The past two weeks, I shared with you a couple different ways to start the story I wrote for National Novel Writing Month, an endeavor I work on with my Honors 8th graders each year. By the time you read this, they will, hopefully, all have reached their 10,000 word goal for the month. I finished my story off at 32,052 words this year!
Before we get to November, we spend some time preparing, and how to begin the story is one area of focus. I shared those two examples with you to prepare you for this week’s lesson on story writing! Who knows, maybe you’ll want to join in NaNoWriMo next year!
There are a lot of ways to start a story. The first example I gave you was set thousands of years before my story was going to take place. I showed scenes with a giant battle between two dragons, and it was clear that the reader has walked into the middle of something that has been going on for some time.
This is a strategy that many writers use. Grab the reader’s attention with some all-out action right away and then go back and fill in the blanks later. In the case of my story, it took some time to fill all those spots in, and I dropped information throughout the rest of my story that patched those holes in the reader’s knowledge.
I actually set that part as my prologue. Since the rest of my story was set about 35 years in the future, I didn’t feel like it should just be Chapter One.
Chapter One was the beginning I shared with you last week. This is the idea where you introduce some characters and settings. In this case, my main character for the story was named Elfheim (not sure where I got it from, but sometimes names just appear as I type!), and he was a farmer, living in Colorado.
In our pre-writing exercises, the students and I worked on settings, too. I knew I wanted my protagonist to be a farmer but to be close to a big city with lots of technology. But until I actually started writing, I didn’t decide it would be Colorado and that Denver and Colorado Springs would play big parts in the story. Our vacation there this summer stuck in my head, and Pike’s Peak also became a central key. I always tell the kids to write what they know, so this made sense since it was still so fresh in my mind.
I say this often, and the students don’t always believe me until they embark on this adventure themselves: I usually have no idea how my story will end. As I write, new ideas pop into my head, and it really is as if the characters are writing their own stories. I made major shifts with one of my main characters, Andretti, throughout the writing process. In my pre-writing, I had her marked as changing from good into a major antagonist. However, as I wrote, it would have felt forced for her to walk that path. She showed me that she was a good person and always would be.
Another method to start a story, one I’ve never tried, is to actually start at the end of your story and then flash back and show how the character arrived at that spot. That would require knowing where my character(s) will end up, and, as I mentioned, I rarely know that. I usually have an idea of where I want to end, but getting there is constantly in motion. For example, I didn’t know how the culminating battle scene was going to end until the day before I wrote it; the idea came to me as I was writing another seemingly innocuous part.
So I actually used both of the previous columns as my beginnings. I wanted the prologue from a long time ago to be able to introduce the idea of dragons. Then I needed to show my main character in the time setting where the rest of the story would take place. There is such a difference between stories that we think of with dragons and stories where there are flying cars.
And that was the seed that has stuck in my head since July. I don’t always remember where exactly I come up with story ideas. For instance, I still don’t recall how exactly I came up with the idea for my trilogy of novels focusing on super heroes in college. No idea. But I do remember the moment I thought of this year’s story.
I was helping with the QCBA summer baseball tournament and spent some time between games reading a book. It was about the return of some dragons after a long time away. This was set in a medieval world, but I suddenly wondered if I had ever read a dragon story mixed with future tech. And from there, I got this year’s story, which I titled “Flying Together.” (Eh, it needs some work, the title.)
I’m proud of my students for their efforts. For only the third time, I had a student write more than I did! I can’t wait to read all their stories and see how many tried different ways to start their story. Time to begin!
Word of the Week: This week’s word is aprosexia, which means an inability to concentrate, as in, “His aprosexia set in when everyone around him was whispering instead of working.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!