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5 Things To Do In Your First 3 Paragraphs

Picture of a tree frog on a hosta leaf
A frog on a hosta leaf - which is more green? Your first three paragraphs need to arrest and intrigue your reader.
1. Engage the senses. You don’t have to hit every sensory stop – but it sure helps. Vivid visuals are great, but they are even better when backed up with visceral, precise taste or touch or sound.

2. Hint at the conflict. The majority of great stories provide the reader with some clue to the conflict driving the story within the first three paragraphs. Here, for example, is the first paragraph of Kelly Link’s marvelous “Travels with the Snow Queen”:

Part of you is always traveling faster, always traveling ahead. Even when you are moving, it is never fast enough to satisfy that part of you. You enter the walls of the city early in the evening, when the cobblestones are a mottled pink with reflected light, and cold beneath the slap of your bare, bloody feet. You ask the man who is guarding the gate to recommend a place to stay the night, and even as you are falling into bed at the inn, the bed, which is piled high with quilts and scented with lavender, perhaps alone, perhaps with another traveler, perhaps with the guardsman who had such brown eyes, and a mustached that curled up on either side of his nose like two waxed black laces, even as this guardsman, whose name you didn’t ask calls out a name in his sleep that is not your name, you are dreaming about the road again. When you sleep, you dream about the long white distances that still lie before you. When you wake up, the guardsman is back at his post, and the place between your legs aches pleasantly, your legs sore as if you had continued walking all night in your sleep. While you were sleeping, your feet have healed again. You were careful not to kiss the guardsman on the lips, so it doesn’t really count, does it.

Holy cow, talk about grabbing the reader with bravura and effortlessly stuffing them full of story. Second person is such a wonderful and reckless choice and it works here in a way not all second person narratives do. There’s physical pain, the bare bloody feet, and sensory beyond the visual with lavender and high-piled quilts and pleasant aches. And beyond that there is both an external conflict, the enforced journey, the drive in her dreams, and an internal conflict, a shame that, because the narrator is so careful not to look at it, makes us achingly aware of its existence: You were careful not to kiss the guardsman on the lips, so it doesn’t really count, does it. (The rest of the story is even better, and Link’s collection Magic For Beginners is worth picking up for its craftsmanship as well as the enjoyment its fabulous stories offer.)

3. Display your command of language. It’s worthwhile for a writer to think about poetry, and all its devices like assonance and alliteration, metaphor and allusion, internal rhythm, even meter. Save scraps of speech that you like, stud those paragraphs with wonderful things and spend with wild abandon from your store, because this is the make or break moment, when your reader decides whether or not to continue. You cannot lavish enough attention on your reader in the form of these paragraphs.

Look at how Carol Emshwiller’s “All of Us Can Almost…” begins, with a fancy hook made of punctuation attached to the title, like an elaborate latch on the door opening into the story:

…fly, that is. Of course lots of creatures can almost fy. But all of us are able to match any others of us, wingspan to wingspan. Also to any other fliers. But through we match each other wing to wing, we can’t get more than inches off the ground. If that. But we’re impressive. Our beaks look vicious. We could pose for statues for the birds representing an empire. we could represent an army or a president. And actually, we are the empire. We may not be able to fly, but we rule the skies. And most everything else too.

That conversational tone doesn’t come easily – it’s beautifully wrought, wonderfully precise.

4. Intrigue the reader while establishing the rules. Thomas M Disch’s “The Wall of America” sets the tone, narrative distance, and time frame (now to near future) while establishing a question (what’s the Wall?) that makes the reader want to keep going:

Most people got more space along the Wall than they could ever use, even the oddballs who painted leviathan-sized canvases they couldn’t hope to sell to anyone who didn’t have his own airplane hangar to hang their enormities. But if you did work on such a scale, you must have had money to burn, so what would it matter if you never sold your stuff? The important thing was having it hung where people could see it.

