NOTES: Beginnings, Middles, & Ends (1992) 3/3

Notes on Beginnings, Middles, & Ends (1992) by Nancy Kress, part three of three.

EXERCISES from Beginnings, Middles, and Ends

FIRST SCENES

  1. Find an anthology or magazine of short stories. Read the first sentences of each. How many hint at some future conflict or change?
  2. Choose two of the stories and study their first three paragraphs. Does each opening contain an individualized character? A hint of conflict? Specific, interesting concrete details? How do the openings differ from each other in their handling of these elements? Is there anything here you can use in your openings?
  3. Do the same with the opening scenes of at least two novels you’ve read and admired. Study the last paragraphs of the first scenes. Do they evoke emotion through detail or dialogue? Is that emotion related to what you know the rest of the novel to be about?
  4. Pull out a story you’ve written that you’re not happy with. Study just the first three paragraphs (five if they’re very short or include much dialogue). IS there an individualized person ehre? A hit of conflict? Specific and telling details? If not, rewrite the opening to include these things, even if you never plan to rewrite the rest of the story.
  5. Pull out a story you’ve written that you are happy with. Study the prose in the first long paragraph carefully. Can you cut any words without loss of information? Are there any vague or abstract words you can replace with more definite ones? How many adjectives and adverbs are there? Are any redundant? Can you cut some even if they’re not redundant? (The ones left will have more force.) Look at the paragraph again. Did cutting improve it?
  6. Look at a story you’re currently writing. What changes occur from the start to the end of the first scene? If nothing does, should something? What? Does the scene’s closing line evoke that change, or the necessity of change? Is it a significant line in some other way?

SECOND SCENES

  1. Find an anthology of short stories. Read the first page of each. Which ones made you want to read more? Go back and study those beginnings. What specifically caught your attention?
  2. Pull out stories you’ve written, or are in the process of writing. Are the same elements you identified in question one present in your stories? If not, do you see any way to revise the openings to include them?
  3. Turn to a story or novel you’ve already read and know fairly well. Pick one in the same broad genre as what you write (literary mainstream, thriller, glitter romance, mystery, science fiction, etc.) Read the first two scenes. Is the second scene backfill, a flashback or a continuation of story time? Does the second scene continue the conflict, cool down the conflict, or introduce a subplot with new conflict? How are transitions handled? Is there anything here you can use?
  4. Look again at those same two scenes. How many characters are there? How do we learn about each – through dialogue, thoughts, actions, appearance, reactions, gestures, expository biography? How are new characters introduced?
  5. Look now at one of your own stories. Do you use as many methods for characterizing your people? Make a list of every characteristic you’ve implied about your protagonist in scene one. Don’t include things you know about her but haven’t indicated yet; confine the list to what’s there. Study the list. Does it add up to an interesting first impression, or to a bland and generic one? What’s individual about this person? How could you indicate it on the page?

REVISING BEGINNINGS

Pull out story of yours that has at least the first few scenes completed. Write five different opening scenes for the story, each no more than three to six paragraphs, focusing on:

  1. The description of some object of importance to the scene.
  2. Your point-of-view character engaged in some significant, unexpected action.
  3. An outrageous opinion held by the point-of-view character, expressed inside her head in her own words- something she would never tell a living soul (everybody has these)
  4. Six lines of dialogue between two characters (three lines each) who are arguning about something that will be important to the plot.
  5. A description of the room where the first scene occurs. Focus on details that will have thematic significance and/or that tell us something about the owner’s personality.

Do you like any of these openings better than your original? Did writing them spark any ideas fo the story? If not, go back to your original opening.

MIDDLES

  1. Choose three novels you know well. For each, summarize the throughline in a sentence or two. If you can’t do this, reread the section of this chapter called “What is the Throughline?” (Remember, throughlines deal with plot, not theme)
  2. For one of the above novels and one of the short stories, make a list of all the forces developed in the middle. How does each contribute to the climax?
  3. Pick of the stories and list the scenes (a longish story works best for this). Now consider each scene separately. What is its function – to develop character, advance plot, or both? How does the scene contribute to the throughline? If you feel ambitious, do this for a short novel.
  4. Pull out one of your own finished stories. Summarize its throughline. List the scenes. How does each advance plot, develop character, contribute to the throughline? Try to find two scenes you could combine; how would you do it? Try to find one scene you would cut; how would you keep in the story any vital information the scene contains? Does it seem to you that this story could have used any additional scenes? Where? Why?
  5. Look again at your story. Try to imagine it form the point of a view of a secondary character. Is it more or less interesting? IF this exercise intrigues you, read Valerie Martin’s novel Mary Reilly, a retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson’ Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from the point of view of Dr. Jekyll’s housemaid; Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, a retelling of Jane Eyre from the point of view of the first Mrs. Rochester; or Tanith Lee’s Red as Blood, a retelling of many Grimm fairy tales from unexpected points of view.
  6. Choose a favorite multi-viewpoint novel. Analyze how, and how often, the author changes points of view. (It can be helpful to mark all the point-of-view changes in the margin.) How does the author mark transitions from one point of view to another? Do the switches follow any pattern? Is there anything here applicable to your novel?

