Story Openings - Part Two

Finding Forward Momentum

Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash

Hello everyone,

This is Part Two of what’s likely to become a series of posts about how to start your fiction in a way that is compelling and engaging to your reader, without resorting to overwriting or cheap tricks. I hope you find it interesting, and please do let me know your thoughts.

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In last week’s post on Openings, I suggested one thing that has helped me enormously, and frankly gives me a lot of pleasure to do, is critically reading the openings of flash fictions, short stories and books, in order to analyse how an author has captivated their readers from the get-go.

I quoted some writing advice from the Irish short story writer Colin Barrett, about making something interesting and intriguing happen as close to the start as possible. This week, I have been rootling through a writing craft book I bought when I first started writing a decade ago, called Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular, by Rust Hills.

One insight that caught my attention was that the end of a good story is always present in the beginning – the final move of a story is only possible because of everything set in motion in the opening. And motion is the key word here, because one of the key things about a story opening is giving yourself (and therefore your readers) something that has forward momentum.