sholio | Another discussion question at my other LJ

Another discussion question at my other LJ

I have totally been Ms. Negativity today, and I apologize for that. I have a glass of red wine and I just spent a couple of hours scripting comics, and I feel much better now. Also, I yelled at the cat, which always helps. The cat didn't seem to think so, though. (Although frankly, he did deserve it. Little idiot won't stay out of my wastebasket.) I've been very on-again/off-again with the creative-ness lately, and that tends to express itself as general bitchiness in other areas of my life. I'm a temperamental artist despite my best efforts ... dammit! *sigh*

Anyway, I've posted another question on the creative process over at my other LJ. This week, my question is: What makes a good beginning for a story?

http://community.livejournal.com/laylalawlor/21230.html

Incidentally, it was basically

iamrighthere and

tipper_green doing this in their own journals that got me started, and it's really quite fun! I'm also having fun coming up with different questions on a weekly basis. I'm very interested in just about everything having to do with the creative side of things -- both other people's process of creating, *and* what people take away from stories when they read and view them. So I've been really enjoying these discussions.

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I really want to comment on this, but (and I know this is silly) I'm really quite intimidated by the first comment (not your post!) That has more to do with the fact that my underside is feeling a little soft at the moment, and I wouldn't cope with people strongly disagreeing with me.

Would it be OK to post a comment here?

Sure, go right ahead! I would love to know what you have to say. *grin* Believe me, I can totally sympathize with that soft-underside feeling ... I'm kind of feeling that way myself right now (hence the fact that I have deleted my earlier post in this LJ).

Yeah I saw that one, and was going to reply, but it had gone by the time I got back to it!

I'm hormonal, and just finished a fic that I suppose would be called 'angsty' and 'hurt without comfort' - although I just call it 'sad', and it's opened me up a bit. And that there, is the reason why I normally stick to humour.

In fact I even edited my comment from your earlier, earlier post, because I disagreed with something you wrote, and just didn't want to go the rounds. I kept coming back to the thread, and then saw that you had elaborated on what you'd said, and that we didn't actually disagree!

Yeah ... I deleted that thread because ultimately I ended up realizing that first off, I don't think I'd explained myself very well in the beginning, and second, I just really, really didn't want to go there. I want this journal to be my happy place, somewhere I can go without being afraid of what comments might be waiting for me. Correspondingly, while I have no problem with debate, I don't want to touch off a potentially volatile discussion on a very touchy subject. I kinda wish I hadn't posted it in the first place, because it *did* turn out to be more volatile than I'd realized, and now I feel very negatively towards a project that I was all happy about. *sigh* But hindsight is 20/20.

What I would have said about that was that I was sad that things had taken that turn for you concerning the project, and that I sincerely hoped that one day soon you'd feel able to pick it up again.

Also, a badly remembered piece of Latin, which apparently is an old schoolboy joke, carved on to desks or notebook covers. I can't quite remember what the last word should be, so it's probably got too many syllables, but hear goes.

Next to a hand-drawn picture of the Venus de Milo,

"No te bastardes carborundorum"

Translation: Don't let the bastards grind you down.

Will post other comment later. HAVE to go out now.

"No te bastardes carborundorum"
Translation: Don't let the bastards grind you down.

This gave me a much-needed grin -- thank you!

About the project ... ah, such is life. We'll see how things go in the future.

Oh -- and I'm looking forward to seeing your comment! :)

Having thought about this, I don't know whether I can answer this question. I've been flicking through the first lines and paragraphs of the books on my shelf, and what caught me up in them is different in nearly every case.

'The Hobbit' - for example sucks you in by making you curious and welcoming you with its charm.
"In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit..." it begins, and immediately you're wondering, 'what is a Hobbit?' But it then launches into what kind of hole it's not, then what kind of hole it is, and then finally into what a Hobbit is, and who this particular Hobbit is.

'The Hitchhiker's Guide...' starts off by insulting the entire human race - saying that we're from a little regarded backwater planet and are so primitive that we think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
The humour, is the hook.

