The scariest part of writing is the beginning. Often times you’ll find yourself brimming with ideas only to reach for a pen and you’re thoughts have burrowed back into the depths on your mind. Once you’ve got a start you can simply keep going, running down the same line until you trip and are forced to back track and take a different path in the story. But the hardest part is taking that first step. How do I grab the readers attention and where do I begin? You can’t be wary to jump in without thinking, allow yourself to work it out while you write (as long as you revise) the first draft can be appalling, it’s easier to take good ideas wrapped in dirt and brush off all the horrible words than it is to try to make pretty sounding vile words into memorable concepts. So I’ll provide you a few tips and tricks to get you started on whatever you’re intending to write.
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For ALL the writing you do the most important thing is the opening line, you have to make the reader BLEED. Tug at all the feeling you can rile in them, once that connection is made they’ll want to keep reading. The reader begins to see themselves in the writing, they want to know how someone in a similar situation deals with such circumstances. If they have never been in that situation the connection can be made through the readers imagination. The point is to capture them, tear them open a bit and begin to fill up the emptiness you just created with the story you want to portray.
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A good beginning is so frustrating it’ll make you want to tear your hair out. Where do I start? An action packed opening? A person going into their past? Dialect? Prologue? (not my favorite). Whatever it may be it’s nearly impossible to not give away your story in the first few line or be too vague to the point of being boring. The key is balance. Write the beginning then re-read it. What gives away too much? Is there too much description? Too little? Find the holes in the reading and plug them. Allow the reader to enter in a peculiar situation, drop them in a moment in the story a writer usually wouldn’t. Be daring! Instead of starting them walking at the end of a street, put him my the trashcan, or in the middle of an argument. Throw the reader in as if they’ve been plucked up and dropped in a world they’re not supposed to see, don’t give the luxury of ushering them in. That’s overdone and often times it make them feel like they’re welcome and is if it’s a book. Okay I know it’s a book but the point is to make the reader uncomfortable. If the author doesn’t cry the reader won’t , if the writer isn’t surprised why should the audience be? Make them flinch, tear up, crinkle they’re foreheads, grunt, close the book in frustration, talk to the pages and feel lost when it’s ended. Not because they don’t understand but because now they don’t know what to do anymore. Treat the audience like a stranger and not like a friend, allow that bond to form overtime. Leave them curious enough to turn that second page. Create the mood of the scene and stick with it, make it thicker and ensnare the minds of others.
I understand that’s not an easy thing to accomplish. It’ll take time and frustration. More than once you’ll feel like ripping everything apart. But once you reach that moment of near explosion you will have the faintest glimmer of success. You’ll never write how you wish to, all writers can only write to their best abilities and they only know what abilities they possess when all the conventional ones have been thrown out the window. KEEP WRITING! Get that first line of emotional explosion and build on it. Make that line mean more to the reader, build that friendship.
