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Rochelle Shapiro is a regular columnist for Authorlink. Watch for her insights every month on Authorlink.
"The white page or screen is like a boogey man. . ." —Shapiro
The white page or screen is like a boogey man, scaring us to the refrigerator or the telephone, or anywhere except at our writing desk. Can I sustain the reader’s interest to the end? you might worry. And even more important, Can I sustain my own?
One of the ways to break through the fear is not to think of anything but the beginning. If you can begin, something will happen.
Here are some ideas for those moments when you would write, you really would, if only you knew what to write about.
1. Begin with a sense of place. Think of it as raising a curtain on a land that you will people before long. You don’t have to know the whole plot, just the place. It can be somewhere you’ve lived, visited, or imagined. It can be realistic or surreal.
Here’s an example from Prefiguration of Lalo Cura by Roberto Bolano, (The New Yorker, April 19th, 2010.)
It’s hard to believe, but I was born in the neighborhood called Los Empanados:
The Impaled. The name glows like the moon. The name opens its way through the dream with its horn, and man follows that path. A quaking path. Invariably harsh. The path that leads into or out of Hell. That’s what it all comes down to. Getting closer to hell or farther away.”
Bolano has created a kind of inferno. Will there be a Beatrice to guide him? Will he survive or get impaled at Empanados? Just the description alone not only grabs the reader, but the writer, too. You’ll be eager to go on, find out more.
Greg Hrber in Sagittarius, (The Best American Short Stories, 2009.) begins with a down-to-earth description of a place, which, it sounds like he’s seen before.
The land surrounding the house is state forest. A dirt road climbs farther up the mountain, where paint-stained bark indicates the direction of the hiking trails and orange signs warn off hunters. It is into this wilderness that he has run away.
“Signs that warn off hunters peak our interest.” Will there be danger? Maybe even the writer hasn’t decided yet. But the line that introduces the character, the one in blue, is where I really sat up and took notice.
A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick begins with a description of a place, a moment really, in a surreal way:
It was bitter cold, the air electric with all that had not happened yet. The world stood stock still, four o’clock, dead on. Nothing moved anywhere, not a body, not a bird; for a split second, there was only silence, only stillness. Figures stood frozen in the frozen land: men, women, and children.
Sure, the author had to have something in mind, but a beginning like that could impel you anywhere. You can take it, make it your own, and then begin writing from there, letting whatever comes to you happen. Then, go back and delete his lines. They were only your impulse.
"Another way to get you going is to describe a situation. . . —Shapiro
2. Another way to get you going is to describe a situation, that is a conflict or a relationship of some sort.
In Premium Harmony (New Yorker, 11/9/2009), Stephen King describes the
relationship between a couple.
They’d been married for ten years and for a long time, everything was O.K. —swell—but now they argue. Now they argue quite a lot. It’s really all the same argument. It has circularity. It is, Ray thinks, like a dog track. When they argue, they’re like greyhounds chasing the mechanical rabbit. You go past the same scenery all the time, but you don’t see it. You see the rabbit.
King uses the third person here, but you get the sense of the narrator’s voice by his vocabulary. Who uses swell anymore? We get a picture of someone who lives in a small town and has had a small education, but is clever. The metaphors work well. But notice how, the first sentence, is an overview for the relationship? We have to read on to find the particulars. Sometimes, after we’re finished, the first sentence can be deleted. It was just the thing that got us started and kept us going. If you’re fond of it, file it in a folder marked “Scraps.”
You can begin with a question such as E.L. Doctorow did in Edgemont Drive (New Yorker, April 26th, 2010:
“What kind of car was it?”
Just that stark line of dialogue without a he said/she said generates a lot of interest in both reader and writer.
You know that the car is, in someway, going to have emotional weight. But what? How?
You might begin with an action as Alex Rose does in Ostracon. (The Best American Short Stories, 2009.)
Katya is searching for her glasses.
An action makes the mind active. It goes for a jog, logging miles of supporting detail. Try it, a simple action, and see what comes. You begin asking yourself, Is she elderly? Depressed? Is Katya a normal person who just misplaces things easily? Does she always misplace her glasses? Is there something she doesn’t want to see?
That’s a simple action. In A Shadow Table, (The Best American Short Stories, 2009), Alice Fulton begins with a startling action:
“In Fox’s Sweet Shoppe, I once saw a woman take off her shoe, unscrew the heel, and drink from it like a shot glass.”
All of us have seen ourselves or someone else do something odd, striking, memorable that we can utilize. In a diner, I once saw a man hang up his coat and begin to take off his pants, too. His wife stopped him.
When you’re stuck, describe a place, either from your imagination, dreams, or one you know well, and launch your story from there. Or you might give the overview of a relationship and begin to dig in, filling in what questions you have, what questions the reader might. There’s always an action, simple or odd-ball, to get you going. And don’t forget about the simplicity of a beginning question, such as “Huh?” Any trick to prod us to write is applause-worthy. (I’m clapping.)
About Rochelle Jewel Shapiro
Rochelle Jewel Shapiro is author of Miriam the Medium (Simon & Schuster) and has published essays in NYT (Lives), Newsweek (My Turn), et. al. Her essay, ESS, ESS, is just out in FEED ME: WRITERS DISH ABOUT FOOD, EATING, WEIGHT, AND BODY IMAGE, ed. by Harriet Brown (Random House, 2009). She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in poetry. She teaches Writing the Personal Essay at UCLA extension.