'The Lord of the Rings' and 'Sense and Sensibility' both start with family histories. S&S is actually quite dry - but it moves on fairly fast inot the story, and LOTR soon puts us in a pub, where the character whose history we've just heard is being discussed.

Asimov's robot stories, don't bother with introductions, they just plunge you straight into the tale.

'The Mill on the Floss' (George Elliot) and 'The Eagle of the Ninth' (Rosemary Sutcliff) both start with beautiful descriptive passages the first of the banks of a river, the second of a Roman Road and the people travelling on it. They may not be the most exciting passges, but the quality of language, and the question of what significance these places hold to the story are intriguing.

So it's not one thing with me. There's no formula. However, I have to say that I don't like it when authors start by quoting a poem or someone else. For the first page or so I wonder how the quote has relevance to the story, or the chapter. Soon after that I'll forget it was even there. Or I'll come to the end of the story or hapter, look back, and most of the time it's had no relevance to the story that I could see.

I suppose what all these beginnings do have in common is that they all introduce characters of themes, or places or attitudes that are central to the unfolding story. I wouldn't like it if the story began with something that had little impact on the following prose.

'Mars' by Ben Bova, is a book that certainly has that potential. It begins with the Navaho story of the creation of Earth and Mars. Fair enough, the book is called 'Mars' but why tell us the Navaho creation story when the book is about the first manned mission to Mars? We later find out that there is relevance, the main character is part Navaho, and his time on Mars reawakens that part of him, making him fall in love with Mars, and feel its connection to Earth that the Navaho believe it has.

So, alas! I thought I would have some kind of opinion on this, but it appears I have not. Just as well I've posted here and not there then....

Should have been 'Nolites te bastardes carborundorum' - I eventually found 'The Handmaid's Tale' (Margaret Atwood) in which the handmaid finds it scratched into a hidden surface in her room - reading is illegal for her class.

I really don't have an opinion on this one, because with me it depends on how committed I am to reading in the first place. If I really want to sit down with a book, I'll suffer through a bad beginning (which can just as easily be based on my mood while reading as anything). I like going into the action, but it's better if I know the characters. A mysterious or funny beginning works well. A good author can drag a person in with a simple emotion in a single sentence, such as "The Fountainhead", which starts with, "Howard Roark laughed," which instantly give the impression that this isn't a man who laughs at much. She has the best intro I've read, because it tells who Howard Roark is as a person, and his situation, and loads us with details and senses within a page.

http://www.amazon.com/Fountainhead-Ayn-Rand/dp/0451191153

Page down to inside the book and click on "read the first page".

*laughs* No no, I'm interested in what everybody thinks! To me it's just as interesting if there *is* no formula than if there's always something specific. And what's intriguing me about all of this is that it's leading me to realize that the range of things that will draw me into a book is broader than I'd previously realized. I had always thought of myself as someone who reads first of all for character -- that if there's no character to interest me in the first few pages of a book, I'll stop reading. I'm also drawn to mystery, so dangling a puzzle in front of me on the first page (as in the hobbit example above) will keep me reading because I need to know what happens next. But looking at other people's opinions is making me think that it's more complicated than I'd realized. For example, authorial voice plays a large role -- when I look back on the books that really grabbed me in the beginning, in a lot of cases they're the ones that had a very distinctive authorial voice.

Roger Zelazny's "Amber" series was raised in the other thread .... and to me, this is still one of the most successful book openings that I've read. It starts with the hero waking up with amnesia in a hospital. Who wouldn't want to know how that happened? Especially since he doesn't know himself. Then a series of different events happen one after the other. Even though the hero's not all that likeable (at least, I always found him a difficult person to sympathize with), you're sucked in by curiosity and then swept along because things move so fast and just when you start getting a handle on one part of the mystery, another wrinkle rises up to complicate things further.

There's definitely an element of "How much do I want to read this book?" that'll keep me reading, or not. I'm currently slogging through a book that hasn't really managed to gain my interest YET (I'm somewhere around page 100) because it was recommended to me by my dad and I keep holding out the hope that it'll get better, although hope is fast slipping away.

