Tag: starting

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Start a Story Late, Finish it Early

Every so often, a pal and I run a readathon where we invite members to set aside some time one weekend to catch up on reading. It last took place a couple of weekends ago, and I intended to make some progress with War & Peace.

However much I wanted to read, though, I kept putting it aside because I wanted to write. I can’t think of the last time I had such an urge to pick up a pen. I was continuing a fantasy series under a pseudonym on a well-known website. It’s a passion project and I can’t foresee a time where I wish to claim ownership, so references to the plot will be vague.

The classic wisdom for writing a story, and especially a play, is to start late and leave early. The aim is to hook the reader by going straight into the drama rather than explaning the backstory, which can be done once said drama is established.

Stories will sometimes will arrive fully-formed, and these are a joy to write. In the most recent parts, I’ve had a strong idea of where the charcters should be, yet I’ve struggled with how to place them there while maintaning the pace of the story.

Despite its genre, this series still has one foot in the recognisable world. In the most recent part, I needed four characters to end up in a riverside cottage and I tried to build up a sense of drama before they even arrived.

The first draft saw their trains delayed because of industral action and bad weather, so there was a sense of relief upon arrival. Another draft saw them arrive early, only to be told by the grumpy cottage owner they couldn’t enter for another two hours.

Because fiction is so subjective and personal, it’s difficult to teach someone how to spot where the action should begin. When you’ve been doing it for a while, though, you develop a sense of where it fits best.

As I continued, I realised the real drama would happen at the cottage, so I didn’t need to create any more on the journey and I began the story at the time of their arrival. By contrast, if I’d needed to convey any backstory to the reader, having the characters stuck on a train chatting about previous events might have been the ideal way to do it.

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Almost Nearly Started and Just About Finished

There are times when it’s difficult to begin a new project or to add to an existing one. This entry is due to be published at 6pm on Tuesday 7 May, but I only wrote the first words at around 8:30pm the day before.

Rationally, I know I need to put something out by the deadline, but it was a struggle to think of a topic, plus I have another project I’m keen to start once this entry is written that doesn’t have a time pressure associated with it.

Fortunately, I have the luxury of addressing this procrastination within my final entry, thus creating a topic to discuss.

And it’s not only writing projects. I promised a friend I’d read her Star Wars fan fiction, but that’s been 13 months and I still haven’t touched a word of it.

As I write, I’ve looked up the link again and charged up my Kobo. At least if I transfer it to my device, I have a higher chance of looking at it before 2020. I can’t provide a link because I was sworn not to share it.

Another area where I’m trying to keep up to date is podcasts. There’s a local one called Creative Chit-Chat that I only began to listen to at episode 46 because I knew the interviewee. I’ve then made a concerted effort to go back and listen to them all in order; I currently have episode 35 queued up.

One aspect I love about catching up with a production is that it can compress a long period of time into a shorter period so you can see the changes that have occurred since then.

A prime example is The West Wing, where the fictional political landscape changed over its eight years on the air, influenced by what was happening in the news at the same time.

No doubt if I scrolled back through my entries on this blog, I would find a comparable pattern emerging. Heck, maybe one of my regular readers has already done this and can comment on what they found.

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Knowing How to Start

Although you see a new blog entry here every week, it isn’t always an easy business knowing how to start writing them. Sometimes, I have only a vague idea of what I want to say; other times, there might be two topics of equal importance that don’t link into each other or sit well together.

There’s no good answer to either of these problems, but one technique is to start writing anything, whether it’s a fragment, a plan, someone else’s words, or even a load of nonsense. After a few minutes of non-stop writing, I find this has the effect of turning on the tap so a structure begins to flow.

Another good method is to head out for a walk or a run, depending upon your preferred speed. A few years ago, I was struggling to write a short story about a man with an excellent memory but limited social skills. I went for a walk in the rain, writing down fragments in my notepad in bus shelters. The moment I had the line, ‘Anger can do in five seconds what a shrink can’t do in five years’, I was ready to write the rest of it.

At times, of course, there will be nothing pressing to say. It’s more difficult to start from a blank slate, but the above techniques can be used in the same way.