story basics # 1, openings

this is the beginning, etc etc

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If I had a group of people who had never written a story before, and it was my job to take them through the process of writing a story, how would I go about it? What would I say to such a group? If I could design a tutorial for the novice story writer, what would I put it in there?

For starters, probably the usual stuff about character, plot, structure, chronology, point of view, all of that stuff. It would quickly become technical because at heart, I am a technician. I love technique. To me, technique makes everything make sense. But that is an approach to story writing that only works once you have…written a story or read a lot of stories. You can’t know technique until you know technique.

As a way of instructing people who already have some sense of technique, this is a perfectly fine approach. But what I am learning is that it presupposes a level of familiarity with craft that many people do not have. In order to teach creative writing as I have been trying to teach it, the people I am teaching need to know, for example, that stories have a dramatic situation, that stories have a shape, and that this shape arises through the development of character and plot. It requires knowing that there is such a thing as point of view. It involves knowing that stories are divided into things called scenes, which is the base dramatic unit of a story. But also, it involves, well, a set of background assumptions about how stories and novels are constructed that you acquire through reading a lot of stories and novels

People are not reading like that anymore. So you can’t really assume that people are coming into creative writing even having thought about point of view. Or ever having thought about structure and form. Many people interested in creative writing know plot only as a thing that they are afraid of, a thing to be defeated and overcome with vibes. I don’t know how to break it to you. But we are in the era of the post-literate writer. It’s beyond the whole “visual prose” thing. Like, they need to be instructed in basics. Like, the fundamental building blocks of reading and writing fiction.

Long before workshops and long before the internet socialists’ favorite catchall for the evils of modernity, the MFA program, writers were, first of all, readers. They read and read deeply into traditions and formed ideas that would later become the basis the techniques we now take for granted. I think we can all kind of agree that—for various reasons—people don’t really be doing that anymore

So that’s the first issue.

The second issue is that people can be quite hostile to analyzing technique. They fear technique will get in the way of their vibe. It will take what is magic about their writing away. They fear learning technique will devolve into a series of “rules.” It will become “dogma” and it will strip writers of their precious little souls. They would prefer the mushy free-for-all of “anything goes.”

I think the identitarian backlash of the mid-2010s ushered in, along with a deaccessioning of white male authors, a de-emphasis on the technical. You can argue about the moral and cultural necessity of this de-emphasis all you want. I don’t care. I am sure there are valid political and cultural reasons to de-legitimate an emphasis on so-called “bloodless” mechanistic understandings of literary technique. Sure, absolutely. But also, it has emphasized what Lukács calls the “mystical” aspect of declining bourgeois subjectivist prose. What some of my classmates and I called the “woo woo” approach to writing. Where everything is “by feel” and one is not supposed to look too closely at the technical or stylistic basis of the work. If one attends to style, it is from the moral or philosophical dimension. Or else, to call the work “raw” and “a gut-punch” or whatever.

I am not here to defend technique though. I mention it only to explain that technique is no longer a lingua franca of the creative writing pedagogical apparatus. As a result, many discussions about a given story or novel devolve to theme and interpersonal interpretation of character and character motivation. There was a time when these interpretations were a tool to ascertain whether or not a particular thread or aspect of the story had been brought off effectively. But now, they serve as ends in themselves. We interpret because we cannot analyze and diagnose. Interpretation no longer points the way back to technique and technique no longer back to the intention of the author or the needs of the story. Interpretation is merely a statement of subjective experience after having moved through the story, a statement about how it made us feel, not a concrete analysis of how those feelings were evoked or their structural role within the story itself.