5. Use interesting, active words. You can never go wrong with this. Here’s James Tiptree Jr. at her best, full of poetry in “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled Of Light!”:

Hot summer night, big raindrops falling faster now as she swings along the concrete expressway, high over the old dead city. Lightning is sizzling and cracking over the lake behind her. Beautiful! The flashes jump the roofs of the city to life below her, miles of cube buildings gray and sharp-edged in the glare. People lived here once, all the way to the horizons. Smiling, she thinks of all those walls and windows full of people, living in turbulence and terror. Incredible.

All of these count in titles too. Here’s an exercise: write down ten first sentences or titles, playing with one of these concepts in each. Then pick the most promising and go write that story.

(Reader notes: The stories cited here can be found in The James Tiptree Award Anthology 1, The James Tiptree Award Anthology 2, The Wall of America by Thomas Disch, and Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree, Jr. Sadly, none of these are available on the Kindle. The Kelly Link collection, however, is available on the Kindle.)

25 Responses

  1. I try to go with “establish a voice” and “establish a grounding, which need not necessarily include setting, but should give the reader some sense of where sie stands in relation to the text.”

    Those are editor not writer impulses, though, born from the fact that little annoys me as much as stories where I can’t figure out where the hell I’m situated, and in the absence of being situated, haven’t even been given a strong enough voice to connect to.

    Obv. my standards for what qualifies as “strong voice” and “well-situated” won’t be universal; I can think of several writers who are often praised whose work I don’t enjoy because I never feel situated or engaged by a voice.

    1. I think we can’t underestimate the importance of setting up the physical world – I hate stories where voices are just floating in a white room.

      1. Yes, although for me, the problem is significantly worse when it’s a white room and I can’t tell even the basics. Is it in the future? The past? America? Britain? A small village in the Amazon? A world where fantasy is real?

        If I have to revise the assumptions I’ve made after the first few paragraphs (Oh! We’re actually in South America and there are werewolves, but somehow it’s also a computer simulation! Got it!), I rarely recover from that. I almost never recover if I have to do it multiple times…

        1. I’m thinking of the wonderful beginning to the film Serenity, where we think we’re in a school – whoops, it’s a hologram –whoops, it’s a different hologram — whoops, it’s the assassin on her trail, and it works beautifully there because each time the world is complete (it helps that it’s visual, sure) before it’s shattered.

          So you can change worlds – but it has to be deliberate, and not just seem like you don’t know what you’re doing. Which is true for violating the majority of writing rules.

  2. I absolutely agree with 1, 2, and 4: engage the senses, hint at the conflict and intrigue the reader while establishing the rules. But displaying your command of language (3) and, to a lesser extent, using interesting, active words (5) raises the question of whether one is writing for one’s self or for the reader. To be sure, there are many readers who will be as pleased by the former. There are many who won’t.

    While I can admire Emshwiller’s or Tiptree’s verbal dexterity, their styles are not something I would want to sit down and actually read for more than a few minutes at a time. The writing would — to me — get in the way of the story. A stained-glass window can be a beautiful thing, but then it doesn’t work well as a window.

    It comes down to personal preference of both writers and readers, of course. And that comes down to one I think you missed (although it also comprises hinting at the conflict and establishing the rules): set reader expectations.

    1. Establishing the rules is worth a whole post in itself!

      I think style doesn’t have to be poetic or dense or hard to follow, but plain style, the sort of clarity Sturgeon and Heinlein get up too, is still a style too, isn’t it?

  3. Wow, thank you guys so much!

    The comments as a writer are just as helpful as the article itself on what a reader wants.

    On the topic of Serenity, and the show Firefly, think the dynamics between the characters are a great example too. Like I really enjoy how each character interacts with each other.

    Thanks again for such wonderful comments, wish mine could be as helpful 🙂

  4. This is exactly what I needed as inspiration! Thanks so much for it. I would also add: Flow well, but be unexpected. Use unexpected words and images, but make them work! My latest favorite example is from Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand:

    “Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl. Everyone would be pleased to see me coming. Maybe I would visit with you for the weekend and then suddenly, because I am fickle like that, I would visit with the man from the corner shop instead–but you would not be sad because you would be eating a cinnamon bun or drinking a cold Coca Cola from the can, and you would never think of me again. We would be happy, like lovers who met on holiday and forgot each other’s names.”

