Chapter Two
The End Is Where We Start From
Scene One
“What we call the beginning is often the end.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.”
—T.S. Eliot
“In the long run, I write novels. In the short run, I write scenes.”
—Timothy Hallinan
The most important thing your opening needs to do is this: Keep the reader reading.
As someone who reads thousands of story openings every year—and no, I’m not exaggerating—I can tell you that surprisingly few keep the reader reading. At our agency, we ask writers to include the first ten pages of their stories in their query letters. We do that because we need to see the story itself—not just the pitch for the story.
I receive some ten-thousand queries a year. I also read the work of hundreds of writers I meet at conferences, workshops, boot camps, and of course, that of my own clients and friends, as well as best-selling authors. No matter how you do the math, that’s a lot of story openings. More often than not, I do not keep reading. Here’s why: I’m not engaged, entertained, or enlightened. I’m mostly bored. And so I put that story down and move on to the next. And the next. And the next.
When I first started at the agency and found myself overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the queries in my inbox—over a thousand during my very first week on the job—our founder, Gina Panettieri, told me not to stress over it.
“For every two-hundred queries you receive,” Gina said, “you’ll only find one or two story openings compelling enough to prompt you to request the rest of the manuscript.”
As it turns out, Gina was right (about that and nearly everything else related to the job, she says with humility). I only request a handful of complete manuscripts every month. These are the ones that work, the ones that capture my attention and hold it, the ones that answer the questions we talked about in chapter one.
Just as important, the story openings good enough to stand out from the rest of the slush pile are those that avoid the common mistakes that sink the others. The most significant of which is this: Nothing happens.
Too many writers open with backstory or description or inner monologue—which means that nothing is happening. The opening falls flat on its face, felled by its own static weight. Or something is happening, but it’s something that we’ve seen a million times before—and don’t care to see again. Or something is happening, but it’s drowning in minutiae. Or something is happening, but it’s not fully dramatized.
Dramatization is the key. Drama is the stuff of storytelling—and it’s what separates the boring beginnings from the compelling beginnings. Dramatize your opening, and you will fulfill the promise of “Once upon a time.”
This means writing in scenes.
The Scene’s the Thing
The most efficient and effective way to begin a story is with a scene. Scenes are the units of storytelling, the pieces of continuous action that you string together to form your narrative. Writing in scenes is the best way to ensure that something happens, which prevents you from boring your readers—and keeps them reading.
Because if nothing’s happening, it’s not a scene.
A well-written scene accommodates all of the elements we’ve talked about: genre, action, character, setting, voice, emotion, etc. What’s more, well-written scenes are the key to building and sustaining narrative thrust. Write a great opening scene, and you give your story the rocket boosters it needs to launch your beginning.
“[The Rosie Project is] structured as a romantic comedy and reads as a series of scenes. And it moves along pretty quickly.”
—Graeme Simsion
Top Ten (Plus One!) Reasons Your Story Opening Doesn’t Work
- Not enough happens.
- The story’s genre is not clear.
- It’s not clear what the story is about.
- It’s not clear who the protagonist is.
- There’s nothing unique enough about the story to set it apart.
- The story is not grounded in setting.
- The protagonist is not likable or admirable and readers can’t relate to him/her.
- The story does not engage the reader’s emotions.
- It’s all showing and no telling.
- The story is not told in a strong voice.
- There’s no narrative thrust.
Let’s take a look at some swell opening scenes. These are all stories in which the writer begins in medias res, that is, “into the middle of things.” As an agent, I find that the easiest stories to sell are the ones with strong opening scenes. Gone are the days of the nineteenth-century novel, which could begin with elaborate descriptions of the landscape, long backstories of every character, and expansive discourse on the nature of philosophy and the meaning of life. In the 140-character world in which we live and write, we don’t have much time to get our stories moving. That doesn’t mean every story has to start with car chases and explosions, but every story should start with compelling opening action. As we’ll see in the following examples—which run the gamut from memoir and women’s fiction to thriller and science fiction—action counts.