That is fine. Probably. Anyway, what I’m getting at is that I am starting to think that we…or I should say, I need to rethink my approach to creative writing pedagogy. I’m at the eight-week mark in the semester, when these sorts of thoughts haunt me because I want to make the class more effective and productive and useful to my students. So I analyze and ponder and make tweaks. Some semesters, I alter the reading list to accentuate a point of craft or sometimes, I change the kinds of questions I ask, leading us into different or alternative routes of discussion. But what I am realizing—thinking about the last few workshops I’ve run over the last few years—is that I have been assuming that people arrive at graduate creative writing workshops with some working understanding of craft and technique and that it is my job to add to that or at least not to deplete that knowledge.

For reasons I won’t get into, I don’t think that’s the case.

So. What to do.

I am thinking about putting more direct didacticism into my workshops. I tend to shy away from didacticism because I assume that everyone already knows the things I know. I was a chemistry major. I took two English classes as an undergraduate. And I was getting a PhD in biochemistry. Everything I learned about creative writing, about craft, about literature, I taught myself from reading books, from Tumblr, reading author interviews, and trial and error. My literary intelligence is scrappily assembled. So I tend to assume that it is the baseline of preparation. But I am starting to understand that this is a mistake. People need more information. They needs basics. They are not being taught basics. They are not being taught basics in a direct and didactic fashion.

Now, you might think I am exaggerating. You might think that I am wrong. Maybe I am. I can only go off of what I see. And what I see in formal creative writing workshops, one-off workshops, informal conversations at events and conferences, and in manuscripts submitted to me for editorial consideration, is a kind of writing that is flat, confusing, and disorganized. More than that, I see a lot of fiction that is simply not telling a story and which fails even on the first page to move the way good fiction is supposed to move.

So in my classes, I am going to start going over story basics. What is a story. What gives a story a shape. How does an author achieve this. What is happening on page one of a story that establishes we are reading a story. That sort of thing. I know it is 2025 and being prescriptive is so last century, so very White Male Writer of me. But I do think that we would all be a little better off if we established some minimum standards or at least a minimal functional fragment of story components. It has been a very permissive, very vibey half-decade, but I do think that some order is…in order.

I am not speaking of subject matter. I am not speaking of the presence of that ancient, smoldering nemesis of the liberal bourgeois artist, “the political.” I am not even speaking of style or formal experimentation or voice. I have certain preferences, sure, but I am not the king of literature. My preferences are idiosyncratic (and according to the socialists, they are also socially and historically determined), and no one should take them as law. When I say minimum functional fragment, I don’t mean that at core, every story has to be strictly and entirely identical. In that way, the science metaphor falls apart (at least if you only have a lay understanding of science). I have been talking about what I don’t mean too much. Let me tell you what I do mean.

Every story that I have that has ever moved me, terrified me, enraged me, flattened me, provoked me, turned me on, made me want to fight, made me want to argue, made me into an evangelist, and on and on and on, any story that has stuck with me for any amount of time, has certain features in common. I think those features are worth emulating, at a very basic, non-technical level. You don’t need to know much. You don’t need to know what a point of telling is or what free indirect is or even use words like flashback or backstory. You don’t need an MFA or a writing group or a fancy fellowship. You don’t need anything except your own human mind.

I am going to break this up over several posts in the coming weeks so that I can devote space and time to each topic.

Openings.

Start with action or Write a striking, memorable opening line. These lines of advice are very common with respect to how a story ought to begin. I think this sort of advice misses the point entirely. When I study the openings of great stories or even just…effective stories, the lines are memorable, yes, but more importantly, what strikes me as most effective and most pleasurable is how a strong opening carries the reader immediately into the relationships and context that will comprise the rest of the story.

A good opening is not about a memorable first line or because you begin with action. You cannot trick your reader into thinking your work is great by deploying strategies developed by ad agencies at the midcentury.

What is so magical about Anna Karenina is not only the very quotable “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” No. Go back and read the first pages of that book. Don’t bother. I will quote the first three paragraphs:

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the house felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in common with one another than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all over the house; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time; the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.

