Writers in the Storm

by Ellen Buikema

How do I start to write a story? Does it have start at the beginning? Should I have a separate writing space? If I stare at the cursor blinking at the screen long enough, will ideas magically pop into my mind?

There is no one best way to start your story because there are too many variables to consider. But there are many ways to begin.

Great Ways to Start the Writing Journey

1. Start in the middle.

If you can’t think of a beginning, start deeper into the story. Author, James Scott Bell’s book Write Your Novel From the Middle suggests that the middle is where the protagonist tries to reach their story goal, where they transform. These changes cause conflict between the protagonist and the other characters, particularly the antagonist.2

2. Write like a patchwork quilt.

Write what you “see” in your mind and then put the pieces together. This is the method used by author Diana Gabaldon, who said, “I write just about everything piecemeal, including nonfiction articles, book reviews and essays. It’s effective because it works; I’m never held up stewing about What Comes Next— I don’t care what comes next, I just care about something I can see happening. The order of the happening has a logic to it (often, more than one), and that will become clear to me as I work.”

3. Start your story at the end.

John Irving writes backwards. He starts writing a book with the last sentence and then works back to where the story starts. This process can take a year or more. He’s written the majority of his novels this way.

In A Prayer For Owen Meany, Irving’s last line is, “O God-please give him back! I shall keep asking You.”

The first line. “I AM DOOMED to remember a boy with a wrecked voice-not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”

Beginning and ending, beautifully tied together.

4. Introduce the lead character.

Starting your story by introducing your main character is a great way to hook your readers emotionally—especially when written in first person, showing their worldview.

Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, uses this type of beginning. “I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.”

When readers care about a character, they want to know what’s happening to them next and will keep reading.

5. Entice your readers with action.

Start with something that immediately grabs the reader, like an action scene that lets your readers know right away what kind of story this is.

Here is an example from the opening scene of the dystopian fantasy Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury: 

“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.”

6. Use an outline.

Some writers prefer to make a detailed outline, which helps keep them organized. This is a plotting technique. Jim Butcher, who writes contemporary fantasy and steampunk, gives a detailed description of his method for setting up a story in his live journal. titled, Putting It All Together: How to Get Your Story Started or Organizing This Frickin' Mess

Jim Butcher is a big believer in the BIC (butt in chair) method. If you decide to enter NaNoWriMo, this is the method you will use.

7. Start with a mystery.

Begin with a mystery on the first page that keeps your readers intrigued until it’s solved. Mystery can be within any genre. Start with a question, problem, or strange event, and they’ll need to know what happens next.

“People’s lives—their real lives, as opposed to their simple physical existences—begin at different times. The real life of Thad Beaumont, a young boy who was born and raised in the Ridgeway section of Bergenfield, New Jersey, began in 1960. Two things happened to him that year. The first shaped his life; the second almost ended it.” The Dark Half, Stephen King

8. Create a Synopsis.

• Decide the genre you want to write.
• Flesh out your main characters.
• Think about the desires of your characters, their motivations, and what kinds of conflicts those desires might cause.

9. Let yourself write badly.

For me, this is not easy to do. I write a page and want to go back and “fix” any errors I’ve made. There are always errors.

One of the suggestions from NaNoWriMo was to sit and write without going back to change anything. Don’t rethink. Go with the flow. I didn’t believe that I could do this, but I tried anyway. It worked! I was a lot more productive. Granted, much was edited after the 50,000 words, but not stopping to edit after every paragraph or page allowed for better flow and more content.

10. Make up the story as you go.

Sometimes you have a basic idea of where the story starts, where it ends, a vague idea of what might happen in between but details are lacking. Write whatever pops into your head and make sense of it later. You never know what gems you’ll mine amongst the winding words.

Spending the time and effort to create a fantastic opening for your story is a great goal. However, worrying over it can stop your progress cold. The stress from worry will stifle your creative mind, so use your favorite method of relaxation, and then keep on with your writing journey.

Here are more ideas for ways to start a story.  

How do you like to start your stories? What methods have you tried?

* * * * * *

About Ellen

Author, speaker, and former teacher, Ellen L. Buikema has written non-fiction for parents and a series of chapter books for children with stories encouraging the development of empathy—sprinkling humor wherever possible. Her Works In Progress are The Hobo Code, YA historical fiction and Crystal Memories, YA paranormal fantasy.

Find her at https://ellenbuikema.com or on Amazon.

Image by Paul Mears from Pixabay

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

When characters are scared about what might happen, so are your readers.

Imagine your character in a dark room, surrounded by shadows, covered in—

Thud. What was that? Is someone there?

Maybe it’s nothing. The cat chasing his tail. The ice maker cycling up in the fridge. Or maybe it’s a masked killer creeping over the window sill.

Whatever it is, your character is freaking out a bit, and odds are, so is your reader. They’re gripping the novel tight, their breath is coming a little faster, and they’re desperate to know what’s out there and how it’s going to affect the character they’ve grown to love.

So, what do you do now?

Are you milking this moment for all its worth, or letting it die before it gets to scare the pants off of anyone? Are you digging deep into your own fears and weaving them into what your character is feeling, or jumping right to the reveal of what made the thud?

Hopefully, you recognize the power of fear as a tension-generating device, and you’re crafting scenes that tweak nerves and unsettle stomachs, and create a mood where anything is possible, and the worst is very likely right around the corner.

But what if you’re not trying to scare anyone? That’s only for horror writers, right?

Nope, not at all.

If you’re not using fear, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to engage your readers.

Emotions connect readers to characters, and fear is a powerful—and useful—emotion.

Fear is one aspect of anticipation, which is at the heart of tension. Readers anticipate what might happen, good or bad, and they keep reading to discover how it all turns out.

That connection is vital to pulling readers into a story and making them fall in love with your characters. When they connect, they care. When they care, they worry. When they worry, they stay up late to finish and tell all their friends about this awesome book they just read.

Find the opportunities fear offers and make the most of them.

Look at your scenes and brainstorm how fear can make them stronger.

But remember—there are many types of fear, so you don’t need to approach every scene as if it were part of a horror movie. A parent can fear for a child on their first day of school just as much as a group of campers who picked the wrong vacation spot can fear for their lives.

Adjust as needed for your story, genre, and market.

1. The Fear of the Wrong Choice

Every scene has a goal, but what if the character is chasing the wrong one? What if they’ve made a terrible mistake and the goal they’re pursuing will only lead to ruin?

When a character is utterly convinced they’re right, and that their goal is the correct one, readers will naturally assume they’re correct. That can steal a lot of the tension and mystery out of the scene. But when we layer in a few hints that it’s not the best choice, or give the character reasons to wonder if they’re doing the right thing, we allow uncertainty to creep in.

Uncertainty leads to worry, which leads to fear, which leads to tension. (And eventually to hate according to Master Yoda, but we’ll stop before we get there).

2. The Fear of the Reason Why 

Remember I said fear was a great motivator? Well, there’s also the fear of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, or doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. Basically, just the character worrying about why they’re acting at all and their reasons behind it.

Maybe they’re being selfish and they know it. Maybe they’re not sure if their motivations are from a good place. They might knowingly do something awful, because it’s the only choice they have and they truly believe they’ll be able to turn it all around before it goes bad.

Not every character acts from the goodness of their heart, so let them worry about why they’re so gung-ho to do whatever needs doing in the scene.

3. The Fear of What’s Out There 

Ah, conflict. It’s a given the characters will face it, and face a lot of it, before the novel is through, but the question is…how awful will it be?

Hopefully, pretty darn terrible (whatever “terrible” means in your story).

Characters will have to figure out how to circumvent the problem. They’ll need to weigh the pros and cons and look at all the options, and worry over them all. They’ll need to decide how far they’re willing to go to fix this issue. They’ll need to accept that things might not turn out in their favor and it’ll end in screaming and death.

This is a major fear every scene should have, even if the characters know what conflict awaits them—they just won’t know how it’ll turn out. 

4. The Fear of it Coming Back to Bite Them 

Which all culminates in the fear of the consequences for their actions. Characters should have a lot at stake, and worry about how their choices and motivations are going to affect their plans.

What if they’re wrong? What if they’re right? What if they’ve made awful mistakes and set terrible things in motion that they’ll barely—if ever—recover from? (Do this last one as often as you can. Really, it’s tons of fun). 

Stakes are a great way to add fear, tension, and a dark cloud hanging over the heads of your characters. If they screw up, they really should regret it.

5. The Fear of the Ugly Truth

Character arcs are rooted in fear. It’s the fear created by whatever happened to them in their past that’s haunting them to this day. In a lot of stories, fighting against the fear that “the past” is right is what the book is all about.

Let characters worry that deep down, they deserve all the horrible things that have happened to them. They’re not worthy of what they want. They’re just kidding themselves by trying to be a better person. They’re everything that person who wronged them said they were.

This is what’s driving them on an emotional level, so don’t skimp out here when developing your fears.

Fears aren’t only relatable—they’re universal. 

We all have them, so we all understand how they can warp a person’s mind and behavior. Fear can make a character act in ways they never would have otherwise, and cause them to act against their better judgement. It can push buttons and ruin relationships. It can divide and conquer and leave a character alone when at the worst possible moment.

It can create situations that yank on a reader’s heartstrings and fully immerse them in the story.

Which is what we want as writers—to tap into those fears and create an emotional connection that helps us engage our readers and give them a story worth their time.

What are your characters afraid of? Do you take advantage of that in your novel?

About Janice

Janice Hardy is the award-winning author and founder of the popular writing site Fiction University, where she helps writers improve their craft and navigate the crazy world of publishing. Not only does she write about writing, she teaches workshops across the country, and her blog has been recognized as a Top Writing Blog by Writer’s Digest. She also spins tales of adventure for both teens and adults, and firmly believes that doing terrible things to her characters makes them more interesting (in a good way). She loves talking with writers and readers, and encourages questions of all types—even the weird ones.

Find out more about writing at www.Fiction-University.com, or visit her author’s site at www.JaniceHardy.com. Subscribe to her newsletter to stay updated on future books, workshops, and events and receive her book, 25 Ways to Strengthen Your Writing Right Now, free.

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by Stefan Emunds

This is the second article of the article series The Yin and Yang Relationship of Psychology and Storytelling. The first article covered how to engage readers. You can read it here.

Why Do Writers Need to Know Psychology?

Writers need to know psychology for four main reasons:

1. They need to know how readers think and feel and use that knowledge to engage them.
2. They need to understand the psychology of experiencing so they can create story experiences that have a real-to-life feel.
3. They need to design characters with plausible traits, flaws, talents, motivations, etc.
4. They need to know themselves — why they write, what they really want to write about, and how to get out of their own way.

This article explains how to create story experiences that feel real to life.

The Eight Crafts of Writing

These articles are written with The Eight Crafts of Writing in mind. The eight writing crafts are:

1. Big Idea (aka theme)
2. Genre
3. Narrative (including POV)
4. Story Outline (aka plotting)
5. Characterization
6. World Building
7. Scene Structure
8. Prose (aka line-by-line writing)

The author will refer to the eight writing crafts throughout this article series.

Note: To avoid confusing readers, the author of these articles avoided the alternation of she and her and he and him. Instead, he uses the nonexclusive she and her to mean writer and reader.

The Psychology of Experiencing & Storytelling

Life is a string of experiences. Stories are virtual experiences, presented in a sequence of scenes.

Who experiences? The mind does. Hence, writers need to know the psychology of experiencing and apply that to stories. This allows them to conjure an engaging and immersive reading experience for their readers.

It's your job as a writer, to make your book real.

- Margaret Atwood

Simplified, experiences involve five mental faculties:

1. The senses
2. The self
3. The intellect
4. Emotions 
5. Feelings

A. The Sensory Stream

In real life, our senses turn external experiences into a multimedia stream and project that onto the brain’s frontal lobe. Our self watches that projection as it watches TV or reads stories.

In storytelling, prose or line-by-line writing emulates the sensual stream.

B. The Self

In real life, the self relates experiences to itself, reacts to them, and evaluates them.

In storytelling, POV emulates the self.

C. Emotions

Our nervous system has two independent neural perception paths. The first reacts involuntarily to experiences. The second responds voluntarily to experiences.

Visceral responses and emotions rule involuntary reactions, such as fear, aggression, disgust, infatuation, or joy.

Writers need to emulate emotions. Writing visceral/emotional reactions puts tension on the page. Tension is a major story engager.

Advanced Writer Tip: We can be curious and frightened at the same time. Conflicting emotions boost tension.

D. The Intellect

In real life, the ego also responds voluntarily to experiences — with the help of the intellect.

The intellect analyzes experiences and assesses their significance. This is the self’s cognitive response to experiences.

Writers can take advantage of the fact that the intellect is super curious. Curiosity keeps the reader turning pages.

E. Feelings

Feelings and emotions are two different affairs. The body conjures emotions, but feelings come from the heart or soul.

Examples of emotions are fear, anger, disgust, arousal, and excitement. Emotions are dualistic, for example, like and dislike, or sad and joyful.

Examples of feelings: love, a sense of beauty, a sense of purpose, and happiness. Feelings are not dualistic. They increase and decrease.

Janus, The God With Two Faces

The human self experiences two worlds: the internal and external world. The human self is Janus, the two-faced god, who dwells on the threshold.

External World

We experience and act in the external world, which is ruled by physical, chemical, and biological laws. The external world is severe. If we miss by an inch, we miss. It’s a competitive place and out there, we can get hurt or even killed.

Internal World

We imagine, dream, feel, and think in the internal world. The internal world defies physics. We can fly without wings, dive without gills, and shapeshift. It’s a merciful world because there are no limits to our imagination and we always get a second chance. It’s the place where the magic happens.

