated or implied? Can the reader empathize with the characters? Does the reader weep or laugh, even when the character can’t or won’t?
6. Dialogue. Does the dialogue move the scene forward or is it empty chit-chat? Are there minor conflicts embedded in the conversations?
7. Language. Are you telling or showing? Does your storytelling have clarity and coherence?
8. Voice. Does the language create the proper mood, tone, voice?
9. Transition. Does the scene make a smooth transition to the next scene? If you use a scene cut, does the reader have enough information to follow the cut without getting confused?
10. Cohesive. Do all the elements work together to create a gestalt, a scene that is better than the sum of its parts?

Where does your scene fall down? Revise. You know the drill.

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Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

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7 Children’s Picture Book Manuscripts in 7 Days

I’m taking the 7 in 7 picture book challenge.

Report on 7 in 7 for the first week of May, 2009

Overall: This was an interesting exercise that I’d like to repeat in a slower month, not May. Why is the Nanowrimo in November and this had to be in May. Pick July or February, slow months.

Besides the choice of months, though, writing seven picture books in seven days was a good exercise. I used a different strategy each time and found that the resulting picture book has a different weakness that I must overcome in later drafts.

This reinforced several truisms: first drafts are awful; writing children’s picture book is a difficult task; and, the need for fully developed characters is imperative, except for concept books.

1. May 7 I stumbled across the Finish Line. It wasn’t a full marathon of writing picture books, of course, just a half-marathon. For this last day, I wrote a draft of a story, focusing on the sound effects that I could add to a story to make it a better read aloud. It was fun and noisy, but I wound up with a story with no conflict. First drafts are just bad. Sigh.
2. May 6. Historical Fiction. OK, here comes the rationalization for why I don’t have a good draft done. A couple years ago, a friend told me a tidbit of interesting history. She was writing about it, though, so it was off limits for me. But it’s stayed with me as — well, very interesting. Especially interesting for kids. Yesterday, when I was thinking of topics to write about, that historical teaser came back and I looked up something about it and of course, a footnote took me off on another tangent. Which I actually think is even more fascinating for kids.

   In other words, I researched yesterday; I wound up with a very sketchy draft, if you could even call it a draft. In the end, it’ll be a good picture book, but the goal was supposed to be to write a draft. Well, maybe it’s a draft. I could call it that, right?

Note: This is a note of general frustration with writing 7 picture books in 7 days. I want to dig in and revise, which I do endlessly on picture books. Instead, I have to come up with a new draft! ARGH!

Actually, 7 days may be about right: only two more days to scribble out first drafts, and the rest of the year to revise.

3. May 5: A Cumulative Story. After tossing out lots of ideas, I finally settled on a cumulative story much like This is the House that Jack Built. It’s an idea I had toyed with before and was fun to take it through all the stages.
4. May 4: Delaware and Miriam. OK. This is getting hard! Picture books are short, yes, but that doesn’t mean they are easy to write. I’ve never written one in less than three days of intensive, obsessive work.

   I did get a draft done last night. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. But it’s no where near fully explored, much less refined. Still, just to get a draft done, I was pleased.

   I think the main problem is characterization. Why would this character do this? My problem is that I tend to write generic characters in my picture books and I’m really struggling to do more in such a short time frame.

5. May 3: At the End of the Rainbow. I didn’t even start until 7 pm because I went to church, then did accounting. But I managed to finish a full draft of this story and am excited to see how it sounds after a couple days of cooling off. The title will change, but it’s a good working title. 1295 words. Yes, I’m writing long, but I can cut.
6. May 2: ABC book. OK, so it’s one I had half-way started before and abandoned because I had blanks for about six letters. All I did today was fill in the rest of the letters, add more options to the letters I had and did general research and clean up. But I now have something for each letter. Yes, two or three are shaky. But it’s progress and I’m counting it.
7. May 1: Violet Ivy’s Button Eyes. 1128 words.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

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