Beginnings: BAMBI Meets GODZILLA

Okay, I mentioned yesterday that two goals for your beginning are to get attention and create pathos. One way to do that is a technique I call "Bambi Meets Godzilla." Watch the video first, then read below it:

The technique is simple enough--create a pleasant mood, and then SQUASH IT! Look how Dudley Clendinen accomplishes it in the beginning of "The Good Short Life":

I have wonderful friends. In this last year, one took me to Istanbul. One gave me a box of handcrafted chocolates. Fifteen of them held two rousing, pre-posthumous wakes for me. Several wrote large checks. Two sent me a boxed set of all the Bach sacred cantatas. And one, from Texas, put a hand on my thinning shoulder, and appeared to study the ground where we were standing. He had flown in to see me.

"We need to go buy a pistol, don't we?" he asked quietly. He meant to shoot myself with.

"Yes, Sweet Thing," I said with a smile. "We do."

I loved him for that.

See what I mean? Slow and peaceful, then hit 'em hard! Give it a try for your next opening and let me know the result...

BEGINNINGS? Get PATtention!

So often, when studying short fiction, we've been taught that "ski slope" diagram by English teachers--you know, the one that begins with "character" and "setting" at the beginning, peaks with "climax," and ends with "resolution." Trouble is, we haven't always been taught how to WRITE an effective opening, middle, or ending. Today, let's focus on BEGINNINGS...

In my mind, an effective opening accomplishes two tasks:

1. It gets ATTENTION.
2. It creates PATHOS.

Getting attention is critical. If you don't attract the eye of the reader, the page is flipped quickly to someone who DOES accomplish that.

Pathos is the feeling the reader has for a character. It's important that the writer makes the reader care about the character BEFORE the conflict. Otherwise, if readers don't sympathize with the character, they won't care what happens to that character. Let's look at a few examples:

Opening paragraph from "YOU OWE ME," by Miah Arnold:

The children I write with die, no matter how much I love them, no matter how creative they are, no matter how many poems they have written or how much they want to live. They die of diseases with unpronouncable names, of rhabdomyosarcoma or pilocytic astrocytoma, of cancers rarely heard of in the world at large, of cancers that are often cured once, but then turn up again somewhere else: in their lungs, their stomachs, their sinuses, their bones, their brains. While undergoing their own treatments, my students watch one friend after another lose legs, cough up blood, and enter a hospital room they never come out of again.

Opening paragraph from "HOUSEWIFELY ARTS," by Megan Mayhew Bergman:

I am my own housewife, my own breadwinner. I make lunches and change light bulbs. I kiss bruises and kill copperheads from the backyard creek with a steel hoe. I change sheets and the oil in my car. I can make a pie crust and exterminate humpback crickets in the crawlspace with a homemade glue board, though not at the same time. I like to compliment myself on these things, because there's no one else around to do it.

The two stories above get our attention and make us care about the main character. The first, a nonfiction personal essay, begins with children who have terminal cases of cancer AND the writer whose job it is to work with them, seeing child after child die. We end up caring about the children AND the writer. The second, a short story, has a very strong character we admire--one who seems to be able to do almost anything on her own--but we care because of a few of the words that opening ends with: "there's no one else around." We WANT this person to find someone to love (cue the Queen music now:"Find me somebody to love...").

Want to create an effective opening? Get ATTENTION and create PATHOS. Put them together and what do you get? Get PATTENTION!

CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE SOUL SUCCESS!

Ok, today I need to mention a bit of my role as a Writing Coach. Each year, I get to teach a small group (twenty-some, usually) of mostly sixteen and seventeen-year-old high school students, in a course called Writing 12. That allows me to talk about and introduce them to magazine articles, personal essays, picture books, chapter books, novels, scripts and screenplays--almost every kind of writing they won't find in an English class. It's refreshing...and rewarding, to see them succeed and see their poetry and prose get into print. It gives me great pleasure to see my work and their work published, and sometimes, we connect in unexpected ways.

Here's one. I was THRILLED when I got the acceptance from the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul : MY RESOLUTION when a personal essay I wrote, "The Write Way: Write Away," was selected for that anthology. It wasn't the money or the free books or the millions of copies they sell, it was that the essay I wrote was a special piece that explained a bit about why I became a writer and a writing teacher despite a nightmarish beginning in university. I had a writing prof who completely humiliated students (myself included) for works he considered unpublishable. I decided then and there that I would never treat my own students that way once I was a teacher.

Flash forward to July 26th, 2011--yesterday. That's the day one of my grade twelve students had a personal essay of HERS published in Chicken Soup for the Soul: JUST FOR TEENAGERS. The student, CARMEN ANG, will now receive a few hundred dollars, ten free copies of the book, and some attention for her writing--but I know her story is important to her as well--it's a piece she wrote for Writing 12! (Ok the size of the image of my book is bigger, I realize, now that I uploaded the pics, but it's not intentional, really--those were the first two images I grabbed from a Google search...really!)