When a high-powered rifle bullet hits living flesh it makes a distinctive—pow-WHOP—sound that is unmistakable even at tremendous distance. There is rarely an echo or fading reverberation or the tailing rumbling hum that is the sound of a miss. The guttural boom rolls over the terrain but stops sharply in a close-ended way, as if jerked back. A hit is blunt and solid like an airborne grunt. When the sound is heard and identified, it isn’t easily forgotten.
When Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett heard the sound, he was building a seven-foot elk fence on the perimeter of a rancher’s haystack. He paused, his fencing pliers frozen in midtwirl. Then he stepped back, lowered his head, and listened. He slipped the pliers into the back pocket of his jeans and took off his straw cowboy hat to wipe his forehead with a bandanna. His red uniform shirt stuck to his chest, and he felt a single, warm trickle of sweat crawl down his spine into his Wranglers.
—Open Season, by C.J. Box
In this first of the popular Joe Pickett series, C.J. Box opens with a bang—or rather, a “pow-WHOP”—that grabs the reader by the throat and doesn’t let go. We meet our hero on his feet, working hard, and ready to follow that shot wherever it takes him—even if it makes him sweat. And we’re sweating for him.
Well, I have broken the toilet. I flushed, the water rose, then rose higher, too much. I stared at it, told it, “No!” slammed the lid down, then raised it back up again. Water still rising. Water still rising. I put the lid down, turned out the light, tiptoed out of the bathroom, across the hall, and into my bedroom, where I slid under my bed.
Now I hear the water hitting the bathroom floor. It goes on and on. Niagara Falls, where the honeymooners go and do what they do. There is the heavy tread of his footsteps coming rapidly up the stairs. I hear him turn on the bathroom light and swear softly to himself. “Katie!” he yells. He comes into my room. I stop breathing. “Katherine!” I am stone. I am off the planet, a star, lovely and unnamed. He goes into my sister’s room. “What the hell did you do to the toilet?”
—Durable Goods, by Elizabeth Berg
In Elizabeth Berg’s classic debut novel, we meet twelve-year-old Katie in full crisis mode. She clogs the toilet and then panics, sneaking out of the bathroom and into her bedroom. She’s so scared of the grown-up who’s heard the water overflowing and is coming up the stairs calling for her that she hides under the bed. And we’re scared for her.
The trees were tall, but I was taller, standing above them on a steep mountain slope in northern California. Moments before, I’d removed my hiking boots and the left one had fallen into those trees, first catapulting into the air when my enormous backpack toppled onto it, then skittering across the gravelly trail and flying over the edge. It bounced off of a rocky outcropping several feet beneath me before disappearing into the forest canopy below, impossible to retrieve. I let out a stunned gasp, though I’d been in the wilderness thirty-eight days and by then I’d come to know that anything could happen and that everything would. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t shocked when it did.
My boot was gone. Actually gone.
—Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, by Cheryl Strayed
Cheryl Strayed begins her best-selling account of her life-changing 1,100-mile trek along the Pacific Crest Trail thirty-eight days into the journey—in medias res—at the point where she loses a boot, the only thing between her and the rough ground she’s traversing, exposing the most vulnerable and critical body part, the part hikers must protect above all others: the foot. Cheryl is alarmed by this turn of events. And we’re alarmed, too, by her predicament and her unshod foot.
Maggie and Ira Moran had to go to a funeral in Deer Lick, Pennsylvania. Maggie’s girlhood friend had lost her husband. Deer Lick lay on a narrow country road some ninety miles north of Baltimore, and the funeral was scheduled for ten-thirty Saturday morning; so Ira figured they should start around eight. This made him grumpy. (He was not an early-morning kind of man.) Also Saturday was his busiest day at work, and he had no one to cover for him. Also their car was in the body shop. It had needed extensive repairs and Saturday morning at opening time, eight o’clock exactly, was the soonest they could get it back. Ira said maybe they’d just better not go, but Maggie said they had to. She and Serena had been friends forever. Or nearly forever: forty-two years, beginning with Miss Kimmel’s first grade.
They planned to wake up at seven, but Maggie must have set the alarm wrong and so they overslept. They had to dress in a hurry and rush through breakfast, making do with faucet coffee and cold cereal. Then Ira headed off for the store on foot to leave a note for his customers, and Maggie walked to the body shop. She was wearing her best dress—blue and white sprigged, with cape sleeves—and crisp black pumps, on account of the funeral.