CHARACTERS IN MIDSTORY

  1. Choose a short story or novel you know well, one in which the protagonist undergoes a significant character change. Consider:
    • What did the character wan in the beginning of the story?
    • What did she want by the end?
    • Which experiences helped change her? List them.
    • How did the author show that the character was even capable of change?
  2. Repeat the above exercise for one of your own finished stories. Do you see places where characterization is weak? Could you improve it by adding a scene, or by supplementing existing dialogue, thoughts, description or action?
  3. Invent a character who wants something contrary to what readers would ordinarily expect. Write a few pages of interior monologue for this character in which he explains and justifies what he wants, why he should have it, and how he’s going about getting it. Try to make him sound convincing and natural.
  4. Using the same character, write a two-person conversation in which he tries to persuade another character to join him in whatever he’s doing. The other person resists. Try to make both characters’ dialogue sound natural. Is there a story idea here?
  5. Choose a story in the genre in which you want to write (mystery, literary mainstream, science fiction, romance, etc.). Pick a story that you recall as having a memorable villain. Reread it. What is the villain’s motivation? Is it clear? If so, how is it made clear? If not, would this be a better story if the villain were motivated by something other than pure nastiness? Given the villain’s circumstance, what might these motives have been?

GETTING UNSTUCK

  1. If you’re stuck in the middle of a piece of fiction, try to determine why. Fear of failure? Fear of success? Literary fogginess? Wrong direction? Once you’ve determined the cause, pick a solution from the appropriate section of this chapter and try it. (Really try it.)
  2. If you’re habitually stuck, repeat the first exercise following chapter three (MORE BEGINNINGS). Did it help?
  3. If you’re still stuck, read a biography of a writer who found writing torturous: Joseph Conrad, Jessamyn West, Dorothy Parker. Did this erode your block by showing you that you’re in very good company?
  4. If you’re not stuck in your current piece of fiction, try outlining the rest of the story before you write it. After the story is done, evaluate the usefulness of the outline. Did it increase your confidence, aid the story’s clarity, or generate new incidents? Or not?

ENDINGS: DELIVERING THE PROMISE

  1. Choose a story, at least twenty pages long, that you’ve never read before. Read four pages, put the story down, and list all the expectations you’ve already formed about the story. Include anything that occurs to you: style. Characters, situation, conflict, outcome, world-view. Now finish the story. Were your expectations met? Did the genre the story belongs to contribute to your expectations being met?
  2. Identify the climax of the story yo’uve just read. Where does it start? End? What forces, stated or implied, come together to form the climax? How had each been developed earlier in the story?
  3. Look at the denouement of the same story, if it has one. How does it wrap up the plot? Does it account for all major characters (in a short story, there may be only one major character)? How had each been developed earlier in the story?
  4. Find a reader whose opinion you trust. Ask her all the above questions about one of your finished stories. Did you learn anything about how your story appears to a reader?
  5. Try plotting a different ending for a short story – own or someone else’s – that you like very much. What character changes earlier in the story would be necessary for this ending to work?

LAST SCENE, LAST PARAGRAPH, LAST SENTENCE

  1. Choose an anthology of short stories. Read the last paragraphs of the first four stories. Out of context, do they seem evocative, emotional, significant? Now read the four stories. In context, do the final paragraphs imply more than they seemed to at first?
  2. Classify each of the four stories as “traditional plotted story” or “contemporary literary short story.” Do the stories fit neatly into categories, or not? How do they endings of the two types differ?
  3. Study each story’s opening and closing paragraphs. Are any of the same symbols, motifs or images present in both? If so, how has their meaning expanded or changed by the end of the story?
  4. Study the final paragraphs of three of your favorite novels. Do they seem to carry thematic significance, or do they merely round off the action? Do you see any differences in the closing paragraphs of the novels form the closing paragraphs of the four short stories you examined in exercises one through three?
  5. Look at the last paragraph of one of your own finished stories. Does it imply as much as it could? Even if the answer is “yes,” write three or four different last sentences for your story. Which works best? Why?

THE LAST HURRAH

  1. Find a story you finished at least six month ago. Read it in the way suggested in the section called “Becoming the Reader.” Joy your responses to the story in the margin. Try to react as a reader, not a writer.
  2. Take the same story and analyze its implicit promise. Is that promise developed in the middle of the story? Is it fulfilled at the end? If you know a Sensitive Reader, ask him to read the story and comment.
  3. Sticking with the same story, now list its scenes. Is it clear to you what each is supposed to accomplish? Can scenes be combined or cut?
  4. Decide whether this story is worth revising. DO you still like the central idea, the characters or the plot, enough to work on it more? If so, revise it according to your analyses in exercises one through three.
  5. Even if you don’t choose to revise this story, pull out the first full page. Go through this page meticulously, cutting every word you can without losing any information. Reword for greater tightness whenever you can. Be ruthless. Retype the result. Does it read better? How much shorter is the page?
  6. Write another story
  7. Write another
  8. Write.