Three days after the quarrel, Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky—Stiva, as he was called in the fashionable world—woke up at his usual hour, that is, at eight o’clock in the morning, not in his wife’s bedroom, but on the leather-covered sofa in his study. He turned over his stout, well-cared-for person on the springy sofa, as though he would sink into a long sleep again; he vigorously embraced the pillow on the other side and buried his face in it; but all at once he jumped up, sat up on the sofa, and opened his eyes.

What is effective and pleasurable about reading these paragraphs? The humor, yes. The wonderfully varied rhythms of the sentences. The delightfully real details. I mean, Tolstoy is Tolstoy. So it’s a banger to be sure. But I would like to put in a (perhaps) controversial vote and say that to me, what is so wonderful about these paragraphs is the density of the information they convey and the elegant inverted pyramid that structures the whole passage.

From the gnomic opening line, we proceed to a delicious unfurling of drama. Tolstoy states the Universal (the opening line), the general case of the Oblonsky situation, and brings us up to the present, Stiva waking up on his sofa, obviously not where he would normally be sleeping. At this point, the reader has everything they need in order to understand what it is we are seeing. The character is presented to us with a wonderfully concise articulation of his family situation and relationships. But also, the structure is one we respond to instinctually. From the universal to the specific, from the abstract to the concrete, from the realm of the high (one might say, the dream world where Stiva is while sleeping), we descend to the sofa (the earthly). It’s so wonderfully achieved at so many levels. Thematic, material, dramatic, etc, and it’s a perfectly paralleled passage of writing.

Notice the elegant way that the family drama is presented as drama, that is, as a series of conflicts that themselves are dramatized. The relationships are presented in tension. As cause and effect. The affair is discovered. The wife is angry. The governess and the maid fight—the maid then, as a result, starts looking for another job, everything in the house is so very, very messy. But the presentation is dynamic. Nothing is static, or merely stated. Everything happens in one chain of effect, and the characters thus reveal their inner natures. Tolstoy discloses as he goes, and the opening gathers momentum and energy from these disclosures. We have more questions, yes, as we descend the passage, but those questions lead us deeper into the novel, not out of it. This is a common mistake people make.

The “cold open.” The novel or story just opens in some pointless string of action, no context, no nothing, we just watch somebody do something for several pages. Like we’re prospecting for clues as to why we should care about these people or their actions. The “cold open” or the “action open” or the “in media res” works only if what we are being presented is, well, interesting or sufficiently charged with interest to keep the reader going. So often, it’s just somebody doing something mundane. And we’re supposed to care as they open a door or go on a jog. Resist the desire to treat the opening of your story like the first five minutes of a procedural. Start with context.

Let’s have a very different example. The opening of Raymond Carver’s “Chef’s House.”

That summer Wes rented a furnished house north of Eureka from a recovered alcoholic named Chef. Then he called to ask me to forget what I had going and to move up there and live with him. He said he was on the wagon. I knew about that wagon. But he wouldn't take no for an answer. He called again and said, Edna, you can see the ocean from the front window. You can smell salt in the air. I listened to him talk. He didn't slur his words. I said, I'll think about it. And I did. A week later he called again and said, Are you coming? I said I was still thinking. He said, We'll start over. I said, If I come up there, I want you to do something for me. Name it, Wes said. I said, I want you to try and be the Wes I used to know. The old Wes. The Wes I married. Wes began to cry, but I took it as a sign of his good intentions. So I said, All right, I'll come up.

Wes had quit his girlfriend, or she'd quit him-I didn't know, didn't care. When I made up my mind to go with Wes, I had to say goodbye to my friend. My friend said, You're making a mistake. He said, Don't do this to me. What about us? he said. I said, I have to do it for Wes's sake. He's trying to stay sober. You remember what that's like. I remember, my friend said, but I don't want you to go. I said, I'll go for the summer. Then I'll see. I'll come back, I said. He said, What about me? What about my sake? Don't come back, he said.