—Breathing Lessons, by Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel opens with long-married couple Ira and Maggie Moran late to a funeral ninety miles away, a journey that begins with the usual marital complaints—bad coffee, cold cereal, and a car in the shop—and promises to proceed downhill from there. Ira’s worried about his customers. Maggie’s worried about her grieving friend. And we’re worried about their marriage.
Ria’s mother had always been very fond of film stars. It was a matter of sadness to her that Clark Gable had died on the day Ria was born. Tyrone Power had died on the day Hilary had been born just two years earlier. But somehow that wasn’t as bad. Hilary hadn’t seen off the great king of cinema as Ria had. Ria could never see Gone With the Wind without feeling somehow guilty.
She told this to Ken Murray, the first boy who kissed her. She told him in the cinema. Just as he was kissing her, in fact.
“You’re very boring,” he said, trying to open her blouse.
“I’m not boring,” Ria cried with some spirit. “Clark Gable is there on the screen and I’ve told you something interesting. A coincidence. It’s not boring.”
—Tara Road, by Maeve Binchy
In this opening scene, Maeve Binchy gives us Ria, a romantic teenage girl experiencing one of life’s great rites of passage: her first kiss. But Ria’s expectations are the stuff of cinema—and the boy’s expectations are the stuff of testosterone. Ria is completely misunderstood by her supposed admirer, not to mention disappointed and somewhat disillusioned. And we are disappointed for her as well—and worried that this misunderstanding/disappointment/disillusionment cycle might prove the first of many.
“Marx has completely changed the way I view the world,” declared the Pallières boy this morning, although ordinarily he says nary a word to me.
Antoine Pallières, prosperous heir to an old industrial dynasty, is the son of one of my eight employers. There he stood, the most recent eructation of the ruling corporate elite—a class that reproduces itself solely by means of virtuous and proper hiccups—beaming at his discovery, sharing it with me without thinking or ever dreaming for a moment that I might actually understand what he was referring to. How could the laboring classes understand Marx? Reading Marx is an arduous task, his style is lofty, the prose is subtle and the thesis complex.
And that is when I very nearly—foolishly—gave myself away.
“You ought to read The German Ideology,” I told him. Little cretin in his conifer green duffle coat.
—The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery
Muriel Barbery opens her international bestseller with this quietly subversive encounter between middle-aged Parisian concierge Renée and young Antoine, whose wealthy family lives in the building. Renée reveals that she is not what she seems to be, not what she actively pretends to be, and she is dismayed that she has come so close to blowing her cover. And we are dismayed as well, not just because she is so nearly found out but because she feels it necessary to hide who she really is and because we sense that there is more dissembling to come—and consequences to pay.
“So, have you split up now?”
“Are you being funny?”
People quite often thought Marcus was being funny when he wasn’t. He couldn’t understand it. Asking his mum whether she’d split up with Roger was a perfectly sensible question, he thought: they’d had a big row, then they’d gone off into the kitchen to talk quietly, and after a little while they’d come out looking serious, and Roger had come over to him, shaken his hand and wished him luck at his new school, and then he’d gone.
“Why would I want to be funny?”
“Well, what does it look like to you?”
“It looks to me like you’ve split up. But I just wanted to make sure.”
“We’ve split up.”
“So he’s gone?”
“Yes, Marcus, he’s gone.”
He didn’t think he’d ever get used to this business. He had quite liked Roger, and the three of them had been out a few times; now, apparently, he’d never see him again. He didn’t mind, but it was weird if you thought about it. He’d once shared a toilet with Roger, when they were both busting for a pee after a car journey. You’d think that if you’d peed with someone you ought to keep in touch with them somehow.
—About a Boy, by Nick Hornby
In this poignant beginning, we meet Marcus, a lonely boy baffled by the world of adult relationships. Marcus is questioning his mother, trying to understand what has happened between her and her latest boyfriend. Marcus is saddened and unnerved by Roger’s abrupt departure because inevitably, his mother’s loss is his loss as well. And we’re saddened and unnerved for Marcus, who must now face his new school without the buffer of Roger in his life.
