New Year and Story Openings - Part One

A gentle exercise in active reading

Photo by James McGill on Unsplash

Hello everyone!

Ah, like that new car smell, a new year has its own scent, it smells of fresh promise, coupled with a hint of ongoing doom, and a soupçon of ‘This’ll be the year!” With all this sense of new beginnings around it seems like the perfect time to think about the beginnings of the stories we write. You don’t have to be very experienced at writing to know that how you open a story (or a novel for that matter) is not just important, it’s crucial. Get it wrong, and the reader will be put off from going further. Get it right and you have them in the palm of your hand.

A few years ago, the acclaimed Irish short story writer Colin Barrett was interviewed for the Bath Short Story Award website. He said this about the opening of a short fiction story:

“Try to make something interesting happen as near to the opening as you can. Now this doesn’t have to be some showy eruption of plot or an aphoristic nugget of an opening line, though it may well be; it might just be the deployment of an unobvious adjective or unexpected detail seamed somewhere into your opening paragraphs. A nuanced little observation or moment, carefully placed. If you can get a small moment right near the start it sends a signal to the reader that you can trust me, you can keep reading. There’s nowhere to hide with short stories, if its five or ten pages long it’s got to start well, do well in the middle, and end well. No point saying it gets good half way through.”

He demonstrates this advice at the beginning of the short story ‘Calm With Horses’ from his great collection Young Skins (Penguin, 2014):

“Dympna told Arm to stay in the car while Dympna gave Fannigan a chance to plead his case. This wasn’t the way it usually went but Arm nodded okay. Arm watched Dympna stalk up the lawn and politely hammer on the front door of the council house Fannigan shared with his mother. Eventually Dympna was let inside.”

So what is at work here to make this opening compelling enough to make the reader want to read on. It’s not about being startling and hugely dramatic. It’s often a much quieter art than that, which is why it’s time to don your critical reader’s hat. By the way, I love putting this hat on, it is one of the best bits of the not-writing part of being a writer. It’s fertiliser for your craft. The more time you spend dissecting the ways a story’s impact has been generated by the author, the better you can become as a writer yourself.

To illustrate what I mean about critical reading, take a look at some of the ideas below, which range among the various elements of writing and style to find what works here: