Openings

Openings

Happy New Year. Welcome to the season of beginnings.

New projects. Weight loss programs. Resolutions.

Well, not quite beginnings. You’ve probably been around for a little bit, living your life all this time, and I’m sure you’ve got quite a way to go.

You could call them crossroads, or changes. I’ve probably used those before, though, and for the purposes of this blog, I’d like to take a slightly different tack. Because, you never know, one of these days I may get it right…

I want to look at storytelling through the lens of openings.

Not beginnings – the start of a story, the place where you choose to introduce your readers to characters and their problems. Though the beginning of a story is the first opening in a story, of course.

That’s the beginning of a reader’s experience of your story. But that’s not the whole story. The stuff that happens before, and after, is not immediately relevant to the experience you want to convey.

I also mean a few other things when I say openings – one, I think of those spaces that allow someone to enter an ongoing process. So, yes, the beginning of a story is an opening. In multiple viewpoint stories, there are several openings into the overall tale, different perspectives on the action. So every time you switch point of view, you are creating a new opening into the story.

I also mean plot, as in those classic film and novel how-to’s and classes, in which plot is designed as a series of events that unfold into ever more complicated problems. You know the deal — end of first act, the initial problem is resolved but it results in an even greater problem, the true issue at the heart of the story that will propel the reader to the end, where there may be a twist as another opening is created, another perspective on what has happened is granted.

I also mean characters, because even a minor walk-on is a window into what is going on for the reader (or should be), and can do or say something that creates a new direction than the one the reader anticipated. An opening, through which the reader falls, hopefully Alice-like into a Wonderland.

That being said (to quote Arrested Development, and for those who don’t watch that or TV in general, the reference is to an observation about the phrase’s disingenuous implied permission to hold opposing opinions at the same time), those first few pages of a story, the first chapter or two, are probably the most heavily revised and edited of anything I write. They are the fruit of everything that has gone on before in the story of the characters coming together for the story you’re starting to tell. They’re also the seeds of what’s coming.

The beginning, in short, is the front door through which a reader walks into a story. In that first opening, I try to see, plant, hint, or lay down the faint possibility of every other opening to come.

If there is magic in the first opening, than the reader can anticipate more in the twists and turns to come. If it’s murder, well, best wear the bullet-proof vest (though not helpful against all the other methods for murder available).

If there is kindness, then there is the possibility of virtue playing a part further down the line. Or maybe, cruelty.

Certainly, contradicting the possibilities inherent in that first opening – throwing in a different point of view to end a story, using magic in a technological world, characters behaving beyond their parameters without appropriate motivation – risks alienating readers (and your editor). Surprises are great, new perspectives are exciting, but the views provided by the openings need to look on to the same story.

Ideally, the seeds will transform into something unexpected. Surprising. Hopefully memorable. But, at least for me, I need everything important to have a reference point in the beginning.

This doesn’t mean I’m calculating at the beginning of a story. Some folks can, I’m just not that smart. I can’t anticipate or contain a whole dream of a story and then set out to put it down.

Quite the contrary, I try to go as fast and as long as I can, throwing in all kinds of weirdness, details, intrigue, whatever, right at the start. Make things move. Yes, I have specific ideas about what I want to happen, but I find the best parts, the most useful elements that come into play later, often come from the unplanned (unconscious) random additions taken from whatever is happening in the world or inside me.

Then comes the sticky part. That middle. Even if I have an ending in mind, there’s the road between beginning and ending that must be built.

Things happen. New ideas are introduced. Something happens in life, and become startlingly relevant to the story. You see new possibilities in a character, or invent a new one. Those openings into the story pile up, turn into holes through which the story leaks, flops, stinks up the joint.

You get stuck. Lost.

Everything goes back to the beginning, to the first time broke through into the real world through the first opening you made.

Like in time traveling, going back to the beginning should reveal opportunities. Images. Something that needs to be unified as a thread. It’s the source.

Mine that first opening.

And, when things are discovered along the way, work your way back and make sure you (even if no one else) can see where the new thing you’ve inserted was there, or potentially there, all along.