Usually I need to be grabbed by character and/or something else to intrigue me in the first few pages (like a compelling mystery). In fact, I think the main reason why I'm so resistent to reading Ayn Rand's books (several of which my husband has) is because from all I've heard, I don't think I'd like her characters and I don't think I'd be willing to plow through a thick book without a sympathetic character to carry me along. But this is really just a prejudice on my part; I don't *know*.

I can't read her other stuff. I've tried Atlas Shrugged, and I haven't picked it back up. I love her writing style, though, very clean and descriptive and precise. Now, I love The Fountainhead because of the lead character. He was written to be her vision of the ideal man/hero. He sticks to his own version of what should be, his own artistic vision, and damn anyone who thinks he should do things in a more traditional/conservative/play-by-the-rules way. Her characters are gripping, if a little, well, can't think of the word, archetypical, I guess? Still, her writing style sucked me in, and Howard Roark's struggle to do his own thing kept me there. He isn't in your face about it either, which I loved. If you didn't agree, he simply shrugged and moved on without a care, because HE knew what he was meant to do, and how to do it. He's almost cold, yet not cold at all. Single-minded without being brash. Fascinating mix.

Uh...sorry. LOL!! I tend to get carried away about it. Not everyone can read it, there is a lot of exposition and what not, but the characters are fully formed and there are several unexpected turns. I guess it simply depends on what you want to take away from the book. I loved her message. Even loved that, later in the book, he develops an intense friendship in that his friend admires Howard so much, and in that Howard actually lets him. Course there is a complication...shutting up now. LOL!

I need good characters too. I've read books that were recc'ed to me, and didn't give a hoot about them because what that one person got out of it, I couldn't get.

I had a teacher who once told me, never start a story by having the character waking up, or have the character waiting for someone/something. Eh, the story I just posted started with one of those no-no's so you can see how much attention I pay to those rules.

Finding where to start a story can sometimes be a trick. I've written pages before realizing that it's all drivel and I need to start at another point, further along in the story and just refer back to the boring stuff. Other times, I'll start a story and realize I need to back up and begin earlier in the tale.

Just thinking back to my last four short stories -- one started in the middle of the action, the next started in a quiet scene setting moment, the next had this weird whiplash thing going where I was referring back to things that had recently happened (it was one of those instances of where to begin-- how far back should I start), and this latest started with the cliche of 'waking up'. It all depends on what you're trying to say in the story, I guess.

Not much help, am I?

Those kinds of "rules", especially for fiction, always bug me ... I had an English teacher one time who forbade us from using the word "flow" in our essays (as in, "The sentence flows ..."). But for fiction in particular, I don't think it's WHAT you say so much as HOW you say it. One of the strongest book openings I can think of off the top of my head (in SF anyway) is Roger Zelazy's Amber series, which starts with the main character waking up with amnesia in the hospital. And like we were discussing at my other LJ, I generally dislike diary/letter format stories, but there have been some that I just loved -- and of course I've actually *done* them (as with "Postcards to Jeannie").

It's got to be whatever suits the story.

Now I'm thinking about where my last few stories have started out. That's actually pretty interesting ... I often jump into the middle of an action scene -- not very surprising, since I tend to like those sorts of openings myself. But sometimes I'll start with a pretty standard team meet-and-greet type of opening ... or *heh* a character waking up, like in "Running on Empty" ... it IS interesting to think about what goes into those sorts of decisions, isn't it? In "Shattered Things", I'd always planned the opening scene where the characters come back through the gate all bloody and drugged, but I'd originally intended to jump back in time and show how they got that way. But the story just wasn't working that way, so I changed it and didn't jump back at all, but just continued on from that point with a few bits of dialogue to help bring the reader up to speed, and it turned out much, much stronger as a story.

*grin* Well, it's definitely on my "to read" list -- although Atlas Shrugged was ahead of it, being the better-known and more influential of her books, but maybe I'll bump that one down and move Fountainhead up a couple of notches...

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Another discussion question at my other LJ

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Starting a story

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