In one way, it could not be more different from the opening passages of Anna Karenina. And yet, I find these two paragraphs just as dense with information and grounding context. The story opens with a situation. Wes has rented a house and called his ex-wife, asking her to come up. We know that Wes is making a go of straightening out his life from the drinking. We know that the ex-wife has a new man and is in a comfortable position and is being asked to give it up to return to Wes. We know she cares about Wes. The other guy doesn’t even get a name. He’s “her friend.” At the end of the second paragraph (which is the end of the story’s first section), she has gone to be with Wes and we know, or sense, that she’s done this out of reckless (foolish) optimism. The house is a rental. And it’s furnished. Like a doll’s house.

One could interpret for days. But just sticking to what is so effective about this opening, I think what makes it work is how quickly and richly the dramatic situation of the story is presented to us. We know who Wes is to the narrator. We know what he wants. We know what the next movement of the story will be. We will be with Wes at Chef’s House. We even have a sense that it won’t go well. The narrator also has this sense. Everything is very precarious, and yet, the story has brought us into the situation and is already unfolding it before we have time to think twice, to doubt or question.

In this way, what is mysterious in the story is what is mysterious in all of us when we make choices we know are wrong because we want things to turn out alright. In that way, the story precisely parallels life. And Carver has done this simply by following his character’s voice and attending to the situation she finds herself in.

Again, notice how the story discloses information as it proceeds. Nothing is kept back. The reader is not forced to be a disheveled detective on the hunt for basic clues. The story is spare, yes, skeletal in some respects, but it is absolutely stuffed with context. The relationships are, again, presented in tension, in dynamic fashion. The opening is a cascade of events, one leading to the other, one conversation causing another to happen. And it concludes with a definition stroke in the relationship of the narrator and her “friend.”

I would say that this kind of opening qualifies as “in media res” and it is one of the things that differentiates “in media res” from the standard, flat “cold opening.” In media res means in “the middle of things.” Sometimes, people take this to mean “in the middle of the action” with “action” interpreted literally. That is wrongheaded, in my opinion. Good advice deployed badly turns into a crime. It might be more productive to think of “in media res” as meaning, beginning in the thick of the situation. “Chef’s House” begins after Wes and Edna have split up. She’s got a new life. She thinks the Wes stuff is behind her. Then, bang, he calls. The story picks up, then, in the middle of things. Not during their marriage. Not during the decline of their marriage, which is where some people would have begun. No. The story opens in the fullness of the relationships, when the characters have a great deal of history behind them already.

The cold open is just a flat, dull misinterpretation of this idea. It’s all action, no relationships.

Another example. “Cat Person” by Kristin Roupenian.

Margot met Robert on a Wednesday night toward the end of her fall semester. She was working behind the concession stand at the artsy movie theatre downtown when he came in and bought a large popcorn and a box of Red Vines.

“That’s an . . . unusual choice,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever actually sold a box of Red Vines before.”

Flirting with her customers was a habit she’d picked up back when she worked as a barista, and it helped with tips. She didn’t earn tips at the movie theatre, but the job was boring otherwise, and she did think that Robert was cute. Not so cute that she would have, say, gone up to him at a party, but cute enough that she could have drummed up an imaginary crush on him if he’d sat across from her during a dull class—though she was pretty sure that he was out of college, in his mid-twenties at least. He was tall, which she liked, and she could see the edge of a tattoo peeking out from beneath the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt. But he was on the heavy side, his beard was a little too long, and his shoulders slumped forward slightly, as though he were protecting something.

People have many feelings about “Cat Person,” a story that went massively viral when it first published. Some people argued that it wasn’t very good. Some people argued that it was a generational story that expressed the typicality of being a young woman. Some people said it was MFA trash. Some people said it was sub-literary. Some people said it was mid. Some people loved it. WHATEVER. I am not here to re-litigate the critical and social reputation of “Cat Person.”

