"When you start writing a story, all the beginning needs to do is get you into the story...it's too early to worry about drawing the reader in." Levine suggests starting where you are interested in the story.
I've wondered about this myself. I have imagined a few "scenes" of a story that I would like to write, in fact, I have scenes from two stories in my head, but I get caught up in how I am going to get my characters to that scene. In one case, I have been able to go ahead with writing those scenes and I am more eager to work on that story because even though I don't have everything in order, I have something to work with--some pieces to work on fitting together. But I worried if that was a good way to go about writing this book. According to Levine, it is indeed just fine to write that way, working from the inside out, per se. She also gives an example of some of her work that she wrote for The Fairy's Return and how not everything she wrote was in the finished copy. I need to allow myself to not only write junk, as mentioned in a previous post, but I also need to let myself write paragraphs and scenes that may not end up being used, but will help me fine tune the writing that I keep.
Writing Assignment
Begin a story about a competition at three different points. Only write one page each. 1) open the story with the moment the competition begins, 2) open with when the main character finds out about the competition, 3) open when the main character begins preparing for the competition.
No comments:
Post a Comment