It was a pleasure to burn.
It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.
Montag grinned the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame.
—Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury’s classic futuristic story opens with firefighter Montag burning down a house full of books with a pleasure that borders on madness. We are equally disgusted and intrigued by his behavior, and we read on to find out why he would do such a thing and who will stop him.
1978
“Wake up, genius.”
Rothstein didn’t want to wake up. The dream was too good. It featured his first wife months before she became his first wife, seventeen and perfect from head to toe. Naked and shimmering. Both of them naked. He was nineteen, with grease under his fingernails, but she hadn’t minded that, at least not then, because his head was full of dreams and that was what she cared about. She believed in the dreams even more than he did, and she was right to believe. In this dream she was laughing and reaching for the part of him that was easiest to grab. He tried to go deeper, but then a hand began shaking his shoulder, and the dream popped like a soap bubble.
He was no longer nineteen and living in a two-room New Jersey apartment, he was six months shy of his eightieth birthday and living on a farm in New Hampshire, where his will specified he should be buried. There were men in his bedroom. They were wearing ski masks, one red, one blue, and one canary-yellow. He saw this and tried to believe it was just another dream—the sweet one had slid into a nightmare, as they sometimes did—but then the hand let go of his arm, grabbed his shoulder, and tumbled him onto the floor. He struck his head and cried out.
—Finders Keepers, by Stephen King
Stephen King knows how to start a story—and this one is no exception. He gives us an old man dreaming of his youth and awakening to the nightmare of three masked men in his bedroom. He is sorry that his dream is over and scared of the men assaulting him. We are both sorry and scared for him.
July
When she saw the glint of the revolver barrel through the broken glass in the window, Hadley Knox thought, I’m going to die for sixteen bucks an hour. Sixteen bucks an hour, medical, and dental. She dove behind her squad car as the thing went off, a monstrous thunderclap that rolled on and on across green-gold fields of hay. The bullet smacked into the maple tree she had parked under with a meaty thud, showering her in wet, raw splinters.
She could smell the stink of her own fear, a mixture of sweat trapped beneath her uniform and the bitter edge of cordite floating across the farmhouse yard.
—I Shall Not Want, by Julia Spencer-Fleming
This crime novel opens with yet another cop under fire—but this is a cop whose ironic self-awareness never fails her, even when the bullets are flying. She so badly wants to live, and we so badly want her to live, and we keep on reading in the hope that she does.
In all of these examples—the longest of which is only 232 words—something happens. Sometimes it’s as subtle as an intellectual sleight of hand, as in the concierge’s conversation with the “little cretin” in The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Sometimes it’s as brash as a bullet, as in the gunshots plaguing the game warden in Open Season and the cop in I Shall Not Want. But regardless, something happens, and it happens to someone, someone we find endearing, like Marcus, the boy querying his mother in About a Boy, Katie, the girl hiding under the bed in Durable Goods, and Ria, the dreamy-eyed teenager longing for true romance in Tara Road. Perhaps it happens to someone we find amusing, vulnerable, and all too human, like middle-aged marrieds Ira and Maggie Moran in Breathing Lessons or old Rothstein dreaming of lost loves in Finders Keepers. It might even happen to someone we find compelling but abhorrent, like Montag the book burner in Fahrenheit 451.
Something happens to someone, and that someone reacts. Then the reader reacts and keeps on reading. This is the engine of story. As the writer, it’s your job to build the scenes, the units of action, that fuel the engine of your story. You make something happen to your characters, your characters react, and the reader reacts … and turns the page. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. All the way to “The End.”
Jump-Start
Take a look at the first 250 words of your story. Examine it in light of the engine of story:
- Something happens to someone. What happens in your story? To whom?
- That someone reacts. What does that someone do?
- The reader reacts. How does the reader react? Are you sure? Give the opening to a few readers, and then ask them how they feel about what they’ve read. Did they react the way you intended?
Note: This is a good exercise for your writers’ group. Exchange openings, and discuss the engine of each story.
