How the fucking hell do you start a novel?

[logansrogue]

I've written bits and pieces and chunks of my novel from a few different points in the story. But I'm not - I'm not happy with the beginning. I'm never happy with the beginning.

How the fuck do you START a novel? How do I draw someone in? How do I do the delicate dance of words that, in the end, hooks a reader and doesn't let them go? The only way I know to even get anything done is to just - start. Dump my readers in head first and let them figure shit out. I don't know if it works, though.

How do you start novels or stories, my dear friends who write? Share with me your wisdom. :)

Comments

[tommmo.livejournal.com]

"It was a dark and stormy night..."

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Dude! *lol*

I was thinking about you and Adam and my other nice geeky male friends a minute ago. Mum and Dad had the morning radio on and this stupid American douchebag has written a book on how women can understand the 'secret language of men' or some shit. Like, these guys were on the radio going on and on about how misunderstood they were and how we should just let them off for being incommunicative selfish oiks just because they have a penis.

I was like, "I wish, just heartily wish, that Tommo or Adam or Dave or Grant or another of my generally clean, well-spoken, thoughtful friends could tell these fucktards what a load of bullshit they're shovelling."

It was like being blasted with male privilege for two hours. I wanted to beat them with puppies by the end of it, seriously.

Just - thank you for existing. You and your kind. *sigh*

[tommmo.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's really nice of you to say all that. Thanks!

Douchebag apologists masquerading as self-help, "secrets of the sexes" guru types are pretty repulsive. Especially when they start writing books about it. Bleh.

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Hehehe, no problem, buddy! *hugs*

Oh I hate them. The only thing I hate more are women that write these books which are pretty much "How to be a total doormat for your man" cover to cover. I nearly wrote "doormate" then, that's a pretty good word for it!

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

That is a pretty awesome new word.

There are the books by women that basically say much the same thing (give the man the sex and you'll get what you want), but do it all with an underlying 'because men are stupid and easy to manipulate teehee' assumption as well. All just the same crap about how old-fashioned gender roles are the only true path to marital bliss, dressed with different sorts of self-justification.

[ryttu3k.livejournal.com]

I like starting with dialogue (or, if it's crack, a bad pun XD). Or! Epicness, not neccesarily related to the story. Last year's NaNo has Mysterious Snippets all through the first few chapters. Can't say if it draws anyone in, though XD

As an example, though, this is the start of NaNo 2008.



Chapter One
Ways And Means

Something was stirring.

It was something alien, foreign to all that surrounded it. Unable to be seen by human eyes, it stirred, reaching out an inquiring limb... if one could call it that. It stretched, queried, searching for something.

It was beginning to wake.



It was beginning to look bad for the adventurer.

Armed only with a small laser pistol, the adventurer adjusted his spacesuit (thin, silver, with a fishbowl-shaped helmet on his head) and stared out over the red dust of Mars. There were tracks leading off from his crashed spaceship - or perhaps it was towards them? It was hard to tell - alien footprints weren't his area of expertise.

The pistol, warm in his hand, was cocked and ready. Beyond the red rubble - was that movement? Could it possibly be his target?

The movement was quick. A greenish blur, moving from the boulder field to his space ship, tilted at a rakish angle. The adventurer spun, laser pistol in hand to cover the movement, eyes widening as he caught sight of the hideous beast --

"Ahem."

The adventurer's head shot up, eyes wide, as the hideous beast tapped the fingers of one immaculately manicured hand against his school desk. "Yes?" he asked innocently, attempting to cover up the comic strip he had been doodling in his grammar book.



So... yeah XD Make of that what you will!

[marie-j-granger.livejournal.com]

You need a killer first sentence or paragraph that draws people in. Consider Austen ("It is a truth universally acknowledged...") or Dickens ("It was the best of times; it was the worst of times...") or Gaiman ("There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife", The Graveyard Book)

[sir-devans.livejournal.com]

If you want it to be your novel then I would do exactly as you wrote, dump them in head first. Simply start at the earliest point. Where you know the story starts.

[leviathan0999.livejournal.com]

There's no one right to start a novel or otherstory, but there is only one right way to start any particular piece. There are endless approaches, but you'll find the one that suits this. You'll feel it. The trick is to remember that there is no trick. There's just the right beginning for this one. I started my current, ridiculously long Trio-Fic novel with a prologue about how a butterfly flapping its wings in china changes the Universe. I started a James Bond fanfic with a discourse about globalization and housing developments. I've started other pieces with cryptic sentences or bits of dialogue.

In the end, the story will tell you.

[xedra.livejournal.com]

I totally sympathize. Beginnings are the hardest things for me when I write. I can be stimied for the longest time on a story, simply because I'm not sure how to start it. I'll have reams of notes on the story, everything outlined, but nothing really gets going until I have that blasted beginning.

Eventually I wind up putting something, anything down, the meekest sentence or a bit of dialog, reminding myself I can always go back and fix it later. Then the ball starts rolling and I'm in the happy-writing-zone.

[hotclaws.livejournal.com]

I've heard your first chapter should be an explaination of what the novel is about and why you want to write it,That gets you going then when you've finished scrap it.

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

It is not the only way to start, but a good classic start is to have someones like turn upside down in the first chapter. The day they got the letter from their father who they believed dead for the last 15 years, that sort of thing. There is a great little roleplaying game that suggests coming up with something like this for every character, and that calls it the kicker.

[cedargrove.livejournal.com]

For myself, grabbing the reader and dumping him in the thick of something either intriguing, puzzling or in the middle of the action usually works. Here's the beginning of Use'ara.

Something wasn’t right. Carefully noting any discomfort, Commander Lindsay Derby stretched first one and then the other of his long lithe legs. Something soft and flexible pressed against his toes…

No boots then.