The following line of thought demonstrates how in-connectible the two worlds are: We can measure social progress on people’s success in manifesting internal (human) values in the external (inhuman) world, like love, beauty, a sense of purpose, and happiness. But feelings don’t make it into the external world. We create external circumstances — for example, a relationship — that allow us to experience feelings. Stories are virtual circumstances that allow readers to (re-)experience their inherent humanity.

The Rhythm of External and Internal Experiences

Like in real life, stories hav internal and external movements, and writers need to distinguish suavely and with great ingenuity between the two.

Let’s take love and romance as an example. Usually lumped together, a romance is the external arc of a relationship, and love is the characters’ internal experience — besides infatuation, passion, obsession, and other emotions. 

Story characters connect internal and external movements and establish an experience-response rhythm: external event → internal response → analysis → decision → action → external reaction → internal response → and so on. 

Our self judges external events according to internal references. For example, we may judge an external reaction according to whether we got what we wanted. Or we may judge information according to how true it is. Other internal references are desires, morality, religion, feelings, and fixed ideas. The protagonist’s internal reference is her story goal.

Everybody goes through this experience cycle a hundred times a day. For that reason, readers will instantly notice when a writer gets it wrong.

The Stimulus-Response Mechanism

On the scene level, the experience cycle becomes the stimulus-response mechanism, aka Motivation Reaction Units (Dwight Swain).

The external experience is the stimulus to which the POV character responds. The response has the following sequence: reflex → emotional and visceral reaction → instinctive response → habitual response → thought → action → dialogue → feeling.

Reflexes, visceral responses, and emotions are involuntary. The body executes them without our doing and the self can just watch them come and go.

• Example of a reflex: Pulling back when a snake strikes at us.
• Examples of visceral responses: a hammering heart, a tightening stomach, and a wave of nausea.
• Examples of emotions: fear, aggression, infatuation, and disgust.
• Example of an instinctive response: Scratching the head in case of confusion.

Mind the difference between reactions and responses: we can’t do anything about reactions, but we can suppress and train responses.

Habitual responses are trained responses. An instinctive response to a punch is dodging. A habitual, trained response is blocking the punch with an arm.

Mind that the stimulus-response mechanism is a mix of internal and external movements:

• Stimulus: external event
• Reflex: external event (can cause an external reaction)
• Emotional and visceral reaction: internal event
• Instinctive response: external event (can cause an external reaction)
• Habitual response: external event (can cause an external reaction)
• Thought: internal event
• Action: external event
• Dialogue: external event
• Feeling: internal event

Why is it important to know these detailed responses?

To create story depth. Writers can make their story characters react in different ways and thus create a more splendrous reading experience. When a scene feels dull, have a closer look at your stimulus response elements and add some or write some fresh.

Divorcing stimuli and responses is a storytelling sin. If you put a stimulus on the page, you need to put the response on the page too or you leave the reader hanging (the famous gun on the wall). If you put a response on the page but leave out the stimulus, readers will get confused.

You can let a character respond with one, a few, or all response types, you just need to get the sequence right.

Here is an example:

Harriette approaches the snake aquarium. The sign reads King Cobra. The cobra rises, spreads its collar, and sways left and right, black eyes on Harriette, split tongue twitching.

Harriette taps on the glass.

The cobra strikes [stimulus]. Thumb.

Harriette’s hand pulls back [reflex]. A jolt of fear crackles through her backbone like lighting [visceral response and emotion]. She takes a step back [instinctive/habitual response]. Good, there’s gorilla glass between her and the cobra [thought/cognitive response].

She wags her finger [action]. “Hey, you scared me.” [dialogue]

Harriette turns her back on the snake and makes her way to the lizard aquarium. After a few steps, empathy [feeling] laces into her fading adrenaline. Harriette looks back at the cobra who still sways, predator eyes fixed on her, probably dreaming of one last deadly strike.

Further reading: Lynette Burrows' article on the Motivation Reaction Unit is a great addendum to read.

More Storytelling and Psychology

Thank you for reading the second article of the article series Storytelling and Psychology — The Yin and Yang of Writing. The next installment will cover how to design characters with plausible traits, flaws, talents, and motivations.

Do you balance stimuli and responses? What is your ratio in writing (external/internal)? Do you overuse or underuse certain reactions and responses? Do you know how to write responses fresh? Please share an example in the comments below.

Note: You can buy The Eight Crafts of Writing here or take the course on the Lawson Writer’s Academy here. 

About Stefan

Stefan Emunds is the author of The Eight Crafts of Writing. He writes inspirational non-fiction and  visionary fiction stories and runs an online inspiration and enlightenment workshop. Stefan was born in Germany and enjoyed two years backpacking in Australia, New Zealand, and South-East Asia in his early twenties. Prior to becoming a writer, he has worked as a business development manager in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. At the moment, he lives with his son in the Philippines.