But if we focus on the opening, there are lessons for us all. What I find most effective in this opening is, yes, that it establishes the narrative context—the who is this story about and where are we in time and space—while also elegantly telling us of the character’s dramatic situation. Where do we find her in her life at exactly this moment. She works at concessions and she is a student. She is flirting with this man because it is what she does to amuse herself. And we see the very moment she takes notice of him within that flirtation, a little sharpening of her attention that brings us out of the general into the specific and particular.

Note also how Roupenian keeps a tight handle on what she allows to bleed in from the character’s deep background into the scene. I have personally witnessed a great many off-piste asides in fiction, particularly in openings, when a character introduces a dramatic situation and then spends half a page talking about something completely unrelated. Roupenian keeps us on task. In another writer’s hand, we would have gotten three full paragraphs about the kind of classes she is taking and the town she is from, just right there in the middle of that second paragraph, totally destroying the flow of information and betraying all good sense. She lets Margot’s imagination run loose a little—telling us something about Margot’s inner life but also the habit of her mind, paralleling the inattention she displays at work—and then, just as Margot realizes this guy is worth slightly more attention than usual, the story and Margot both concretize him. He becomes more detailed, real, and the string of imagined life is snapped, replaced by this current of the real. It’s very elegantly done. And again, as in Tolstoy, perfectly paralleled structurally. The story changes shape in response to the subjectivity of the character who is closest to the narrator. We descend from inattentive daydreaming to, oh, wait, this guy is kind of hot and with that descent, we concretize.

Another, wilder example, the opening of “An Angel Passed Above Us,” a recent story in The Yale Review by László Krasznahorkai, translated by John Batki.

I’m open to anything, he said, pushing the AK-74 a bit farther away and reaching under his bulletproof vest to scratch his armpit, then continued, I’m glad I can at last say it all, since until now he’d had no opportunity, he’d only been able to mention one or two minor details whenever they’d had a breather, even though they hadn’t been sleeping because of the bombardment, but now at last he could tell the whole story, and all in one piece, but first he had to begin by saying he was not a future analyst or futurologist, in civilian life he’d been a trend analyst, though rather than a trend analyst, he preferred to describe himself as a kind of observer, and whereas future analysts or futurologists sat around in a room, watching monitors, yes, they had their own methods, models, futures wheels, and so on, but for them it was inconceivable to think in larger terms, the way he did, about society, humankind, robots—these things upset them—so he was not an analyst of the future but rather of trends, data, facts, he explained, placing separate emphasis on each of the three words, but then—since only one eye was more or less intact, although with rather hazy vision—to be on the safe side he groped with his hand along the edge of the pallets he was lying on, because, since his left leg had been amputated at Bucha during the first month of fighting, and since the walking sticks he leaned against the inner wall of the trench were always sliding down, and now, once again, he was unable to grab one, all he could do was crawl over to his neighbor, and grope to find the other man’s chest, shoulder, neck, and carefully pull his companion’s head back onto the bolster of his rolled-up fatigue jacket, because he’d noticed that that head was starting to slide down into the mud, and then he brought his hazy right eye closer to the other man’s bandaged abdominal wound, stared at it for a while, meanwhile explaining, look here, my friend, it’s a very simple formula, there is a closed system, the earth, the population expands, now it is seven and a half, soon it will be eight billion, and we pretend that this is some huge surprise, but no, we’ve known for half a century that this multitude of humans would ultimately need some form of automated cooperation, of course we’ve known this, and felt it, and that was why—and here he signaled with a gesture that a parenthetic remark was about to follow—he’d so much liked it when, over fifty years ago, in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of the characters, holding some flat thingamajig in his hands, pressed something on it to reach, move, start up, or stop anything at will, and nowadays this seems so natural to us, no? but back then it was not at all natural, it was nonsense, sheer fantasy, childish make-believe, we snickered at the notion, yet today you have your smartphone in your hand and you can reach anyone[…]

