In a post on Writer Unboxed, Kathryn Craft offers advice on writing a strong opening for your novel, and examines the opening paragraph of Eleanor Shearer’s River Sing Me Home.
In 106 words, Shearer puts her main character in action, creates anticipation, raises questions, describes the setting, foreshadows, and establishes desire, obstacles, and stakes. Not bad for one paragraph.
What isn’t included in that paragraph? “There’s no character description, and yet we can see Rachel in our mind’s eye,” Craft notes. “There’s no block of setting description, just interactions. There’s no backstory to tell us who Rachel is or what caused this nighttime flight—just questions that pull us forward.”
Craft suggests that writers attempt this in our writing. “Imagine, if when starting a new project, you held yourself to the inclusion of just one aspect of story movement in each sentence,” she says. “Movement begets movement. What movement you create in your opening will continue to move within you, making the drafting easier.”
Notably, the opening didn’t utilize Shearer’s research and conveyed more tone that information. Rather, Craft suggests that Shearer asked: “If I were Rachel, what must I be doing at the start of this story?” And that helped her and the character hit the ground running.
The “running” in your novel may not be literal. Your character could be painting a house a shocking color of pink. But if you give us a taste of her desire, hint at the obstacles in her way, and foreshadow the stakes she’s trying to avoid, we’ll sense she has a good reason for doing so. Then, you can’t go wrong by enhancing that story movement with any of the other techniques Shearer displays.