    So. Good.

  5. “It’s worthwhile for a writer to think about poetry, and all its devices like assonance and alliteration, metaphor and allusion, internal rhythm, even meter.”

    One of the best habits I ever got into, as a prose writer, was reading and writing poetry. It’s a master’s class in how to evoke mood and emotion without wasting words. I have a GMail conversation with myself whose only purpose is to store poems I’ve come across that really resonate with me: some of my favorites include “The Year of Held Breath” by Veronica Patterson, “Advice to a Prophet” by Richard Wilbur, and “Dedication” by Czeslaw Milosz, each one evocative and in my opinion brilliantly rendered.

    In particular, another favorite, “Portage” by John Glenday, actually inspired my own story, using the same title.

  6. in reference to a setting up a story’s world and where the reader is situated, I find that if done can correctly, some level of ambuigity can work well and be intruiging. I enjoy not quite knowing where I stand and not having all the blanks filled in for me.

    1. Alec, I think you’re right, but (imo) there also needs to be enough that you feel that the writer, if not the reader, understands everything that’s going on. Too much ambiguity can lead to contradictions that can throw readers out of the story, which might be a valid strategy for some narratives, but usually spells disaster.

  7. I was just randomly looking into storytelling; I’m trying my damnedest to change my sort of patchwork style of writing. & I came across your blog about how to end a tale & just had to read some others. just wanted to say thanks!

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On Writing Process: Writers Just Effing Write

Man Standing on His Head Playing the Guitar
If this man can play the guitar standing on his head, surely you can write in unfamiliar circumstances.
Here is one of the wisest things about writing process ever told me, said by Syne Mitchell during a Clarion West Friday mystery muse visit: “Try different things, find out what works for you, and then do that. Lots.” Brilliant.

It’s to the point because everyone’s process differs, and may change due to time and circumstance. I can write with some ambient noise, for example, so I can take a notebook over to Soul Food Books in order to grab coffee and one of their tables and know I’ll have a productive afternoon. Here at home, I need more quiet, and it takes me a little longer to get focused, but once I’m started I can write fast and furiously for a stint that’s good for a chunk of words. I like writing in airports, but it’s scattered writing, flashes of notes, observations about people, notes for stories I’ll write later.

Sometimes I write on the computer, other times by hand in a notebook. I’ve tried dictating and at first it didn’t work well for me but over the course of a decade has become crucial to my process. I sample different notebooks – I like big artist’s sketch pads to write in, actually, because I like all that white space with plenty of room for extra notes and diagrams. I don’t like writing on small surfaces, like business cards or Post-its; I don’t think I’d get much done if forced to rely on those.

And actually, I take that back. If all I had to write on was index cards, I’d make that work. Because sometimes you have to, or else give up on writing. A new parent, for example, won’t have the uninterrupted bouts of time that they once had. They have to start thinking about writing in short bursts, or at a time they’d normally be in bed. The trick is to write, to resist the temptation to slack off, to give yourself a break.

Try new things. Go write somewhere today where you haven’t written before and turn out a few hundred words there: sitting on your front steps, or on an aquarium bench while tourists pass, or sitting on the back of one of the lion statues outside the Art Institute in Chicago while a November wind gnaws at your fingers. Or write a list of ten places to try – and then try at least one. Or stay at home in your usual place, that’s fine too. As long as you’re getting some writing done.

The mantra of our household is: writers just effing write. Because it’s so much easier not to do it, to spend time reading blog posts or alphabetizing the spice rack or making plans and blueprints for the wonderful story we’ll produce, once we get sufficiently prepared. Prepare yourself for the writing, don’t prepare the writing for you by fiddling with outlines or research or format.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Perefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

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Using Random Tools Like StumbleUpon for Rewriting

Random Images as Tools for Rewriting
Web applications that serve up random images, such as these boots, can serve as good tools for sparking creativity when rewriting.
The Internet may be a sometimes maddening easy way to lose track of time, but it’s also the source of a lot of useful tools for rewriting, making it possible to justify a little time spent poking at it. I love tools for finding random things that I can inject into my writing. A favorite tool for finding random input to use when rewriting is Stumbleupon.