Somewhat heretically, I made a truncation, but I encourage you to go read the full story for yourself. You will notice immediately the formal differences between Krasznahorkai and the other writers cited here. It’s almost as if an entirely different regime of thought organizes his work (because it does, lol), but I also think that one can learn a great deal from studying this passage. First, there is the profusion of language, the solidity presented by the block paragraph itself, as though it were an object entirely its own. One struggles to make a hierarchy of it at a glance, the way paragraphing normally works, grouping things into associate clumps. But then you start reading, not looking at the text, but reading, and, as in Tolstoy and Carver and Roupenian, you enter the stream of the story. One thought leads to the next, even if it interrupts or doubles over that thought, and we move from moment to moment, from the physicality of the cave and the horrors of war to the discourse presented by the man telling the story. It’s dialectal in its approach, discursive in its subject matter. While also paralleling the busy, hurtling experience of contemporary consciousness amid, well, nothing short of catastrophe.

What first appears as perhaps intimidating or messy or chaotic resolves into a very elegantly and deliberately structured and paced piece of writing capturing the impossible to capture experience of war and also the extreme and devastating alienation of contemporary life and the very human impulse to tell stories amid that. And how is this achieved? Through the methodical and careful unfolding of context and information. We follow the evolution of a thought process in a clearly articulated narrative context, within a scene if you will. Krasznahorkai delineates the internal and the exterior extremely well if you read carefully. What he does not do is offer the (potentially) artificial organizing of the usual prose narrative because this is, actually, quite alien to life. We are, all of us, constantly squeezed into tight interfaces of our own thoughts and perceptions of the exterior world. It does seem somewhat silly that we stop to parcel these things out in prose.

But we also know that because of how we read and ingest information that parceling makes these things easier. What a novelist like Krasznahorkai shows us is that this is an artificial depiction of consciousness and experience and should not be mistaken for actual experience, and indeed, it is simply the most hegemonic of presentations of consciousness and experience, not the only one.

Anyway, I am not a Brodernist by any stretch, but I do sometimes enjoy some Krasznahorkai, from time to time, as a treat.

So, what might we generalize about openings from these examples?

1. A good opening answers the questions: who the fuck are these people and what are they going through and where are they going through it? I am not saying your story needs a thesis statement. But I do think we have all read enough cold opens with people grabbing door handles or waking up and washing their faces. I think we have had enough of reading arbitrary actions for the first two pages of the story without real narrative grounding or context. A story is not a reality TV show, picked up while flipping through stations. Give the story some context. A little grounding.

2. A good opening concretizes as it descends: we move from stating what the character is going through to depicting what the character is going through. It’s not enough to just say, “Marcia was always bad with men.” In what ways has Marcia been bad with men? And what is the particular way she is currently bad with men at the moment the story opens? Can you imagine if Jane Austen never moved on to concretizing the opening of Pride and Prejudice? If it just stayed at the same level of abstraction as “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Indeed, you would miss the wonderful irony if you never went beyond that particular line of thought. But no, the novel concretizes as its proceeds. It moves into the particular depiction of specific relationships at a specific time in the lives of the particular people being chronicled. And we come to understand all the different shades of irony contained in that opening line.

3. A good opening stays on task. It proceeds in the direction of elaborating the dramatic situation at hand. Every bit of information is an extension of what comes before and even when it departs (think those wonderful associative jags in the Krasznahorkai), the narrative deepens because of the material it introduces. It does not dilute the dramatic situation or distract from the unfurling tension in the piece.

4. A good opening reveals more than it conceals. The objective of an opening is to disclose, not to cover up or withhold. Find a story you like and reread its opening passages. No matter how mysterious the story is, no matter how suspenseful or tense, you will likely find that the story is quite upfront about its presentation of information. It is telling you something. Otherwise, you would not keep reading. Your story should grow deeper and stranger through disclosure rather than withholding. Secrecy is cheap.

These are just some general ideas about openings. Four tidy generalizations to get you on your way.

