Starting stories - how to compel your reader on

The Slow Story Club - September 2023

Hello friends,

Seeing as this is the first ever post in The Slow Story Club, I wanted to start with beginnings. Getting them right is vital if we want to reel a reader into the world we’re creating and connect them to the character so they want to read on.

When I read the submissions at Retreat West and WestWord, the majority of the time I know from the opening lines whether a story is going to keep me engaged or not. How? Because they grab my attention. This can be through a variety of ways:

• A vivid, often startling, image.

• A unique and strong narrative voice.

• A feeling of being a bit off kilter.

• Gorgeous use of language and the senses.

• The indirect posing of a question.

• The provoking of an emotion.

Sometimes, when it's a truly brilliant story, they do all of these things at once!

A story that was selected for the August 2023 edition of WestWord, An Orange Fruit Will Ripen In Its Own Good Time by Kathy Hoyle, gripped me from the beginning with this opening paragraph:

Mama stacks the babies in orange crates, out back. She keeps ‘em dry in hessian sacks and packs ‘em tight, sometimes three to a crate, sometimes only two. Mama says that stops ‘em wailing too much and wakin’ the whole goddamn neighbourhood. 

Babies being stacked in crates immediately signifies that something is not quite right so we have our vivid and startling image and a feeling of being off kilter. The narrative voice connects us instantly to this child and the senses are engaged with the wailing.

The neighbours that come to view and take the oranges/babies are also hinted at and, as the story unfolds, the questions I had about what was really happening just kept growing. I loved that it didn’t turn out to be as dark as I was expecting and that final image of the narrator sucking orange segment fingers ended the story as startlingly as it opened. My interpretation of the message at the heart of the story changes with each reading. What do you think it is? Let us know in the comments below.

Now not all stories that have great opening lines deliver on that promise but many of them do. When it comes to the writing of my own stories, often the opening lines are the final ones that I edit as, once the story is done, I know what it’s all about and what I want the reader to take from it. And it’s become one of my writing goals to subtly convey that in the opening paragraph, so that when the reader gets to the end what has unfolded feels inevitable.

It’s hard and I definitely don’t think I’ve achieved it in many of my stories yet, but I am working on it. And that’s what this Slow Story Club is all about, working on our craft. Taking our time and developing our writerly skills to make our stories shine and make us feel more connected as we write and edit them.

Being Extraordinary and Ordinary

Photo by Maddy Baker on Unsplash

In the craft book, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg, she gets to the heart of it I think in the chapter entitled “The Ordinary and the Extraordinary” when she talks about the vastness of the landscape in New Mexico and the Hopi snake dance she watches, and how extraordinary these are to her.

I looked and looked in wonder. “How could I ever write about these vast expanses and mythic rituals?” A friend who had been with me asked: “Look at this huge space, the hills and mesas and sky. You can feel God here. How can you just use the original detail that you talk about to capture this?”

We mistake detail for being picayune or only for writing about ants or bobby pins. We think of detail as small, not the realm of the cosmic mind or these big hills of New Mexico. That isn’t true. No matter how large a thing is, how fantastic, it is also ordinary. We think of details as daily and mundane. Even miracles are mundane happenings that an awakened mind can see in a fantastic way.

So it is not merely a materialistic handling of objects that is the base for writing, but using details to step through to the other shore—to the vast emptiness behind it all. For the Hopi who had always lived there, the large expanses around their village were very ordinary. The saw the huge mesas every day.

So whatever we are writing about in our stories, no matter how ordinary or extraordinary the people, landscapes, or experiences are, let’s work on our craft to bring in the opposite and show the two sides there are to everything, which are always feeding into each other. There is no light without darkness, no long without short, no joy without sadness, no extraordinary without ordinary.

Writing Prompt

Write a story that’s set in a very ordinary place for the protagonist and by the end of the story, let them discover the extraordinariness in it. Once you have written the first draft, leave it to sit for a few days at least then read it back and see if you can find the emotional truth of the story. It doesn’t always reveal itself fully until later edits! But a glimmer of it should come through.

Then leave it for a few more days and go back and do your first edit. Leave it again for a day or two, then read it back through and edit just the opening paragraph to foreshadow that truth and work on creating a beginning for the story that also has one or more of the following elements in it:

• A vivid image.

• A unique narrative voice.

• A feeling of being a bit off kilter.

• Gorgeous use of language and the senses.

• The indirect posing of a question.

• The provoking of an emotion.

Happy writing!

I hope you have enjoyed this first Slow Story Club post. Do let me know what you think in the comments below as I want to make sure that you all get lots out of them. I will be using a mix of flash fiction and short stories to look at each month, but if you have a preference for more of the former and less of the latter, or vice versa, do let me know!

Paid subscribers: you can share your openings, or the whole story, in a private chat thread that I will open in a week or so.

With love,

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