…and when he moved his legs to try and feel the edges of whatever the firmness was that lay under his back his hips ached like he imagined rheumatism must feel. Slowly he moved his arms, pressing his hands first against his shoulders and then down over his chest and stomach, down toward the dull pain in his hips. Skin… but… the entire left side of him felt somehow soft… spongy. He tried to move; to sit up and moaned as the dull ache became a sharp pain.

“Easy, Lin, easy.” A woman’s voice.

From a teaching perspective, when teaching compositional techniques with the kids in my class, it's about one of three things - dialogue, action (event), or description. Whatever you write though should always leave your readers with questions to which, the implied promise is that if they continue reading, they'll find the answers.

Don't know if that helps, hun.

Also - how do you start your Mummy fic? Why should it be any different starting a fanfic than a novel... (I mean, it's a little bit different sure, because you don't necessarily have to describe characters and background stuff, but... as Michael would have it, "...the principle is still the same.").

[apolla.livejournal.com]

Start however you want it to start.

That's no help, of course. Don't worry overmuch about the first line if it doesn't come straight away. If it's the last thing you write, that's fine too. If you want to start funny, do. If you want to start intriguing, do. Maybe write several possible beginnings and then see which you think works best.

writing

[de-scribe50.livejournal.com]

tart by keeping a dairy of ideas, jot down things that annoy you please you....interest you.....create a new world..ask questions

then order or group ideas together...maybe form charachters

start writing anything....eg. As a small boy I used to lie in bed staring at the white dull ceiling and wonder why I was alive.I hated wearing pajamas and I would sometimes take off my pyjama pants and feel my nakedness against the coll cotton sheets.

Re: writing

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

O_o ... okay.

[shantari.livejournal.com]

One wip of mine has the Magnificent Bastard start out with a inner monologue about why there really was no point in listening to another person on account of not even having the chance of being as bad ass. Because the character in question starts off extremely arrogant and is a total bastard.

Another one, that's further along, is about dreams and therefor starts in the middle of a dream that's recurring and plot important. Making it a in medias res start.

Yet another starts with a very detailed description of a room that the main character's sitting in, and then of the main character. And then the MC say "I'm bored", and thus start doing things that leads to a plot. (It's a work of humour.)

In the end, what makes the start of a novel so difficult is because that is your selling point. That's when you catch the reader's interest and give them some general idea about how the novel will be. The usual way is to start it in the middle of something happening, to give a sense of action and adventure. If the setting is important, you could instead start with a description of that. When you know what sense you want the reader to start off with, then you work to make the beginning convey that sense. That's what I did with the above examples: In the first I wanted to convey that this is a person who is more arrogant than anything else, and the events that follow only strengthen the character's arrogance.
In the second I started in the middle of a dream, but worded in a way so you don't know that right away. Thus at once blurring the borders between dreams and reality which is what the novel in general is about, and also starting things off the beat so that when the character wakes up the real story begins. In the third I start off with a semi serious description, and then subvert it to highlight that it's a work that doesn't take itself seriously.

The things that you want the reader to feel as soon as possible, should be begun early. You want the readers to feel disoriented? Start off one way, then burn the map and steal a car to go in any other direction, preferably several at once. :D Want the readers to sympathise with a character? Introduce them and show how they are during an ordinary day of their lives, before turning it upside down.

It's all about getting the reader in the right mindset. One of my more recent WIP comes from me having this delightfully ludicrous dream that I turned into the beginning of a story, and then everything after that has grown from that silly beginning. That's more of a case of the beginning deciding the work rather than the work deciding the beginning though.

Anyway, use my advice freely, and then we'll see if I actually finish any of these. :D

Pixis Genomies and writing

[de-scribe50.livejournal.com]

Fun is what it's all about: have fun.
What is fun?
Who invented it?
Why is it so popular?
Is it really fun?
Is fun so funny when we are being made fun of?
In short :it's no fun to be short.
Or being fat or wealthy or clever for that matter.
Words do matter. Words can hurt.
Forget sticks and stones will brake my bones but names will never hurt me...try telling that to the school yard bullies victim.
Genomies often can be found pondering lustfully over pretty cute would-be writers who just happen to be very clever too at art and music and all manner of things artistic and whom inspire tired old grumpy genomies to wonderlust and think of what it would be like to be in love with such a creature as this.

Re: Pixis Genomies and writing

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Oh it's YOU! Damn, I thought you were some random creepy guy for a while! *phew* Don't scare me like that, silly genomie! *laughs*

Sorry G didn't mean to scare Pixi

[de-scribe50.livejournal.com]

Helen said:
Hi genome,
Are you all burned and dead?
Hope not. Is your nest safe? all those guitars would burn nicely I suspect.
I think you arn't near any fires though, I hope? I heard you've had some
horrible hot weather over there too. Might be time to move to Tasmania?
Melbourne heating up too much. 45 degrees etc too hot! I experienced 50
degrees out in the nullabour on the way home from living in Melbourne and
that nearly killed me! awful!! It's bullshit hot that.
Just wanted to see if you were alright.
the Pixie

[callistra.livejournal.com]

Hmm.
I've written the beginnings of six novels now.

Loud music mimicked Celeste's heartbeat in the darkness.

"No comment!" Jayne's face looked huge on the vidcast as she shouted. "I said, no comment!"

“T, I have caught a bird which may need your care. Please send help as soon as possible, L."

Samkara pressed herself more firmly into the log, trying to peer over it to see what was happening.

Coming closer to the rooms, Marissa could hear shouting and babies screaming.

Donal saw her first.


Realistically, I expect them all to change!