I would like to speak, in closing, a little about composition. I often get asked the very reasonable question, after giving some bit of useless craft advice, “should I be thinking about this before I write or while I write or after I write?” I used to think that most craft things are best not thought about at all or if you must think about them, only during revision.

I have changed my mind.

I offer what I am about to say only in the way of suggestion and only because I am interested in saving you some time. Please disregard if you don’t find it useful:

Before you write, you should think about your story more.

Listen, I get it. Walk with me on this. I know what it’s like to get an irresistible image in your mind, a banger first line, a beautiful first scene, presenting itself to you, free for the taking, and you just wanna get that doc open and bang it out, etc. I have spent much of my life doing this. I do not do this anymore. Perhaps because I have written all my “easy” stories, the stories that I was satisfied to write at one level and one level only. Or maybe it’s because I’ve read a lot of stories, I don’t know. But what I do know is that when I get a first image for a story, I do not write it.

Instead, the first image is when I begin to ask the following questions:

1. Who is this person or who are these people?

2. What is going on in their life or lives?

3. What is their motivation?

4. What is their dilemma?

5. What is the situation of the story?

6. What is the moment of the story?

When I have some semblance of an answer to the above questions, I might begin to write a scene or two, but very quickly I begin to ask the following questions:

1. What is this character’s motivation in this scene? Why have they done this? Why has that other character done that? Why did they say that?

2. What does this event mean in the history of the character? In the history of the story?

3. Where is this going?

Sometimes, the above questions stop me from writing until I come up with an answer or answers. Sometimes, I keep writing even as I turn over those questions in my mind and they guide me through the composition process. But I am always weighing what I write against those questions, trying to see if I’ve written myself any closer to answering them. When I have, I keep going. When I haven’t, I discard the writing that is off-task or pointless.

When I have a draft of a story, I begin to ask similar but different questions of the whole piece:

1. What is the core incident of the story?

2. What is the central scene of the story?

3. What is the turn of the story?

4. What is the central question of the story?

5. What is the central idea of the story?

6. What is the core of the story?

I think by asking these questions, my composition process is less cluttered. It’s not…always pleasant. Sometimes (most times) I don’t have answers right away. But I do find that by asking these questions, I direct myself back into the story world and away from my own petty machinations. I justify and interpret everything through the line of the text, and everything is measured against character motivation, as I understand it and as the character understands it at the time, in the moment. I measure the story against itself, and where the story snags, it snags because of incomplete understanding on my part. This is good because it prevents me from doing a lot of useless writing.

By thinking about the story more, by pressing on those initial impressions and forcing them into more substantial form, you can begin your composition on a more active footing rather than chasing ghosts and illusions.

Anyone who has taken a workshop with me will recognize very many of these questions because these are questions I ask in class. I am always trying to get clarification on the narrative context because like, half of all problems with story comes down to context. The rest is point-of-view, frankly. And if we’re being honest, point-of-view is kind of a part of narrative context.

I can tell from the very first page when an author has not thought enough about their story. The story feels flimsy. The details are not organized in a way that builds to anything. It’s all just randomly assembled, free association vibes. The story world does not grow more coherent as it progresses. It does not become more real, more itself. It just dissolves into a shamble of random, arbitrary data points. Or else, it feels too…slick, a little too like “Someone told me to start with action.”

You want the opening of your story to feel like the definitive stroke. Like, the thing that sets us on some irrevocable, inevitable path.

Here is an exercise. The next time you set out to write a story—ask yourself the six questions:

1. Who is this person or who are these people?

2. What is going on in their life or lives?

3. What is their motivation?

4. What is their dilemma?

5. What is the situation of the story?

6. What is the moment of the story?

Do not write anything—not a scene, not an image, not a line until you have come up with answers to these questions. When you have answered them. Write a scene that typifies and concretizes that information. Just one scene.

Anyway, this is already too long. These are my thoughts on openings. Next time, we’ll talk more about situation.

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