I start every story I write with a sentence. If you’re not a writer, or fancy yourself a scribe, you might assume that is about the most asinine thing anyone has ever written, but if you ARE a writer (which you probably are) you’ll recognize right away that I don’t write like other writers do.
Every writing book ever written tells you that you have to grab the reader with the first sentence or you could potentially lose them. They site first sentences like “It was the best of times, it was the worse of times …” from A Tale Of Two Cities (which I just recently read for the first time), or “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow,” which was from “To Kill A Mockingbird.” Both are fairly great first sentences, and both for different reasons. It was the best of time … is poetic and lyrical in form, and almost summarizes the novel, while To Kill A Mockingbird was puzzle needing to be unraveled. I have to say out of the two opening sentences Harper Lee’s was the most boring, and yet unraveled into the best novel.
I wrote a story that was called “everyday,” and that story started with looking at my alarm clock one morning and noticing that I had accidentally set it for 5:36 a.m., which is kind of an odd thing to set your clock at. I began the story with a simple declarative sentence: “Everyday his alarm clock goes off at 5:36 a.m.” From there my story unraveled into the masterpiece it became. The previous day I had fallen asleep on the sofa during Judge Judy, and I had a dream about ants, hardly ever remembering the events of my dreaming mind, I looked up the meaning, and found out it meant dreading the monotony of the day. The alarm clock and the dream, and some borrowed inspiration from the universe (that loves me), allowed me to come up with the short story. Which I will post after I post this blog.
What I’m trying to say is sometimes in order to come up with great stories, you need to come up with great sentences, or sentences that inspire you, but that doesn’t mean they have to remain your first impression. When I wrote the story Dana Thomas and the Big Black Scar, it started off with the sentence “You’ve probably already heard about it.” I changed that opening sentence, and the version you can read online isn’t the same. That brings me to my next point … let a story happen. Let the story become something besides the ends of your fingers. Let the story protrude from your brain, out through your fingers, onto the keyboard and into the computer to become something else, and love it, but don’t marry it. Don’t be the man who falls in love with someone he hopes will never change, be the woman who falls in love with the man hoping he will. It might not happen. You might write the story that your brain is dedicated to, but if you open up your mind the possibilities of it, the story might write you.
Now this is something I can’t teach you. You can take a writing course, and they can show you different styles of writing and the like, but they can’t teach you to trust yourself when you write. They can’t teach you to burden your pages with your thoughts; punish the keyboard with your dreams and tainted memories. They can’t critique you into being a writer, because you can’t take a writing course unless you’re ALREADY a writer. It’s the one thing that no one ever tells you. And the art comes from being honest and trusting in your abilities to script a scene from your mind, and my friends, it is art, make no mistake. Not everything ever written is art, but art can be engraved into your mind with words. Remember that when you write, that you are creating something that stands on it’s own, and does not need you after you commit to it.
My friend Wayne wrote an interesting comment that is worthy of reading. Read it not because he disagrees with me, but because it displays more than anything why writing isn’t something you can learn, it’s something you need to live. I write a lot in this blog about being true, it all comes full circle with Wayne’s comment, because he’s right (to a certain extent, because he disagrees with me and I’m always right), writing needs to come from somewhere inside you that’s honest and real. Okay this is all a bit sappy and cliché right now but you get the general idea, right? More on how to begin a story in the next couple days … TO BE CONTINUED.
