We're getting a lot of submissions to the Halloween Writer's Jam right now! I'm really excited to see that... but, since I've been reading a lot of them, I figured this would be a good time to mention something I think could be helpful for people...
The Hook:
This'll apply to just about anything in written form, be it novels, essays, or regular magazine articles. Still, for our purposes, we'll look at them for short stories.
The beginning of a story is called the "introduction" for a reason: this is the point you introduce everything to your reader. As much fun as it is to just jump right into the action in media res, if you're not careful you risk losing the audience long before the story has even started. If this is a shorter story and if the audience is still not sure what's going on until right before the end... well, they've just lost a lot of why the final reveal should make them go "Oh! I get it! Nice!" Instead, you get a lot of "...I feel bad because I don't get why this ending is as profound as it should be... hang on, let me go back..."
Now true, I love going back and re-watching old movies with twist endings to see how it all sets up. But the initial twist needs to be a good one that I can keep a track of, or else I just won't care.
The same is true of short stories: you gotta set them up.
The First Few Lines...
I remember I once did an exercise in English Class where we were supposed to write a story about a really stressful moment in life. After we had written them, our (substitute) teacher told us all to write our first sentence on the whiteboard at the front of the classroom.
When we had done all of that, he read each one in turn and then asked the class if we had any ideas on what the story was going to be about.
Now this was a hard lesson for me to learn, since I'm still an essayist who likes anecdotal introductions where you tell a little story before really getting to your point. But what Mr. Blatherwick told us that day is true, and I've often thought back to that day.
I do think that expecting too much from just the first sentence is a bit impractical, but that first sentence does need to help set up the rest of the story, be it setting, characters, or atmosphere.
Try it yourself: pick a short story you've written, and only read the first (or first few) sentence(s); see if you can tell just from that where your story is headed.
Before The First Few Lines...
Actually, setting up your story can begin even earlier than the first few lines of your story! This has always been something I've felt very, very strongly about, and it's something perhaps not as many people do.
It's the story's title.
A story's title can be one of the best hints towards explaining what a story is about. Even if it's not entirely obvious, it'll get readers thinking in the right direction right away. It should be something beyond the fact that "Titles Are Required".
Now to be fair, titles aren't always the easiest thing to think up for a story and someone can spend a lot of time thinking about one. But wow, when you get just the right name for a story, then you know you're in a good way.
Examples?
As I thought about this, I checked my own stories that I've written at theO so far. Let's see...
Here's the opening to my horror story "The Used Bookstore":
Urban adventurers. That's what they call people like ourselves. Tammy, Gene and I had learned a few things from a couple websites, decked ourselves out with black everything, cameras, and went off into all the nooks and crannies of the city. As exciting as it must be to venture deep into South American jungles or Egyptian tombs, we knew there was just as much undiscovered mystery in our own town.
So right off the bat, we know that the story is about "a used bookstore". Check.
Within the first few sentences, we learn that the main characters are fans of clandestine (black clothing, cameras) "adventuring" in the city. Okay.
Put those together: we can now presume that these clandestine urban adventurers are probably going to explore a used bookstore. There's your setting right there.
Then of course by the fourth paragraph, they're all joking about taking pictures of ghosts and other paranormal stuff. So now we have friends secretly exploring an old bookstore, and now the reader has been given the suggestion that this could become a ghost story.
All in the span of about three hundred words (for those of you wondering, this workshop alone is already over eight hundred words).
In Media Res:
I'm not really going to do a full dissertation on this. Rather, I'm just gonna make a quick warning.
Latin for "in the middle of things", starting a story in media res is a good way to keep people guessing, to jump people right into the action. It's a fun trick to pull off, but even then you still need to explain yourself sooner than later.
My cousin was a notorious "why are they chasing him?" kind of person during movies. She hated having to wait 'til later to have things explained to her. And this was for movies that did this kind of stuff well!
If you really wanna try to leave a basic setup out of the first few lines, you need to do two things:
1. You need to make sure that your jumping into the middle of things is incredibly exciting, intriguing, and interesting.
2. You need to fill us all in on what had just happened sooner than later.
So if you do wanna go this route, just be careful, okay?
So That's That...
Any thoughts?