For example, that’s how I found this marvelous tool, the N+7 Machine. It describes itself thusly:

The N+7 procedure, invented by Jean Lescure of Oulipo, involves replacing each noun in a text with the seventh one following it in a dictionary. Here you can enter an English text and 15 alternative texts will be generated, from N+1, which replaces each noun with the next one in the dictionary, to N+15, which takes the 15th noun following.

I have a story, “The Ghost Eater,” that’s been sitting for a while that I need to return to, so to whack myself on the side of the head and inspire an interesting rewrite, I ran the first two paragraphs through it, in the hopes that looking at them might spark some new ideas that I could use in mapping out my strategy for the rewrite.

Here’s a favorite:

“This creature for expectorants is a harmful faint,” Dr. Fantomas said to the mandarin at his legacy. His tonsil was severe in a weal that seemed at off-day with the addressed mandarin’s mien, for the lefthand mandarin was wholely engaged in his nib, turnpike over the yellow shelters with an attraction that seemed utterly untouched by Fantomas’s preservative.

“A harmful faint!” Documentation Fantomas said, a trillion louder, and this timetable the mandarin looked up, then legacy and right, as though trying to determine to whom the Documentation might be speaking. Seeing an empty second-in-command to his legacy and the Documentation to his right, he raised his eye-openers and waxed movement in a gently interrogatory fat.

What might I do with this? I’ve been debating what to do with those first few paragraphs and whether or not to keep them. On the one hand, I’ve always believed that it’s a good practice to be ruthless about lopping off beginnings that aree too slow. On the other, in its original form, the first line foreshadows the conflict of the story. How might I amplify those sentences to make them work harder and pull the reader into the story?

  • Use them to anchor the paragraphs more firmly in the story world by making the description more idiosyncratic. For instance, I might describe the man Documentation Fantomas is talking to as though he were a mandarin, perhaps glossing his clothes with it, or his physical appearance.
  • Mine them. Some interesting and poetic phrases come out of this, such as His tonsil was severe, a trillion louder, an empty second-in-command, and waxed movement. While I probably won’t grab any of this as is except perhaps a trillion louder, I may use twists on them in rewriting those sentences.
  • Grab some of the actual nouns. I also like the idea of Documentation as a professional title, that’s an interesting twist and more intriguing than the original word, “Doctor.”

Here’s another:

“This creed for expenses is a harmful fairyland,” Dr. Fantomas said to the mandrill at his legislation. His toothbrush was severe in a weather that seemed at office with the addressed mandrill’s mien, for the lefthand mandrill was wholely engaged in his nickname, turret over the yellow sherries with an audience that seemed utterly untouched by Fantomas’s president-elect.

“A harmful fairyland!” Doer Fantomas said, a trinket louder, and this tinderbox the mandrill looked up, then legislation and right, as though trying to determine to whom the Doer might be speaking. Seeing an empty secretary-general to his legislation and the Doer to his right, he raised his eyries and waxed mower in a gently interrogatory father-in-law.

Running through it with these ideas in mind yields the following:

  • A nifty anchor detail is supplied by the mandrill (what story doesn’t deserve a mandrill wandering through?). Ditto the interrogatory father-in-law and yellow sherries. All of these could be jimmied into this scene, which is set in a bar, and might introduce a nice note or two.
  • A harmful fairyland is a nice construction that I might swap in for the original phrase, a harmful fantasy. Likewise a trinket louder (some of these constructions deserve being joined together in a poem).

By now I hope you see what I mean. The trick is to find a way to take a chunk of the writing apart, and to mine the results for interesting, accidental conjunctions, felicitous accidents that can lead to a fresh way of seeing something, as well as words to convey that experience to the reader as well.

Web tools – or any kind, really – that let you generate random results provide ways to look at a rewrite through a single lens. Such random tools, used for rewriting, can be a useful resource. (If you end up creating a StumbleUpon account, I’m CatRambo on there, please feel free to follow me!)

Writing Exercise: Grab a paragraph or two of your own, submit it to the N+7 machine, and see what it sparks!

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