The Structure of the Scene
We’ve been examining the very first paragraphs of the opening scenes of great stories. But scenes are units of action, as we’ve observed. Just as your story has a beginning, middle, and end, each scene in your story should follow that same structure. Likewise, there’s an arc to each scene, just as there is an arc to your story. Crafting scenes with beginnings, middles, and ends is the way you build a story, beat by beat, scene by scene, and act by act.
Beginnings, Middles, Ends
“People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don’t have a middle or an end anymore. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning.”
—Steven Spielberg
Director Steven Spielberg knows how to begin a story. A storyteller of the first order, he knows how to grab the audience and hold its attention. Let’s take a look at the opening scenes from three of his most successful films:
Jaws: Scene One
Beginning: A drunken teenage boy chases a girl named Chrissie along the beach. He’s trying to catch up with her as she strips and runs into the ocean.
Middle: Chrissie swims out towards the buoy and is pulled down into the water. She’s screaming and thrashing and we can’t see what’s got her. Too drunk to stand, the boy falls down on the sand and passes out.
End: Chrissie manages to make it to the buoy, but she’s pulled down again and this time, there’s no escape from whatever has taken her. The boy dozes on the beach.
Watching this scene, we are pulled into the story kicking and screaming. We watch Chrissie disappear under the water, and we wonder who’ll be next. This iconic scene is so terrifying that many who saw the film for the first time in theaters gave up going into the ocean forever. I myself avoided seeing the film for years because I was afraid that if I saw it, I’d never swim in the sea again.
Raiders of the Lost Ark: Scene One
Beginning: Indiana Jones is trekking through the jungle with Satipo, hunting for a golden idol. He consults the map and finds the cave.
Middle: Once inside, Indy foils the spiders and booby traps and discovers the idol. He swaps a bag of sand for the idol—but the theft triggers a new series of booby traps. Satipo betrays Indy, steals the idol, and leaves Indy for dead. Indy uses a fraying vine to escape and goes after Satipo, who has fallen victim to one of the booby traps. Indy grabs the idol. A huge stone ball threatens to steamroll him, and he races out of the cave.
End: Upon exiting, Indy lands at the feet of rival archaeologist Belloq, who is backed by a large group of hostile natives. The Frenchman steals the idol, but Indy escapes the angry natives and makes it to his plane just in time.
This scene is one of the most entertaining scenes ever filmed, and it sets the stage for the rest of the serial-style action to come. The opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the many reasons this movie remains a crowd-pleaser. I for one am compelled to watch it whenever it’s on—and it’s on a lot—whether I want to or not.
E.T.: Scene One
Beginning: E.T. opens with a small alien wandering away from the area where his fellow aliens are collecting horticultural specimens from Earth to take back to their home planet.
Middle: When a group of scientists discover the spaceship, the aliens prepare to leave. One alien stands at the stairs leading into the craft, waiting for E.T. However, the scientists close in, and the aliens close up their ship and take off into space, leaving E.T behind.
End: E.T. is left alone on Earth. He runs away from the scientists, toward the bright lights of suburbia.
From the very beginning, we fall in love with E.T., a little extraterrestrial abandoned on an unfriendly planet, just as we would any lost child. We want him to find his way home safely somehow, and are compelled to see him through his journey back to his own kind, come what may.
All of these beginnings have memorable opening scenes built on a strong structure. The beginnings, middles, and ends of each scene are clear and solid. We know what each story is about right from the very beginning: something deadly lurking just below the surface of the sea, an adventurer/archaeologist willing to risk everything for priceless treasure, an extraterrestrial lost on Earth. And we are hooked.
Impromptu
Think of the opening scene in your favorite movie. Watch it again. What is the beginning, middle, and end of that scene? Break it down. Write it out. Why does it work? What can you learn from its structure, and how might you apply that to your opening scene?
Note: This is a good exercise to do with a writer friend or your writers’ group. Have each writer analyze the beginning of a different movie, and then open it up to discussion.
Seducing the Reader with Structure
Readers, like viewers, love structure; stories that are on solid ground allow readers to relax during the actual reading of the story. Structure gives your story, and every scene in it, ballast.
The Brilliant Ballast of Eat, Pray, Love
Perhaps the most beautifully structured story in recent memory is the blockbuster Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. In this memoir, a depressed American divorcée goes on a journey in search of the meaning of life—only to find herself. That’s what her story is about.
