Nuts and Bolts: Jump-Starting Stories

(Reposting a 2013 post from the Anna Katherine co-tumblr)

Because I just did this, here you go: Some simple ways to start a story, particularly if you don’t know what you want to write about, but you know you need to write something. (For money, for practice, for mental health, for whatever.)

Standard caveats apply. 1. The reason advice looks contradictory is because it literally is different for everyone — shit that works for one person won’t work for someone else. Just stick it in your toolbox and move along. 2. I will say obvious shit that you already know. Because it’s possible somebody else doesn’t. 3. You may totally disagree with anything/everything I say, oh my god, that’s fine.

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1. A line of dialogue. Particularly one that makes no sense, so you have to then have a second character explain it.

“You said what to the Queen?”

—Instantly you have to answer who said it, what was said, why it was scandalous, who the queen is, what she’s queen of, and who actually spoke the dialogue. Getting all that exposition in gracefully is at least 150 words right there.

2. (All of my points are going to boil down to variants of point 1, so, you know, grab a soda or something.)

3. A sudden burst of action. A nice explosion, maybe, or someone getting knocked unconscious unexpectedly. In medias res is always a pleasant place to start. You’ll want to start with a brief sentence that makes the reader empathize with whatever you’ve decided to blow up, and then destroy it in the second sentence, as that’s more fun.

“The Manor had been in the Candleford family for generations, a bit more curly-topped and hodge-podge than most stately noble homes. It burned for three days before anyone could put it out.”

—Now explain how that happened, or what happens next, or who’s affected, or who did it.

4. A vivid description. This one can be a bit tricky, as it can all too easily go on too long. I’d stay away from vivid descriptions of landscapes or weather or other (dare I say it) fairly boring things. Corpses — those are fun. Terrible kisses. A really interesting tentacle that maybe is touching something else that’s about to become interesting because, hey, tentacle.

“The running shoe was worn along the edges, and had a rubbed patch in the heel. It was pink and grey, and the laces were still tied, clearly toed off after a return to the house. The inspector stared at the shoe that lay on its side on the landing, and wondered where the other one was.”

Once you’ve got a couple of sentences of vivid description, stop and backfill with exposition — why are we seeing this thing? Who’s seeing it? What are they going to do with this information? As you can see, I couldn’t help but add in the inspector looking at the shoe — it just sort of starts to fill itself in.

5. A terrible secret that you don’t want anyone to know about yourself. Writing is frequently auto-cannibalism. You take parts of yourself and you write them into your stories to make them real. So if you need to write something, and you’re not sure what to write, dig out one of your secrets and give it to a character. 

I wrote a horror story (still haunting some editor’s slushpile [eta 2023: it was bought!]) about the weird urge I had when I’d had abdominal surgery to dig around in there afterward — I didn’t actually follow through in real life, but I decided to write a story about a character who did. Use first person POV if you have to, but it’ll definitely get something on the page.

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+1. After you’ve got a story going, you can go back and delete whatever you started with. Nothing says you have to keep what got the motor running.

+2. If you’re interested, my sentence for this evening was: “It would be a bit much to say that the kiss was magical.”