Overnight, we received an entry to the Global Short Story Competition story that reminded me of the variety of ways to start a short story. However you start your story, the beginning should have The Question, something that hooks your reader. You need to grab them from those first lines.
You can do it with out and out intrigue, of course - ‘the last thing he expected to see was his wife holding the gun’ - but another way is to draw us in with the sheer quality of the writing.
Why do I remark on this? Well, the story we received started with a man and by the end of the first paragraph, he had been so beautifully depicted that the reader needs to know more about him. Nothing happened in those early lines, no one was murdered, no one did anything terrible, it was simply about a man but by drawing us into the character‘s life, it‘s job done for the writer in question.
No comments:
Post a Comment