Although it seems logical to start at the beginning when telling your compelling story, the beginning isn’t likely to create the captivating curiosity that rivets your reader’s attention long enough to keep them reading.
Not knowing how or where to start your story can be the writer’s block that keeps your compelling story in your head instead of in a book.
After I had finished the first terrible draft of my book, Becoming Conscious: One Woman’s Story of Spiritual Awakening, I was invited into a writer’s group led by New York Times Best Selling author, Bill Manville. Bill had supported himself as a writer his entire life, so he knew a thing or three.
Besides constantly picking on me giving me positive feedback about my too-long sentences, and for me telling my reader what was happening instead of creating word pictures that let them vision the scene for themselves, he said, “Find a dramatic scene from somewhere in the story and start with that”. (This has been a perfect example of my typically too-long sentences!)
From that advice I went to the middle of the worst part of my trauma and started there:
“I am afraid of heights, and we didn’t have a gun; an overdose might leave me alive, but mentally incapacitated. A razor to my wrists was way too grizzly, and I’d heard that a person looked really ugly, all bloated and purple, from carbon monoxide poisoning. I wonder how long it will take to starve to death?”
Here is a similar example from the book I am currently ghostwriting:
“There was a party going on. I didn’t know him from Adam. We were in an upstairs bedroom in somebody’s house. He had a weird vibe, but he was kind of good-looking in a rugged sort of way, and he showed interest in me, so I went for it.
“After . . . we had dressed and were just laying there . . . I said something he didn’t like. I don’t remember what it was. I can’t even imagine what it was. I have no recall except for thinking I am going to get myself killed!
In a flash he’d restrained me on my back on the bed with his arm across my shoulders and chest. With the knife blade against my throat I knew if the knife broke the skin, my flesh would filet as easily as butter. “Don’t think I won’t use this,” he growled.
I gasped at the sensation of the cold steel against my throat. I held my breath . . . probably didn’t even ’t even blink, because I was certain if I moved a muscle I’d get my throat slit.”
Once your reader is hooked with your opening sentences/paragraphs, tell the story that satisfies their curiosity ending each chapter with a page-turner sentence/paragraph that creates curiosity about what happens next.
What do you think? Leave a comment and let me know. If you have a first sentence/paragraph you’d like feedback on, leave it in the comments too and I will respond. And most of all keep on writing!