The promise of the perfect scaffolding for this classic true tale of self-actualization is right there in the title: Eat, Pray, Love. The journey itself provides the storyline, divided into three acts:
Beginning/Act One
Elizabeth learns to feed her body by eating her way through Italy. She sublimates her desire for Italy’s handsome men and focuses on food. From the spaghetti alla carbonara and tiramisu in Rome to the margherita pizza with double mozzarella in Naples, she leaves no plate unclean. She comes to Italy, she says, “pinched and thin,” and she leaves four months later “noticeably bigger” in every way.
Middle/Act Two
Elizabeth learns to feed her soul by praying in India. She goes to an ashram, where she chants, meditates, and scrubs the temple floors, all in the quest for enlightenment. But what she finds there—after endless hours of chanting, meditating, and scrubbing—is that what she needs right now is not exactly enlightenment but the capacity to forgive herself and her ex-husband for their failed marriage. Her fellow seeker, an American named Richard, tells her to “find somebody new to love someday.”
End/Act Three
Elizabeth learns to feed her heart by falling in love in Bali. She meets a lovely Brazilian man named Felipe and abandons her vow to remain celibate during her journey. She falls in love and learns to trust, not just in Felipe, but in herself. As Elizabeth says, the new “happy and balanced me” sails off into the sunset with Felipe.
Elizabeth Gilbert needs to learn to nurture herself, and she does it in three acts: Once upon a time there was a very unhappy woman who decided to eat, pray, and love herself back to life, and she lived happily ever after. (Well, at least until her next book.)
Scene One Breakdown
The opening scene of Eat, Pray, Love takes place in Italy, on the first lap of her journey.
Beginning/Scene One
I wish Giovanni would kiss me.
Oh, but there are so many reasons why this would be a terrible idea. To begin with, Giovanni is ten years younger than I am, and—like most Italian guys in their twenties—he still lives with his mother. These facts alone make him an unlikely romantic partner for me, given that I am a professional American woman in my mid-thirties, who has just come through a failed marriage and a devastating, interminable divorce, followed immediately by a passionate love affair that ended in sickening heartbreak. … This is why I have been alone for many months now. This is why, in fact, I have decided to spend this entire year in celibacy.
Elizabeth is in Italy—a place many people on this side of the pond associate with impetuous sexual alliances, rightly or wrongly—and while we know that she knows that she is a heartbreak waiting to happen, we are worried that she might succumb to Giovanni’s charms nonetheless.
Middle/Scene One
Now we are at my door. … He gives me a warm hug. … we’re pressed up against each other’s bodies beneath this moonlight … and of course it would be a terrible mistake ….
The temptation is so great—the door, the hug, the moon. And we hope against hope that she will resist this terrible temptation because she insists that’s what she needs to do, and we agree with her, given her recent romantic history. But we also know that given the same scenario, we might just surrender our self-imposed virtue ourselves.
End/Scene One
I walk up the stairs to my fourth-floor apartment, all alone. … I shut the door behind me. … I am alone, I am all alone, I am completely alone….
Grasping this reality, I let go of my bag, drop to my knees and press my forehead against the floor. There, I offer up to the universe a fervent prayer of thanks.
Elizabeth has resisted the lure of the lovely Giovanni. She has kept her promise to herself. We are exhilarated and hopeful that she may actually succeed in her quest to abandon self-destructive behavior and become a healthier and happier person, but we also know that it is early in her journey and that she has a lot of miles—and men—ahead.
The opening scene in Eat, Pray, Love is full of conflict that echoes the main story questions of the book: Will Elizabeth learn to make better choices? Will she learn to treat her body, soul, and heart with kindness and compassion? And if she succeeds, how will her life change as a result?
Analyze the first scene in your story. Ask yourself the following questions:
- What is the conflict that drives the scene?
- How does that conflict echo the main story questions of the work?
- Can you break down the scene into beginning, middle, and end?
- How does each relate to the others?
