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HYPERPYRUS
THE HYPERPYRUS ARCHIVES: Writing

20 August 2007
Monday
Beginning at the Beginning
Subject: Writing

I haunt a number of listservs and discussion boards for writers, and recently, not for the first time, someone asked, "How do I begin to write a story?" The writer already had a premise, so she (or he?) had clearly begun to think about the story, so that wasn't quite the sort of beginning she seemed to mean. Coming up with ideas is usually, but not always, the easy part. But the beginning of the story, the start, that crucial opening scene that's supposed to entangle the writer and pull him (or her?) in deeper and deeper, paragraph by paragraph, inexorably to the very end. . . .

I want to address a very type of beginning, one unfamiliar to readers but also perhaps to some writers. I first made this observation on DeepGenre (15 September 2006), and it's probably not original to me.

When we, as writers, study other people's beginnings, we are seeing the openings they used for the reader. In fact, however, there is a good chance (I won't guess at any closer statistics for this phenomenon!) that the story first had another opening that let the writer herself into the story.

To take one example from my own works, here are the first three paragraphs of my short story "The Rope," which appeared in the April 2007 issue of Realms of Fantasy:

The rope was braided out of common halfa-grass, as many ropes are in the Antique Lands. It trailed from a low and broad basket, made of doum-palm fibers but unworthy of further remark. Some length of the rope lay coiled beside this basket. The other end of the rope, which had to be thought of as the far end, stood at present some fifteen yards distant. And this, as will be seen, was worthy of remark indeed.
The rope had been displayed in the Lower Ópetian port town of Noofr for five days now. Late each morning the blind old man who owned the basket set it in a broad sort of plaza that periodically filled up with tradesmen and merchants, forming near the ice manufactory an ephemeral sooq of goats, bitumen, fish, rice, and other regional produce. This place was more than broad enough for the rope to have been laid straight out in any direction without touching the wall of the native town, or that of the manufactory, had its owner chosen to do so. The old man, whom the people of Noofr came to call the little khedeev (that is, the little "ruler of Ópet"), chose not to do this.
The effect of this location, likely unintended by the old man, was also to keep the rope some distance from any building whose roof or window might have facilitated a closer inspection of the far end. The residents and visitors to the sooq were much inclined to attempt this, because from its coil beside the basket the rope rose straight into the air. And there was no yardarm or balloon tethered anywhere along its length.

But this opening -- which, in another discussion on DeepGenre, I dubbed an example of the "Antiques Roadshow" type of opening -- is not where I started. No, years before, when I was first developing the idea that became "The Rope," I began with the character who, several pages along in the final version, becomes the rope-charmer's rope-climber. Here is the earliest surviving draft of that opening:

Iana watched the boy, wondering if he would fall.
It happened now and then. If the rope-charmer played a bad note on his ivory horn, the rope might break or slip from the point at which he had tethered it to the sky. Most often, of course, the boy did not fall. He would climb higher than the nearest tower or obelisk, perform his tricks and climb down again into a shower of coins and trinkets from the applauding crowd.
Squatting in the shadow of the crowd, Iana made pebbles vanish by sleight-of-hand, did tricks with her little jambiyah and its sharp, curved blade. The hard sole of a sandal nearly crushed her thumb. “Out of the way!” said the man. Someone kicked her.

About 10 years separate these drafts, so some changes were the result of gained skill and confidence. As you might guess from these excerpts, the original version of "The Rope" was much more a character-centered story than the version that was published. But it was through the character of Iana (who, as I worked out the linguistics, history, and cultures of the Antique Land milieu, became "Iánheh") that the "bones" of the tale developed. Without having first examined her--and having developed her character, which evolved during the intervening years--I could never have written the somewhat more removed (yet deeper and richer) narration that now presents what happened to her.

"The Rope" represents a fairly extreme example of changes between a "writer's opening" and a "reader's opening" -- and I don't mean to recommend the "Antiques Roadshow" technique as a good way to open a story: it is easy to overdo and, as some of you are likely to agree, doesn't easily engage the reader.

"The Chapter of Bringing a Boat into Heaven" opened originally with the first-person narrator going into some detail about her current circumstances before she looked back to the events that brought her there. In the end, the first three paragraphs got knocked right out, and the story opened with the words of the fourth paragraph:

For the sake of my own immortality, which is by no means assured despite all that I am about to tell, I will write my name here in red hieroglyphs: Ankhesenast.

Unfortunately, the discarded paragraphs no longer survive, but without their build-up, whatever it was, I would not have arrived at these words. These (and the rest of the Ankhesenast's tale) hooked editor Shawna McCarthy and resulted in my first sale and publication. (The story appeared in the February 1995 issue of Realms of Fantasy.)

So, when it comes to beginnings, my advice is this: begin where the story interests you, the writer, the most. You might realize later that you've started too soon, or you've started too late, in the story, but the crucial point is that you have started. And it's not until you've finished that you will know for sure where the beginning of your tale really lies.

COMMENTS? E-mail me.