How’s your writing coming? What problems are you running into? For me, the winter months are writing season. How about for you?
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Experienced writers, here’s a question for you from CWG Member and aspiring writer, Hilda Leticia Dominguez: I have and idea for a story, but I don’t know how to start it! How do you introduce a story?
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Jennifer Fitz
Jennifer Fitz is the author of The How-to Book of Evangelization: Everything You Need to Know But No One Ever Taught You from Our Sunday Visitor and Classroom Management for Catechists from Liguori Publications. She writes about all things evangelization and discipleship at jenniferfitz.substack.com. For updates on where else to find her, visit JenniferFitz.com.
Most writing “experts” will tell you that you should start with an inciting event. IE, where does the *story* actually start? Nowadays, readers don’t want to have a lot of background explaining the character’s past and the world. They want to learn these as they go and apply them to the inciting incident.
Having said that, What Sarah and Jennifer said works well. The other thing you can do is simply sit down and start writing from wherever your imagination wants to start. Later, when you are editing, you can go back and decide if the first scene(s) or chapter(s) were just warm-up for the main event. If so, you can cut them, revise them or move the information to where it fits more naturally.
Good luck and God bless!
That was my thought, Sarah. I just start the story somewhere, and then come back later to see if I started it where I want, or if I need to change the opening.
I can’t offer advice to Hilda based on my own writing experience, as I write nonfiction. However, I read a lot of fiction, and it seems introducing the story is critical. My advice, based on my own general writing experience, would be to write your story and come back to craft the introduction. There’s nothing saying you have to start with the intro! 🙂
As for my writing…well. Going well. In between big projects, but need to work on a proposal, but there’s the “real work” that’s going to take over for a week or two, so I’ll be treading water and avoiding said proposal for that time (ministry scheduling = test of faith, I tell ya).