The Circle of Story
If we look ahead to the end of the story, to the last scene in Eat, Pray, Love, we see Elizabeth in a very similar situation, on the cusp of another decision—another decision concerning a man. This time we know he’s the right man for her and that she’s earned the right to love again, but does she recognize the right man when she sees him? Does she have the courage to love again? Has her journey of self-actualization led her to a happier, healthier self?
In the best stories, the ending always circles back to the beginning. This circle of story is what separates the great storytellers from everyone else. If you know the end of your story already, then you can make sure that your opening scene echoes that last scene. But if you don’t yet know where your story will end or if you are not sure how to close that circle of story, don’t worry. We’ll talk more about that in chapter seven.
Just keep in mind that the answer lies in whatever your story is about. As Eat, Pray, Love is about a woman’s journey to love and wholeness, the beginning of the story is about her deciding to make that journey to love and wholeness in good faith, and the end of the story is about her deciding that she’s completed that journey. She learned what she needed to learn about love and wholeness on the way and can now choose a more fulfilling life with the right man. Whatever your story is about, you can make the same kinds of connections.
“I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.”
—John Irving
Speaking of the End
In the most beautifully crafted stories, the last lines echo the fierce words of the opening lines:
Beach Music, by Pat Conroy
First line(s):
In 1980, a year after my wife leapt to her death from the Silas Pearlman Bridge in Charleston, South Carolina, I moved to Italy to begin life anew, taking our small daughter with me.
Last line(s):
Because she had promised it and because she had taught me to honor the eminence of magic in our frail human drama, I knew that Shyla was waiting for me, biding her time, looking forward to the dance that would last forever, in a house somewhere beneath the great bright sea.
The Rosie Project, by Graeme Simsion
First line(s):
I may have found a solution to the Wife Problem. As with so many scientific breakthroughs, the answer was obvious in retrospect. But had it not been for a series of unscheduled events, it is unlikely I would have discovered it.
Last line(s):
Had it not been for this unscheduled series of events, her daughter and I would not have fallen in love. And I would still be eating lobster every Tuesday night.
Incredible.
The Invention of Wings, by Sue Monk Kidd
First Line(s):
There was a time in Africa the people could fly. Mauma told me this one night when I was ten years old. She said, “Handful, your granny-mauma saw it for herself. She say they flew over trees and clouds. She say they flew like blackbirds. When we came here, we left that magic behind.”
Last line(s):
When we left the mouth of the harbor, the wind swelled and the veils round us flapped, and I heard the blackbird wings. We rode onto the shining water, onto the far distance.
Cape Cod, by William Martin
First line(s):
A.D. 1000
Strandings
Each year the whales went to the great bay. They followed the cold current south from seas where the ice never melted, south along coastlines of rock, past rivers and inlets, to the great bay that forever brimmed with life. Sometimes they stayed through a single tide, sometimes from one full moon to the next, and sometimes, for reasons that only the sea understood, the whales never left the great bay.
Last line(s):
And the whales swam north, past the point that might once have been called Kiarlness, the sandpit that sheltered the Mayflower for six miserable weeks, north from the bay that brimmed with life, north along coastlines of rock, past rivers and inlets, north to the seas where the ice never melted, to the place where the glaciers shimmered, the great white mountains of ice, the shaping hands of God.
“I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending .... So the style of the novel has a consistency.”
—Joyce Carol Oates
The Good Enough Opening
By now you’ve taken a hard look at your beginning. You’ve analyzed the beginning, middle, and end of your opening scene. You know what that scene is about and how it relates to what your story is about.
The question is: Is that enough? Is the idea of your story strong enough to support a good opening scene, and even more important, is it strong enough to support an entire narrative? Can it succeed in today’s challenging marketplace?
In truth, it doesn’t matter how good your opening scene is if the idea on which your story is based is flawed, either in storytelling terms or marketing terms. As an agent, I see writers pour their hearts and souls into stories whose basic premise is too slight or too trite or too old-fashioned to attract agents, editors, or publishers, much less readers.
In chapter three, we’ll talk about how to make sure your idea is strong enough, how to tweak it if it isn’t, and how to ditch it altogether and come up with something new and improved. We’ll also talk about how to rethink your opening scene so that you get the biggest possible blastoff for your story.