Beginnings

Confession: I'm very fidgety, and I always have to be doing something with my hands. Even if I'm watching TV, I need to be doing something. That's how I learned to crochet and to solve a Rubik's Cube.

Reading:

• Master of the Cauldron, by David Drake
• Realms of Fantasy, June 2008

Writing:

• "Ferian Fetlock Cures a Horse"

The beginning of a story is often the trickiest part, because you're starting without context. The reader is a blank slate, and it's up to you to fill it. Unfortunately, you can't just present the information in the most efficient way possible, because that's boring. Your beginning has to serve (at least) two purposes. It must convey just enough information to get the reader started into your world, but also enough to hook them, to make them want to keep reading.

Of course, the beginning of a story is not the real "beginning" for that character. Even if you start with someone being born, that's not the real beginning, because you can always good deeper, to the character's parents, or their parents, and so on.

I would also say that as humans, we're not all that familiar with real beginnings. Sure, we can talk about our first day on a job, or the first day of school, but does the story really start there? We probably got interviewed for the job, and before that we applied for it. But why did we apply on the first place? Did we read the notice in a newspaper, or did a friend recommend it? What about that friend? And so on.

In most things in our life, we can't really point to a beginning. Even if you're one of the lucky people who can point to a memory and say, "that, that is my earliest memory," you probably don't think that's the first thing that ever happened to you. Our own beginnings are hidden from us.

What about when you're having a dream? No one ever says how their dream started, because we never remember the beginning of our dreams. We just suddenly become aware that they're happening around us, whether we know it's a dream or not. Often we have to figure out what's going on, and then it still might not make sense.

I think dreaming is the best analogue we have to storytelling. Sure, the story has a definite beginning. But the reader is entering your character's life bit by bit, finding him or herself in the middle of a story already in motion, and they have to pick up the details as they go.

It's our job as authors to give them the details that they need, and keep them interested in the new universe in which they've found themselves.